Email is still really useful when you have a lot to say but don’t want to write a letter. If I’m catching up on the last several weeks with my parents, I’m not going to write a 10-page text. I can write a nicely formatted email and attach a few photos, though. It’s far more convenient than writing a letter and stuffing a bunch of printed photos into an envelope.

It’s amazing how much emotion we invest in our cars. I had a not very expensive but fairly unique car in my late teens. Eventually, I joined the adult world, moved away, and it sat in storage for years before being given away.

Now I’m much older, in a vastly different place in life, and generally successful and happy. I’d still sell my left testicle to get that car back, though. Not so much because of the car itself, but because of the memories. It feels like a lost photo album or that one song that just sounded perfect but you can’t remember the artist or the lyrics.

I’ll preface this by saying that I strongly feel that in a democratic society, citizens have a patriotic duty to do certain things. Jury duty makes our justice system work. Taxes make our public services work. Voting makes our democracy work.

I can’t fathom the idea of not voting. Even if you don’t support any particular candidate, you still have the option to pick the person who is less likely to ruin your way of life. I have voted in every election since I’ve been old enough to do so. I’ve voted for a few candidates I really believe in, and I’ve voted against a few I truly hated. I have never voted for a candidate that aligned with my views 100%, but I’ve always voted.

Given the popular vote numbers, it’s an undeniable fact that the majority of American voters support Trump. Given the lack of turnout, though, I have to wonder if it’s true that the majority of American citizens support Trump. A large group of the population supports the GOP, and a large group of the population just doesn’t give a shit. Both are equally to blame for the next 4 years of suffering.

I’ll start: 39/M/US, so yeah, I fit the demographic.

In the first photo, the owl has a shadow over his left eye, and the pupil is larger than the right. Do their pupils dilate independently of one another, or is this the unfortunate result of brain trauma? If it’s natural, that’s a really cool adaptation.

This is such a ridiculous argument. “Things are bad, so anything different MUST be better.”

In the words of George Carlin: “Imagine how stupid the average person is, then realize half of all people are stupider than that.”

I don’t think that most people really just how big of a deal a 60% tariff on Chinese goods would be. This isn’t like paying a bit of extra sales tax. Nearly everything is made in China. This is going to be an absolutely devastating move, as in nearly everything suddenly doubles in price and becomes unaffordable.

How the fuck do so many people think that the economy is going to be better under Trump than Harris? I really don’t get it. If the economy was one of my top issues (it isn’t), then that would make me even LESS likely to vote Republican.

I am American, and I have always loved my country. Until now, I’ve never been ashamed to call myself patriotic. My thought has always been than there will always be uninformed, uneducated assholes that vote against their own self-interests and the interests of their own country.

This election is different, though. We knew exactly what we were getting if we re-elected Trump. We responded by not only electing him in a landslide election, but handing the House and the Senate over to the Republicans, too. It was a clear message. America is not a nation of mostly good people with a few vocal “bad apples.” We are a nation of hateful, scared bigots, and we proved it in a big way.

This was a turning point in American history, and the majority of us sent a clear message to their fellow citizens and to the world. America is not a nation of mostly good people being overshadowed by a media that covers the loudest assholes in the room. America is a nation of people who by a majority support exactly what the “crazy” Republicans are saying. I would feel better if Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, but that’s not what happened.

This isn’t an election where I’ve lost only lost faith in the democratic process or my fellow citizens, although both are true. This is an election where I’ve lost faith in my country as a whole. I have never been proudly Republican or proudly Democrat, but I’ve always been proudly American. Now I’m just… sad. I don’t expect I’ll see a day any time soon where I can honestly say I’m proud of my country. The best I can do is retreat into my own personal bubble, live my life, and watch the world burn around me until the flames consume everything I care about.

If you’re living in a place where renting a pod with less space than a prison cell costs nearly as much as a studio somewhere else… move.

Manner of death: “Natural.” That’s bullshit. Manner of death: “Religious” or “Political.”

