He has a spinning HDD apparently.

I also like LocalSend. Not quite as automagical as airdrop but it’s cross platform

For medication names, I’ll pronounce every vowel like the letter name, so A is “eigh”, E is “ee”, I is “eye”, O is “Oh”, U is “you” and Y is “why”.

So Ibuprofen is “eye-byoo-proh-feen”

I call it a superstition but honestly the more I think about it the more it sounds like plain common sense. You shouldn’t name something (airport, highway, public institution) after someone who’s still alive.

Mah boi! This console is what all true warriors strive for!

A friend of mine seemed to have every game system growing up. He even had a virtual boy. No CDi though, but it was through him I learned there were zelda games for a non Nintendo system. Blew my 90s kid mind. Sometime it still gets me that Sonic games are now playable on 3rd party systems.

No social media. All the stupid stuff I did and said as a kid stays where it belongs, haunting my memories as I lie awake at 3 AM.

Terraria is just north of 10 MB, and it’s still (?!) only $10. That’s $1 per megabyte!

“bus factor” I believe it’s called. How many people have to be hit by a bus to crash the project. As for stuff I’ve experienced. Ham radio overlaps a fair bit with FOSS, so there’s that. Last year there was an argument between the team developing a new digital voice protocol (M17) and the guy who develops the most popular modem for digital voice (MMDVM). I had a raspberry pi with an MMDVM hat whose SD card had corrupted, and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it until a few weeks ago. When it went down it could do M17, and when I brought it back up it couldn’t. That’s how I found out.

I worked in a call center that involved a lot of repeat calls as a matter of course. Most were elderly, some had mental issues. We had some characters for sure. A lot of people who clearly didn’t have access to a good education growing up, or who burned their brains out on drugs when they were younger, or who were literally high right then and there.

Honestly I think intelligence is a vector, not a scalar. There are lots of things that contribute to it. If you have to boil it down to a single thing, I’d say the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts or ideas. In fact I seem to remember there was a show called Connections with this as its premise, tracing cause and effect between historical events that seemed otherwise unrelated. I remember watching it and feeling very dumb.

I’ve hit what I think are the limits of my cognition on a few occasions, and it’s always a scary experience. First was probably failing calculus II in college for the second time. I had this distinct feeling that no amount of studying or sheer willpower was going to make me understand it. The latest was when I kept failing a certification exam. I had been trying over and over, but my score was actually getting worse. I still maintain that I could have passed the test if it were presented differently, like if there was more time, or if I were given better tools than just a bunch of unsearchable JPGs of log output scattered around the screen.

This doesn’t answer your question, but I thought I’d put it out there.

EDIT: my spatial reasoning is nonexistent, so I have a hard time comparing the sizes of two objects if they’re not directly in front of me. This comes up most often in the kitchen. I can’t deduce the most appropriate size pot or bowl for a given task, so I default to the largest, which is of course hardest to clean and takes up more room in the fridge. And I don’t think it’s down to inexperience either. The only way I can figure out if a leftover container will fit said leftovers is by actually placing them in the container, which of course dirties it, so if it doesn’t fit I have to get another one. So again I just use the largest one I can find. I’m sure there’s a visual comedy routine in there somewhere.

I have met people who were confidently wrong, and no I don’t mean people who’s worldview differed from mine. When I was in 5th grade, I had an argument with a grown man who thought ants weren’t animals. I think he just thought “animal” meant terrestrial vertebrate. Pretty sure he had gone to college, too.

Billy Mays is an outlier and should not have been counted. He raises the average volume of the entire country

Horse (equus ferus caballus) + donkey (equus asinus) = mule

In general, the most widely cited definition of what a species even is is a group who’s members can produce fertile offspring. But there are still edge cases like ring species, where population A can mate with population B, population B can mate with population C, but A and C can’t.

If you’ll permit me one of my linguistics tangents, there’s an analogous phenomenon called a dialect continuum, where dialect A is intelligible to speakers of dialect B, dialect B is intelligible to speakers of dialect C, but A and C are not mutually intelligible.

I read the novelization by Arthur C. Clark and it made way more sense than the movie. I never understood why HAL went crazy, but the book explains that it was given orders to be honest with the crew, but not reveal the purpose of the mission. HAL naturally concluded that he couldn’t lie to a dead crew.

In the case of tools I’ll shop at a hardware store, usually Ace, either in person or on their online store.

addendum: Some casual googling seems to suggest that hacking or jailbreaking it to expand its functionality is, for now at least, out of the question. The only workarounds I’ve seen, as suggested here, are getting a developer account to install unsigned software. I’m not going to do that.

I don’t want to ask permission to make a product I payed for work for me in the way I want. <angry Louis Rossman noises>

I don’t think the top level domain of the site has much to do with its platform decay, but yeah the ads are beyond obnoxious.

I want to make a small apologia on behalf smart glasses. I have an Orcam MyEye (pictured) which uses computer vision to provide a number of assistive features. It lets me know who I’m looking at, and will attempt to guess age and gender. It will read text that I indicate by pointing, and it identifies currency. I believe it also has a UPC barcode database but I don’t remember. It does this completely offline.

Admittedly I don’t use it all the time since it has to attach to a glasses frame via a magnet, which is somewhat uncomfortable, and the battery makes hummingbirds look good (I think it only lasts an hour) but it proved instrumental when my eye was hemorrhaging after a surgery and I had to travel alone with even less vision than I normally have (my doggo was amazing, too).

So it’s not all dystopian.

TV Tropes has an article on this that probably does a better job explaining than I could.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElectricBlackGuy

I miss rage comics and advice animals. I miss when memes had a shelf life measured in years. I also miss the golden age of YouTube in 2009-11, when creators were starting to find their feet. Stuff was genuinely entertaining as opposed to just quaint, but it still felt authentic and personal.

I get watery eyes as well, so maybe some sort of out-gassing? IDK