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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Why is it that Billet Labs themselves haven’t spoken publicly about this? At this point, the story is being told second hand. I’m not saying it’s not true, I’m just saying that taking it at face value is a bit iffy considering it’s coming from someone else. Maybe I missed it, and they DID say something, but I literally have to take it at face value that Steve is telling the ENTIRE story, or that he even got the ENTIRE story.

    I’m not against accountability, but a lot of this could have been handled privately. Again, not taking sides here, but Steve gets most of his attention from just going after other companies, whether deserved or not. I rarely hear about GN unless there is SOME kind of controversy going on (hardware issues and him having very valid input on it, or basically company drama). I just feel like this is pointlessly dividing a community in to Team LMG vs. Team GN thing, and it’s dumb.

    No really, hear me out on this. Steve has said in the past he wants to be treated like he is doing journalism, and intends to hold himself to journalistic standards (he said this during the NewEgg thing). It’s pretty standard when doing a story to get commentary from the party your story is about. Because journalism is, at least supposed to be, about telling the WHOLE story. Both sides. Instead, it’s more of a hatchet job. There are ways to go about “calling out” a company that doesn’t involve telling what is ultimately a one-sided story with the veiled challenge of “prove me wrong.” That’s not journalism. That’s drama for views.


  • A big reason is, at least for me, I’m one generation removed from someone who lived when Canada was on Imperial. It’ll take a few generations to get rid of it. You can even see it in the replies here, as people who are certainly younger than me are talking about how they’re using metric exclusively for things that I still swap between.

    That’s the ONLY reason. I’m quite fond of metric.


  • It’s easy, because of the proximity to the States and the fact that we still have generations in Canada that were alive PRIOR to metric who have handed it down, we’re more or less raised with it. I can’t speak for others, but I can pretty freely convert between the two (at least very close, I can’t completely convert Celsius and Fahrenheit in my head).

    But yeah, that’s pretty accurate as to how everyday measurements go here. I’m trying to think of others, but I think this covers most/all of them.






  • My last office job, the cleaning staff would come in right as we were leaving. I dunno if it helped, but I always tried to make sure any trash in my corner was neat and they really only needed to do a quick turn over of my trash can. I don’t know if that’s a thing they appreciate, but I’ll always do that much for them. I may not be sanitizing tables or anything, but I think making a neat and orderly pile for your cleaning staff or even a table busser is just being a decent human being.





  • My utilities.

    The uncertainty of the future of shows I actually enjoy means I don’t bother paying for any of that crap (I’d probably consider Shudder though). I run an Emby server with a ton of storage. I’m not going to pay a company to actively crater the content I actually want to watch. I did grab a Nebula/Curiosity Stream year-long sub at Christmas because it was heavily discounted. They’re likely to get more money from me, because it’s primarily creator driven and more (I think) of the revenue goes to the people who deserve it.

    Moreover, the bulk of the crap isn’t worth spending money on anyway. If I wasn’t getting it for free, I just wouldn’t consume it at all. Hell, half the stuff I download just sits there until I “get around to it.” That list only grows, never shrinks.





  • Same. I had my first one when I was in another country (fortunately, my wife was from said country and I was covered under her insurance, 'merica!). I thought I had to pee really bad, and the feeling never went away. And within minutes I was on the floor in a ball with tears in my eyes. Because of the way military insurance worked, we had to get approval from the post doctor, who originally told us it’d pass. He called back within minutes and said “yeah no, that’s an emergency, get to the hospital now.”

    That was the day I learned how people get addicted to Vicodin (I didn’t, I just realized how great they felt).

    Anyway, I’ve had 12 more since, that I know of. Lots of people form stones that cause no pain. I’ve had surgery for 4 of them, the rest I just took meds to help pass them faster.

    Actually passing the stone from your bladder to cursed “birth” is the easy part, I always say. It’s over in a second. The problem ones are when they get stuck in the ureter. One of mine actually got me bumped ahead of a guy having a heart attack. Not sure how that worked. Another one resulted in an infection around a stent, which then likes to move, and feels like a mega-kidney-stone. From what I understand, the doctor who saw me that day was going to escalate because of the total lack of medication they sent me home with (nothing for infection, and a handful of Tylenol 3. For reference, it took 10mg of morphine to effectively manage the pain).

    Anyway yeah, kidney stones are literally the worst. My aunt has had 4 kids, and gets stones like I do, and has said repeatedly that she’d rather have more kids. That’s pretty damning.


  • Reddit in general has been in a fairly steady state of decline. Certainly recent events haven’t made things any better, and I’ve been openly critical.

    However, I more or less gave up on participating on Reddit during the pandemic. The sheer number of people constantly online at that point while actively in the era of brigading, having any kind of counter opinion on Reddit ended in you just getting shamed and downvoted. I’m not talking about unpopular, right-wing stuff, but stuff like having an opinion on a hockey player leaving a team for another was enough to garner literal death threats.

    I more or less resolved to stop actively participating when I went to a support forum and got buried and (again) shamed for trying to get help with a question. Instead they dangled the answer in front of me. The answer, by the way, wasn’t possible in any of the ways they were trying to suggest, as the method no longer worked. So not only were they actively being jerks, they weren’t gatekeeping valid information. Forget it, why bother?

    Reddit WAS amazing. But like everything else, it gets ruined. I don’t want to be all negative, but history has consistently repeated itself. Hopefully the Fediverse can withstand it’s own weight, especially if big players like Meta plan on getting involved. I hope it’s robust enough to withstand, I WANT it to be robust enough.


  • Ideally it’s a config error at the firewall. I saw an interesting idea posed on the lemmy post suggesting that it may have been targeted by a DDoS that used kbinbot in the user-agent string.

    Ultimately, it’s not happening at a code level, it’s absolutely happening at a firewall level (nginx, which, for those who don’t understand, is kind of acting like the door lock on your apartment building, where you need to go through the main security before you can get to your own place. Sort of the same idea here). I just spent a bunch of time testing a bunch of various user-agent strings, and it very specifically is matching “kbinbot”. No wildcarding within the word, but it a string like “blahbinbotblah” will 403, whereas “blahkbbinbotblah” won’t (and various other forms, like k.bin.bot, or kasdfbinasdfbot.)

    It’s pretty specific. Anyone who deals with firewalls in any capacity understands how nginx works, and specifically why they and others are raising an alarm.

    So yeah, ideally it’s a misconfiguration, otherwise it’s a fairly clear message.