I’m curious what actually happened here. If he stopped payments for his truck, it would be a repossessor taking the truck, not police. If it’s unregistered, it’s still legal to use on private property (like a farm truck).

I’m guessing his truck was involved in a crime of some sort, or more likey, there’s a lot of important information missing.

Why is kernel-level anti-cheat even a thing?

If I was trying to prevent cheating, I’d hash the relevant game files, encrypt the values, and hard-code them into the executable. Then when the game is launched, calculated the hash of the existing files and compare to the saved values.

What is gained by running anti-cheat in kernel mode? I only play single-player games, so I assume I’m missing something.

I use Jellyfin heavily, and it’s a fantastic project, but I really wish they would address the issues with transcoding, specifically the ability to force it on.

My library contains a decent amount of HDR (lots of DV) content. On my TVs (using Nvidia Shield), it will direct play the DV content, resulting in a green picture. If I turn on burned-in subtitles or drop the bitrate and FORCE it to transcode, it’s looks perfect. I’ve resorted to just setting a low bitrate on clients so it always transcodes.

I’m really hoping a future version gives us the ability to set more fine-grained transcoding settings per-client. Even the ability to disable direct-play completely would be fantastic.

If you’re sick with something that’s non-transmissible, then it’s on you to decide if you want to go to work or not.

If you’re sick with something contagious, then I don’t care who you are, you’re a horrible excuse for a human being if you go to work.

Maybe I’m totally wrong, but doesn’t EGR stand for EXHAUST Gas Recirculation? Is the Volt a hybrid? I thought it was an EV and thus had no exhaust.

Edit: This was a joke, wasn’t it?

I really believe that in order to subscribe to the SovCit bullshit, you have to be mentally challenged to some degree. None of these idiots have ever won a court case or a civil suit against a bank. Even if everything they said was true, it’s a blantly obvious fact that our legal system doesn’t agree.

Suspend disbelief for a moment and give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re still clinging to beliefs that have been proven time and again not to work with our modern legal and financial systems. Nobody with a properly-functioning brain could possibly still think any of this is a good idea.

I was born in the 1980s. I remember growing up, I always had the impression that by this time in the 21st century, we’d have figured out some way to break the established laws of physics. Maybe it was because of watching so much sci-fi, but I feel like I’m not alone in this. The media seemed to reflect the same line of thinking. “Back to the Future 2” with its hoverboards and flying cars is now set several years in the past.

Be it anti-gravity, interstellar travel, teleportation, whatever, I always kind of assumed that by now, we’d at least have a working theory of how we might implement it in the next few decades. I think a lot of that has to do with the start of the “information age.” Computers and the way they could connect us were so revolutionary, it seemed like “magic” to the layperson. More “magic” would only be a few years away, right? If we could fit all this power into a box that sits on your desk, then it wasn’t beyond the scope of reason to think that anything was possible; it’d just take a few more years for us to figure it out, then we’d be planning the first NASA mission to another solar system.

What I never would have predicted is just how rapidly computer technology would advance. We now have supercomputers in our pockets, powered by CPUs that are well into the realm of nanotechnology and are now starting to run into limitations imposed by quantum physics. As a technological society, we’ve probably progressed farther than I would have ever imagined, just not in the way I expected.

If I want to connect my laptop to a code reader for my car, I just plug my OBD2 reader into one of the USB type A ports. If I want to connect it to a monitor, I have USB-C, DP, and HDMI ports available, depending on what the monitor supports. I want to transfer some movies from my NAS, I can plug the ethernet port right into a switch or a wall jack.

I use every single port on my laptop, and I don’t have to buy an adapter to connect to anything.

I hate Trump almost as much as Putin, but in the midst of a global pandemic, should we be providing testing devices, vaccines, etc to whoever needs them as long as we have some to spare? Trump has a whole list of crimes that he should be locked away for. This isn’t one of them.

Do you really? If you have permissions set up properly, it really seems like an API over a read-only SQL server is just an unnecessary layer of abstraction.