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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • My personal favorite was my insurance at my last job had my prescription coverage managed by CVS caremark. I have a few prescriptions I probably need to take the rest of my life, and after the initial fill at my local pharmacy, they would refuse to cover it unless I had my doctor resend the script to their mail-order service, and had the gall to claim it was for my convenience. Some of said medication is controlled such that I can only refill it within a few days of my current fill running out, bud will conveniently also cause some rather unpleasant withdrawals if I miss a couple of doses. So, “for my convenience,” rather than calling in a refill and walking the two blocks to my local pharmacy, which has my refill ready in 30 minutes for me literally every time, I had to send it off to CVS. Then hope they filled it quick enough and there weren’t any Sundays or holidays to mess with it.


  • The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan

    Almost all, except for the oddball that is Strange Journey, taking place in post-apocalyptic Antarctica, instead. It has a lot of elements that differ from other Mainline entries, but Atlus treated it as such and acknowledged it with the recent Mainline 25th anniversary celebrations. I really enjoyed it and think it’s worth a playthrough, but it may not be the best starting point. I also don’t know how the remake holds up, I’ve read complaints about changes online, but SMT fans can be a bit touchy about their favorite games.

    SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.

    I’ll disagree on this one and just add that not everyone who enjoyed 4 found Apocalypse to be that good. From what I saw, people that really just love the battle system and doing things like building out the perfect team for tackling boss rushes and insanely challenging super bosses really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting more of SMT IV’s world and story, you may well be disappointed by it. I found the characters to be unlikeable, personally, and it seemed like an unnecessary rehashing of the story. I also recall some unavoidable boss rushes in the main story that made certain areas really grindy and killed my enjoyment for a good while.

    Otherwise, I would say a pretty decent write up here.


  • For native speakers, there is also the level of education and the contexts they use it in that can influence their vocabulary. I know a lot of Spanish speakers, both heritage speakers and those who grew up in Spanish a speaking countries. Heritage speakers often are educated in English and mostly use Spanish at home and in social situations, but are more comfortable in English for other topics. Lots of my coworkers who grew up in Spanish speaking countries have pretty limited formal education. In either case, they often don’t know the Spanish terms for technical, scientific or political contexts, and will just use the English word, even in Spanish.

    This doesn’t mean that English has a richer political or technical vocabulary than Spanish, but it does create a chicken and egg situation in certain contexts. Why bother to learn and use the Spanish term if the English term is already more widely known, especially if it isn’t a topic that would lend itself to popular publications and discussions outside of industrial or academic contexts? Even in Spanish speaking countries, the increasing dominance of English internationally can result in highly educated people in these countries being pressured to publish in English, further reducing the number of occasions one might have to use these terms in Spanish.


  • In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

    I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.


  • My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

    My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.




  • It really just needs to get annoying enough to use. In my case, I enjoyed it for music discovery, but then its recommendation algorithm got like YouTube where one stray listen just wrecked my discover weekly playlist for a month. I have one friend who’s really into jazz, and maybe once every few months, I would click on one of his recommendations to see if he had found something that clicked for me. It got to the point where I stopped clicking on pretty much any recommendations, because Spotify would see that one song a quarter and go “Hold up,I think this guy wants nothing but atonal Yugoslavian free jazz in his playlist for the next month straight!”


  • The article the screenshot is from links directly to a case of an elderly woman being hit and killed by someone on an ebike. It also links to a story of another woman has suffered brain damage and lasting effects after being hit by someone riding a moped.

    They don’t really go that fast.

    You really can’t say that, categorically. Part of the issue is that when people speak about e-bikes, there is a huge range of vehicles that fall under that category. You have ebikes that hit 80mph these days, yet generally are sold no differently in terms of registration or licensing than a pedal assist bike that cuts out the engine at 20mph or if the rider stops pedaling. A lot of these delivery drivers in NYC are riding illegal electric mopeds that go at high speeds and weigh much more than a normal bike, but are sold as though they were equal to an e-bike that goes much slower.

    Even a lighter e-bike, like a Citi Bike, weighs about 45lbs. That’s 15lbs heavier than my regular bike, which will make a difference if you get hit at higher speeds. Something like the Surron bike mentioned in that video is advertized as street legal, but according to their specs page, their bikes clock in at 47 kg, or 103.6 lbs! Sure, that guy could be riding a slightly different model, but there is an absolutely massive difference for a pedestrian between getting hit by a 150 lbs rider on a 30 lbs bike doing 20 mph, and getting hit by the same rider on a bike that’s three times as heavy and going at four times the speed. Heck, there’s a big difference for the rider themselves if they just eat it on their own.




  • Yeah, some of the e-bike circlejerk sounds like it’s from people who have never been in a major city where they get used by people with no regard for others. I’ve nearly been run down by app delivery drivers on ebikes and mopeds turning onto the sidewalk going the wrong way down one way streets at 30+ mph, people riding both acting crazy in the bike lanes, running red lights and cutting through traffic with no regard for their own safety or anyone else’s. You’ll have to excuse me when I lack sympathy for the guys on souped-up ebikes doing 30mph over a blind hill with no lights or helmet that get mad and start threatening me because they had to swerve to dodge since they were riding in the wrong lane.

    Some of it could be app delivery drivers struggling to make ends meet while being subject to unreasonable and dangerous metrics, along with unlivable pay. I feel for them, but their struggle to earn a living doesn’t give them carte blanche to put other people’s lives at risk. On the other hand, a lot of people I see riding these tricked out ebikes and mopeds are the same people I know that were riding dirt bikes on NYC streets a few years back and moaning about how misunderstood they were and how the cops are picking on them just because they want to ride 40 deep down Third Ave and do wheelies while the streets and sidewalks are full of other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians.

