Yes, I really wanted to buy something like that, the first time I heard about it.
But then, looking through stores, seeing these second-hand mini-sneses being at least 35 pounds, sometimes up to 100, even though I could definitely afford one while I was working full time in UK, just kinda left a really bitter taste in mouth.
Really? Are they really milking everything out of us? I had for a while forgot what name emulator on my phone I wanted to play some pokemon, worked fine. Why would they want to price their devices so high? Just because people can afford it?
I guess it's a cultural thing + buyer's remorse or how you call it, since that's what you've been exposed to for the most of your life.
I grew up in the other part of the world, the only popular games being Quake 1/2/3, Half Life, Star Craft +BW, Diablo 1/2+LoD, Red Alert, CS and later Lineage 2. I have no recollection of Nintendo at all. It was non existent in this part of the world (except the "Dendy", the bootleg hardware clone of NES for us, we all played mario and mortal kombat for a while, but then it died just as quick as it appeared).
Looking at Nintendo games now, I could see why they might be popular with younger kids, buy I'll never buy into the fact that an adult might like them, that just seems like some advertising ...
Today I can't even imagine not gaming on a computer, both AAA, indie games and big name games are shit though.
Imagine you're 38 years old, you go like a normal person to a normal persons job interview.
Now your new employer obviously doesn't have access to your DNA, but he has an active subscription to "NaturalCheck(tm)whatever" which does have access to most people's DNAs.
Sorry, we can't hire you, your NaturalCheck came back as red.
You call NaturalCheck, after getting tossed through 2-3 support staff you finally learn your dna has some markers for some kind of cancer. Welcome to a new world.
P.S. If you think this is unrealistic: Credit check? Credit score? I see people have no problem with this stuff...
As a matter of fact, never heard of "boeuf bourgignon", so I had to check it's wiki page.
1. Fry meat + <<whatever else usually grows in Europe, or in/around France>> (givin' it's a french dish).
2. Once done, smash some whatever red wine on top and get it into a shape that looks like food.
3. Add gradually whatever spices and herbs are known to grow in Europe at the 'correct' time during 1 and 2. (apparently nowadays it's popular to smash 3 peppers cumin coriander and some brown sugar all into one big pile and cook it, with a whole stick of butter, regardless of dish! wtf?)
0. Pan-fry separately either some onions, mushrooms or potatoes (I hate boiled potatoes, and carrots), with, again, whatever spices and herbs can grow in France. (personal preference, don't like mixing way too many stuffs together, they'll usually lose all taste)
FIN. Put both dishes together when serving per plate or table. Add another load of ground peppers and the same herbs on top while the food is still hot, for aroma.
Wikipedia still looks like a great resource for scouting recipes for me.
Except for cakes. Cakes are magic. haven't managed to get them to work properly for some reason, regardless of recipes. My best guess store cakes use some kind of cheap industrial grade oil/margarine which is not readily sold so I never managed to replicate them..
As an example, once I bought a fresh jar of olives, but I forgot I already had like 1/3 leftover jar in the fridge. So I started wondering what I could make, so given olives are associated with Italy, I thought, there could be some kind of pasta with olives.
So, one wiki article of two paragraphs gives me enough suggestions how to make 2x2x2 dishes (apparently, I just counted the variations).
Anyway, turns out I really like the simplicity of this, so I keep making this now every time I feel fancy! Add some red/white wine, and it's a restaurant grade dish. (notice you don't have to add any x sticks of butter or any kosher whatever, delicious :)
I don't think it's a stretch, he put it much better words than I could have done.
P.S. For cooking I've been using exclusively wikipedia for the last 3-5 years. It's actually amazing the kind of content you can find. Next time try searching "cooking method wiki" :)
I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again.
> Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans.
The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn.
Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola...
Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa...
I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.
I started making something similar back in the time when I was trying to learn some php (self-hosted LAMP setup). Stopped mostly because I wasn't able to find a proper English dictionary for NLP.
Second reason was the inconvenience of opening my local webpage and clicking "new entry", then selecting from my tag suggestions or adding a few more new tags.. every time I wanted to add a new note.
Creating a new text document, copy-pasting into it, then closing it and clicking yes to save, then drag and dropping it onto my "notes" folder on my Desktop, somehow seems easier... No titles, no tags, but I could always rest assured that, when I'll need it, It would be there, somewhere in that "notes" folder, even years later.
