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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Interesting phrasing there. Orange guy “fell victim to” (was Innocent) while blue lady “was guilty”.

    It’s true that we often excuse our own behavior by what we intended, and often blame others based on their behavior without knowing their intent. But that isn’t a behavior you might expect from a psychologist determined to analyze a situation, showing a bunch of his own biases.









  • Copying my reply to someone else:

    What did they interrupt the episode for? Because a number of companies have adopted the policy that, if the interruption is promoting something else offered by the platform - say, a different program, or another tier of service - that those interruptions aren’t really ads, because the company isn’t actually getting paid to air it. It absolutely looks and acts like an ad to the viewers, but the companies are trying to redefine the word.



  • What did they interrupt the episode for? Because a number of companies have adopted the policy that, if the interruption is promoting something else offered by the platform - say, a different program, or another tier of service - that those interruptions aren’t really ads, because the company isn’t actually getting paid to air it. It absolutely looks and acts like an ad to the viewers, but the companies are trying to redefine the word.


  • [When launched] Prime Video with ads was given a “very light ad load,” providing subscribers “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like." The executive pointed out that Prime Video with ads doesn’t show commercials in the middle of content. That could change next year.

    Planned enshittification a la boiling frogs.


  • GenX tv addict here. I grew up in a time when, if you wanted to watch a show, you need to make an effort to be in front of the tv when it aired. If you missed seeing it, you had to hope that if was repeated over the summer (only about 2/3’s the episodes of a continuing series would be repeated, and if a show was cancelled, that was it). If you missed it on summer repeats, you’d have to hold the show went into syndication, was carried locally at a time you were able to watch it, and then stalk the series because syndication packages were notoriously shown out of order (which is why almost all the episodes ended up with the characters being in the same base situation as they started out in).

    It was the same thing if there was an episode or series you loved and wanted to watch again.

    VCRs were an absolute game changer. You didn’t have to revolve your life around a tv schedule- you could go out, to go events, go shopping, have a late dinner. You could pause tv to go to the bathroom, you could watch and re-watch episodes that you enjoyed, or verify something you thought had happened earlier instead of relying on collective memory. If you missed taping something, you might still have to wait for re-runs - but there was also the chance that someone else had taped it and could loan you the tape.

    Having learned the lessons of broadcast tv, I taped everything I watched, and I kept the tapes of the stuff I liked, or that had actors I liked. I could sit down today and watch all the episodes of David Soul in Casablanca or Billy Campbell in Moon Over Miami, or short-lived shows like Space Rangers or South of Sunset.

    I still record and save things locally. The myth of having immediate access to everything ever produced was always just a myth.



  • I got a Brother INKvestment Tank MFC-J4335DW. I think it was a Wirecutter pick. The ink is supposed to last for up to a year, it’s a Brother so there’s no fuckery, it does color and b+w, prints, copies, scans and faxes. Since my PC is old (Win7), I had a little difficulty setting it up, but it’s worked perfectly ever since.

    Pricing on that unit: you can find used and refurbished ones for about $120, but I hate buying used printers. After poking around the Internet a bit, I bought a new one online from Staples for $179.99 (which is MSRP). It’s over the minimum limit, so I got free shipping; it showed up at my door the next day.

    I have a Staples rewards account; they had an offer where you got 30% of your purchase price back in rewards points (you need to activate the offer first) [this offer is still available]. So they gave me 10680 points for that 30% reward, plus another 178 points for the purchase. I took the ink cartridges out of the old printer and gave them to Staples Recycling for another 100 points each. I also gave them my old printer to recycle (easier than taking it to the towns e-waste event every spring); they gave me another 500 points for that, plus 1000 points because it was my first time recycling tech with them.

    In total, I got 12858 points, worth about $64 in store credit. Since I actually do use office supplies, I know I’ll use the credit: for example, yesterday, I picked up 4 reams of printer paper for $3.74 each (though I do miss their back-to-school penny-paper week!).

    Anyway, that’s what I went with: the Brother MFC-J4335DW from Staples. YMMV.





  • Wikipedia:

    In late 2006, programmer Jed McCaleb thought of building a website for users of the Magic: The Gathering Online tradable card game service, to let them trade “Magic: The Gathering Online” cards like stocks.[13][14][4] In January 2007, he purchased the domain name mtgox.com, short for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”.[15][16][17][18] Initially in beta release,[19] sometime around late 2007, the service went live for approximately three months before McCaleb moved on to other projects, having decided it was not worth his time. In 2009, he reused the domain name to advertise his card game The Far Wilds.[20]

    In July 2010, McCaleb read about bitcoin on Slashdot,[21] and decided that the bitcoin community needed an exchange for trading bitcoin and regular currencies. On 18 July, Mt. Gox launched its exchange and price quoting service deploying it on the spare mtgox.com domain name.[14][22]

    I’m not sure when people started to refer to it as Mt Gox.