    I’m all for encouraging people to use other modes of transportation, but people are being assholes and demonstrating why there’s going to be a need to regulate the ebike and moped industry more rigorously, and probably introduce some sort of licensing requirement to enable tracking dangerous riders and enforcing safety rules. You have people riding devices rigged up to go at highway speeds, being careless while riding and disregarding pedestrians, riding the wrong way, and just generally being reckless and putting other people at risk. This is also ignoring the issue of people being cheap and buying aftermarket batteries that cause some nasty fires.

    If you’re on an ebike, scooter or moped that exceeds 25mph, I don’t think you have any business being in the bike lane. Yes, it’s riskier for those riders to be in vehicular traffic, but even ignoring the mass of the bike, just a person’s body hitting you at 30mph or more can do some serious damage. If you’re riding at a massively higher speed than those around you in the same lane, you’re a safety hazard to others in your lane, whether you’re on a moped doing 40mph in a 15-20mph zone, or in a car doing 70mph in a 45mph zone. People still need to be held accountable for putting others at risk with dangerous behavior, too, whether it’s a car driving erratically, ebikes going down one way streets the wrong way, cyclists taking blind corners at speeds that don’t let them stop for pedestrians, or even just pedestrians doing stupid shit like insisting on walking in the bike lane, rather than using a perfectly good sidewalk or pedestrian path right next to them. That said, they need to be enforced across the board, not just singling out people on ebikes or cyclists, while ignoring others.


  • People are wild these days. My wife and sister have both, working in different industries and companies, come home and informed me they were freaked out and a bit repulsed to discover coworkers in the bathroom, audibly having a bowel movement of some sort, with an iPhone on the floor of the stall facetiming their partners. These were both work places that skewed younger, but people have just been going feral. My last job, I walked into the bathroom and heard what I assumed was the Smack, smack, smack of somebody jerking off, only to find out it was a guy near his 60s doing clap push-ups in front of the urinals.


  • The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.

    I would say this segment of @Iceblade02’s post would be the issue, in that people are locked into these systems even if they prefer to use open source software. For example, my university based in the UK requires I submit my assignments in an MS Word format that supports Microsoft’s annotations for the tutor to do all marking up and correcting/commenting on the paper there. There are ways to do the same thing with PDFs, but at least on my modules so far, it hasn’t been an option at all. That’s just for papers and such.

    When it comes to exams where you’re supposed to be answering the questions and submitting them as you go, there are schools that insist on you installing monitoring software so they can make sure you aren’t cheating, which only tends to be available for Windows and Mac. I don’t know how common that sort of software is outside the US, but it’s certainly a thing.


  • It is a true statement that roads are used to transport goods and services.

    They then simply ask who in the video is carrying goods and products into stores/homes, and how workers move goods from ports to the stores.

    It’s a very simplistic and reductive view of roads, though, in response to a post that specifically mentions another function of roads, namely, facilitating people’s travels as individuals for their own purposes. It’s like you telling someone you like using lemmy because you’ve found communities you enjoy participating in and individuals you like talking to, and they go, “But the internet is for commerce, the buying and selling of goods! Who is selling and who is buying in these instances?”

    Your example is overly charitable, in my opinion. Not everyone is being malicious with these sorts of questions, but the person is ignoring some pretty clear context explaining other uses of roads to go attach a strawman. At the very least, it seems like a bad faith argument.


  • the will to learn about the topic

    I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.

    Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that

    These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.

    Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.


  • It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.

    Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”


  • I think you just underestimate how awful public transport is in the US. Beating what’s available here is not a high bar to clear, especially when it’s nonexistent in many places. It can also vary pretty widely across and within regions. I imagine public transport in London is a different beast from public transport in Manchester, for example.

    When I was visiting Manchester in March, it was pretty great. I could get around the city via bus, tram or walking pretty easily, and trains between Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds were all pretty clean, even late at night, and the most I paid for two round-trip tickets was £48.40 going to Leeds and back. Everything else was below £30 for two people, round trip.i Wherever I got off, I could get an Uber to where I was going for less than £10 if I didn’t feel like waiting for a bus, or there wasn’t a bus nearby. For a similar trip here, for one person going from NYC to Philadelphia and back would run me in excess of £100 with Amtrak making the trip in about 90 minutes, or closer to £30 round trip, but with each leg taking nearly 3 hours without any delays on NJ Transit. A 15 minute Uber here to work would routinely run me close to £20 each way, before accounting for a tip.

    Nobody was screaming in my face asking for “donations,” there weren’t people with amplifiers blasting music, or homeless folks left to stew in their own filth keeping entire cars unusable for anyone else due to the stench. Even walking about the cities at all hours of the night, I had a grand total of 3 people ask me for money in a week. Residents apologized a few times about how awful things were there, but it was absolutely lovely, even in the parts they thought were local embarrassments for allegedly being unbearably dirty or run down. Granted, it was nice and cool, so I didn’t get to see if Manchester gets the same lovely summer effect that NYC does, where every outdoor space smells like hot piss and garbage once the temperature clears about 27°C.

    Granted, spending a week in a city as tourists isn’t the same as living there, but from folks I know who’ve made the move, it was a massive upgrade in terms of things like public transit and general quality of life compared to life in the US or Canada. I ran the numbers, and it would actually make sense for me to take over a 50% pay cut if I could move there. Heck, it was cheaper for us to eat out for every meal for a week straight for two people and me buying several coffees out a day than it is for me to shop and prepare every meal at home and make all my own coffee here. Even if things aren’t as good as they used to be, they’ve still got us soundly beat in many regards.