Jokes aside, I didn't actually realize people are into these "knowledge management" systems.
I was wondering if one were to open source a self-hosted app like this, what license you could chose such that individual people would be able to install/modify/use/etc a copy for personal use, even commercial, even if employed, even work computers. Yet disallow a company from modifying/customizig/deploying it for multiple employees, have the company pay a formal fee? Are there any examples of such licenses in the wild?
I've been logged in into the same google account for at least 10 years.
Google knows exactly who I am, and what I am/want/etc. Yet the moment I landed in the UK, suddenly, I'm English, most of the times getting just *.co.uk results, as if the rest of the world doesn't exist anymore.
I'll be honest, it was helpful to know at what hour the Iceland and Aldi next to my house will open/close, and I didn't even had to tell it my address or turn my location on (this is amazing actually), and when it suggested where to find a dentist since I didn't know the city... But that's pretty much it.
Googling exactly "herpes covid" from my IP, gives 10/10 papers on the first page. On second page, I got 4 more papers, a paper disproving it, one reuters article about misuse of antivirals, and 4 articles about new drugs. This is fun.
Thinking now, I might have been in some kind of Google-bubble at that time, since I started my search with symptoms at first, and later I started making connections. So I guess Google decided I need to see a doctor :)
What strikes me, this was done in early 2021, yet the propaganda machine is still going strong with that whole persistent cough and fever thing... It's like there are entire establishments trying to guard information from normal people for some reason.
Case in point: I have just moved out of the UK last week, and to my surprise, Google is slowly starting to return better and better search results. I (suspected) I had two flareups of herpeses after both my pfizer vaccines when I was there, so I searched then on Google, zero, whole result pages filled with nhs links and other websites with copy-pasted content from nhs and the likes (90% telling me to go see a doctor...). I was going crazy, joking with friends that the vaccine might not be what they're telling us it is, given the wide range of 'undocumented' side effects I got from it.
Now that I'm searching from Moldova, actual first result was a paper documenting two doctors with herpes zoster after vaccination. Apparently it does happen, from both the vaccine and the infection. Guess I'm not crazy.
Sonos basically reinvented my Samsung remote. (+ the 8 meter cable I made as a 14 year old kid so I can connect it to the TV which was on the other side of the living room, cause my parents asked me if I could connect both for a house party).
I got a cheap HIFI (I think) Samsung system from 20+ years ago (paid $100 second-hand at that time), I use it as an amplifier through aux for the last 15 years (2x15W). Beside that, still have my tiny pc speakers, even older, from around the win98 era.
Neither seem to be asking for any firmware update, seem to be working fine so far. Haven't seen any other speakers in stores so far which could beat in quality the pair of Samsungs I got, they're basically monitors..
They now make soundbars, sonoses, bluetooth speakers... it amazes me that people put up with all of this, it's truly amazing people are convinced this is better than the old, wired, boring stuff.
1. - Not OP, but I believe the moment you put some music/radio on speakers for other people to listen, legally, you become a broadcaster. You can't just play anything you want, you need a license :) I recall my last workplace mentioning they're paying a few thousands a year to stream just one radio station, same 20-30 songs 24/7...
> You really think that owner operators repair their own trucks? That doesn't make any economic sense. This is not a hobby, they need to drive to make money not to play truck repairman.
Oh yes! I have seen this unfold once in front of my own eyes, a real spectacle. Driver working for a driver company servicing a distribution company, tries to start the truck, something wrong with brakes, truck is driveable though, gets off, calls boss (company policy). One hour late boss finally arrives, gets in, unhooks trailer, parks the truck three meters to the side, gives the driver a different truck to take. 1 hour more paperwork to process, the trailer finally leaves the distribution warehouse 2.5 hours late. The driver company is apparently paying both late fees and parking fees to logistics company while this ordeal unfolds..
~4AM (5 hours later) a truck fixing mini-buss from a 3rd party truck fixing company arrives with two technicians. They plug into the truck, their diagnostics software shows nothing wrong, they leave.
Next day a different truck fixing company shows up and finally tows the truck after dancing around it for almost two hours with diagnostics software.
Quite a few thousands of pounds burned in just two days of people following rules and policies...
This is apparently "normal", this makes much "economic sense".
