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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • Because cats want to warm up to people on their own time. And people who don’t like cats (or are allergic) give them lots of space. So then the cat warms up to them.

    The best piece of advice for getting a cat to like you is to ignore them until they approach you. If you approach before they’re ready, they’ll spook. But if you let them approach when they’re ready, they’ll love you.


  • Our local and state elections are 100% gerrymandered, but the presidential doesn’t use districts. Instead, republicans have focused on suppressing blue votes. Things like shutting down voting locations in blue areas, so people in blue areas need to travel farther, and wait times at the remaining locations are 6-8 hours, instead of minutes. Making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in line. Voter ID laws, to bar people who can’t afford the fees+time off work to get an ID. Plenty of others too, but those are the big ones. Usually they use the “ensuring the integrity of the election” messaging to justify it, but it’s really about eliminating blue votes.






  • Yeah, I understand the mindset behind “if I tell people Linux is easy, they might actually switch.” Getting people to switch means overcoming a lot of social inertia. But the issue is that this makes you an unreliable source when a newbie inevitably runs into issues. They’ll be more likely to go “eh I was told it was easy but this isn’t. I guess it’s just not for me.”

    Providing a realistic outlook may make Linux sound less appealing, but it will mean those who do try it are more likely to stick with it.


  • There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.

    Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.


  • Yeah, dB is a measure of difference, not an absolute value. Every increase of 10dB represents twice as much volume, but that means 0dB is essentially just a reference point. Going from 0 to 10dB means you have doubled the volume. 20 is twice of 10, 30 is twice of 20, etc… But what is twice of 0? If 0 were an absolute value, the entire scale would break down because 0x2 is still 0.

    People have a really hard time wrapping their minds around the logarithmic growth of the dB scale… For reference, a rock concert can easily hit 120dB, but the loudest sound that earth’s atmosphere can support is ~194dB. Because sound is a pressure wave with a compression and expansion. After 194dB, the atmospheric pressure isn’t enough to fully expand into the void after the compression. Once you get above that ~194dB threshold, it stops being a sound wave with a distinct push-pull, and becomes a solid shockwave that is all push. Above 194dB, it’s essentially an explosive wave.

    And to briefly touch on what you mentioned about perception, there’s also the fact that different frequencies require different amounts of power to produce the same volume. Lower bass frequencies require more power to produce the same volume, because the bass waves are physically larger and require more motion from the speakers to produce. If you want a demonstration, go look up the difference between white noise and pink noise.

    White noise has the same amount of power throughout the entire audio spectrum, but it tends to sound relatively high pitched and tinny. This is because those lower frequencies are quieter. In comparison, pink noise has a curved power distribution, mapped to how much power it takes to produce the same volume. This means it sounds much more “full”, as the low end is actually balanced with the highs. But listening to pink noise will be wildly different on a phone speaker vs a car stereo, because the phone speaker physically isn’t large enough to truly produce those low notes.


  • My dad once rm -rf’ed his company’s payroll server by accident. He was a database admin at the time. He was asked to make a quick update to something. Instead of running it as a transaction (which would have been reversible) he went “eh it’s a simple update.” He hit Enter after typing out the change for the one entry, and saw “26478 entries updated”. At that point, his stomach fell out of his asshole.

    The company was too cheap to commit to regular 3-2-1 backups, so the most recent backup he had was a manual quarterly backup from three months ago. Luckily, Payroll still had paper timesheets for the past month, so they were able to stick an intern on data entry and get people paid. So they just had a void for those two months in between the backup and the paper timesheets.

    It wasn’t a huge issue, except for the fact that one of their employees was on parole. The parole officer asked the company to prove that the employee was working when he said he was. The officer wanted records for, you guessed it, the past three months. At that point, the company had to publicly admit to the fuckup. My dad was asked to resign… But at least the company started funding regular 3-2-1 backups (right before his two week notice was up.)



  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoGames@lemmy.worldThank you, Thor! 🥳
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    3 days ago

    It’s playing the game by the rules as written. If the Game Master is upset at a player for using their own rules against them, that’s the GM’s fault. I can’t begrudge a guy manipulating a mega corporation (in this case, manipulating Google/YouTube’s algorithms) for profit. He needs viewer retention to stay at the top of the algorithm, so that’s what he’s doing.


  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoGames@lemmy.worldThank you, Thor! 🥳
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    3 days ago

    He has literally said that the MS Paint doodles aren’t meant to be super descriptive or helpful. He started doing it in his meetings at Blizzard, because he found that any visual aid was good at keeping executives’ attention. Whenever he had to do a presentation, he’d use MS Paint every few minutes to keep them focused.

    And now he does the same with his viewers. He busts out MS Paint every few minutes, just to refocus the viewers and keep them engaged. It’s not to help with whatever he’s describing; it’s just to keep the viewers engaged, so he keeps making money off of them.

    To his credit, at least he admits this. It’s not like he’s hiding his strategy. He just does whatever will push him to the top of the algorithms and keep viewers engaged.





  • I used to work in a theater where the main director had recently died. It was cancer, and was a relatively long battle. The entire cast and crew watched the slow attrition, and her loss hit everyone pretty hard. She always sat in a specific seat during rehearsals. When she died, the theater even had an embroidered ribbon with “Reserved for [Director]” made, to hang on the seat.

    About a week after she died, one of the audience lights started acting up. It was the one directly over her favorite seat. It would just randomly come on during rehearsals when the rest of the audience was dark. We all very quickly started calling it “the [director’s name] light.”

    Those of you familiar with theatrical lighting may know that this “randomly decides to turn on” phenomenon is colloquially called ghosting. It happens often enough with older lighting systems, so it’s not unheard of. But the fact that it was directly over her seat, (and only ever during rehearsals, never during shows when an audience would have been bothered by it) fueled a lot of superstition. Needless to say, there were a lot of other “this theater is fucking haunted” things that started popping up.

    The most memorable one for me happened after a rehearsal. The rehearsal had already ended, and most people had already left for the night. The lighting tech and I were in the booth, going over some of our notes and updating lighting cues. The director’s light was ghosting, but we didn’t think too much of it. Then the wall phone in the booth rang.

    The phone ringing was notable for a few reasons… First, it was like 11:30 at night; Who the hell calls that late? Second, to the best of our knowledge, the phone didn’t fucking work. As far as anyone knew, it was just left over from when the theater had a landline patched into the booth. But normally it didn’t have a dial tone or anything, so you couldn’t dial out with it. And nobody knew the phone number for it, so it never got any calls.

    The lighting tech and I swap confused/concerned looks, and I reach over to answer it. On the other end is just pure static. Like straight white noise. And no, I know what a fax sounds like. This wasn’t a fax. After answering and a few seconds of trying to hear a response through the static, the line goes dead. Okay, whatever. I hang up.

    The very moment the phone returns to the wall hook, the director’s light in the audience flickers out. The lighting tech and I swap another confused/concerned look. She starts to worriedly say “so I think we’re done for now“, and I’m already shutting down my gear and grabbing my bag to leave by the third word in.