> A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
Maybe a good quality of life compared to other people from the same area... but nowhere even close to that of an American worker.
No idea where you got that "1/4 salary is worth more at home" from, when in my experience I used to be able to feed myself with 10 GBP/week on average in UK, now I'm spending close to 15 GBP/week in Moldova. Tech/computers/phones are about twice as expensive here, used cars ~10 times more expensive at the lower-end, mid/high-end about the same (at least you don't have to spend crazy amounts of money on parts since getting the MOT equiv here is much easier, so you can fix your car with whatever hammer and lattice from your neighbor's garage..)
Utilites about the same. Rent is cheaper, since most people live with their families overcrowded in tiny appartments...
The cost of "living" is higher, most people just don't know how poor people live. Most people can't even imagine eating ten pounds a week...
By "proper ID" you mean the right kind of country ID, I assume?
Cause I've been denied by two banks, the third bank even had two countries blacklisted.. that's right, on their official website they wrote: "we are currently unable to accept government issued IDs from X and Y" or something along those lines.
This only works if you fit that stereotypical definition of what a "normal" person looks like or does. As soon as you deviate even a little from the norm, suddenly you got problems.
I had to do two interviews with a bank to open an account in UK because their automated systems were giving them "errors", apparently, when they're trying to check me. Normal people have to complete an online form (5 minutes) and will receive everything through post.
A year later I had to phone paypal support four times as it wouldn't accept neither of my two cards. On my 4th try I finally managed to get an actual English guy to answer my phone, who finally managed to understand every word I was saying without having me to spell anything letter by letter..
Last week I wanted to buy a plane ticket. I had no problems doing that until now (I had an old laptop with windows 7). Now, since running Linux, I open the website, as soon as I click search to find a flight, suddenly captcha! Every 3-5 minutes a new captcha...
As a long time foobar user, when switching to linux I only found quodlibet to be able to sort by multiple columns at the same time, quite buggy but kinda works, for a few days, then it resets for whatever reason.
Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
For my entire life I've tried to become a programmer, went as far as studying CS for three years, never managed to get a diploma as I ran into some financial and health issues... you mention
> I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you don't address those issues.
I think the real issue, is, the world is much bigger than the first world countries. I would love to have a diploma, to get a "real" job as a programmer for some random company, to add that "value" to the internet, to design useful software for actual people, etc. etc. But I was born in Eastern Europe..
I tried freelancing a few times through gac, rac, and scriptlance which later got "globalized" (all acquired and killed by freelancer.com, yay capitalism).. and I just can't compete with indians on that site, way too many of them, somehow quoting 5% of the price promising double or triple of what I can do somehow...
So I tried looking for that "Real" job, except I was born ugly as hell with broken teeth, so nobody would even take me seriously. Even one of my professors in uni told me once: "See.. if you could do less drugs and study more, I bet you could get an A, it's a B- for now..".. I never even tried drugs, but apparently I'm so ugly half my profs thought I was drugged. As far as I can tell, It's just nepotism right and left, people only hiring other pretty-looking-people-alike for both normal and startup-like jobs where I come from. Zero chance for me.
So on the brink of giving up on everything, I took a construction job for 6 months, which allowed me to save enough money for a plane ticked and my first month of rent in UK. Now I'm a Reach Truck driver in a warehouse.. making >triple the salary I could make as a programmer in my home country, but slowly destroying my back and knees every d day.
Funnily enough, I've met quite a few programmers, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists and even a surgeon through my warehouse jobs in the last two years. Quite smart people, a few broken teeth here and there, a couple disfigured faces, husbands, kids, sick family, plenty stuff...
The internet is just bullshit, just like most of this society. Making money, jobs, starvation, HA! I don't even know what I'm trying anymore or why I still keep reading on this site.
Sorry for the rambling, your message just resonated somehow for me so I felt I should say something. Good luck to you!
But then, looking through stores, seeing these second-hand mini-sneses being at least 35 pounds, sometimes up to 100, even though I could definitely afford one while I was working full time in UK, just kinda left a really bitter taste in mouth.
Really? Are they really milking everything out of us? I had for a while forgot what name emulator on my phone I wanted to play some pokemon, worked fine. Why would they want to price their devices so high? Just because people can afford it?
I refuse to buy it, it's that simple.