hyperdimension

Is it that good? I quite liked The Plague Dogs. He writes with a nice flowery style.

Neat, I didn't know there was an upside down interrobang.

Interesting! That makes sense now. I thought it stood for CAble TV and always wondered why they used two letters instead of just CTV.

Yeah, I'll freely admit I'm a curmudgeon with respect to technology "upgrades", but we've really lost a lot of solid reliability in our phone systems (landlines at least)

Now it feels like an afterthought compared to all of the redundancies they had put in place back then.

I guess my opinion rounds down to nothing now. I guess that fits my track record.

Funny, I use toilet paper and check if it gets wrinkled, but I like your method better.

Yeah, but everyone knows that one. ;)

That bothers me way more than it ought to too. When I hear people saying it IRL I keep thinking that trillion dollar companies are engineering our speech.

What can ya do? :/

That's the point. It hardly does what is claimed to do.

Until we find the murderer's face!

"I asked GPT-5 without thinking and it said..."

Did you post the essay anywhere? I've always had kind of a soft spot for Ted--not his actions, mind, but his manifesto raises some rather prescient ideas. I also think he was..."justified" in a sense; again, not in his actions, but his decision to check out of society, only for society to come back to get him.

I'm happy to be proven wrong about any of that though. It's been quite a few years since I read it.

I completely agree with your "Children of Ted" hypothesis, for that matter. Historically, oppression births revolutionaries, for better or worse.

"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they start making vacuums"

Not part of this, but that's not really called for.

It just seems you two have different experiences from possibly different countries is all.

On nearly every point. We should be glad we still have water, if not just to flush the toilets with.

I believe that would be the line for me. Personally, anyway.

>Do people pay for tinfoil hats these days?

Only with cash.

"common failure mode" = 'they break in a particular way a lot'

As Randy Fromm says, "the things that work the hardest fail the most"

Examples: MLCC (multi-layer ceramic capacitors) over time will often fail short.

Older devices with electrolytic capacitors (the large can-shaped things often situated by where the power input is) have a liquid electrolyte in them that evaporates (boils off?) over time. When it does, they lose their capacitance and the power supply stops being able to supply (good) power.

The point being, when something stops working, check these things first. It's like if your lawnmower dies on you, don't go pulling off the head to look at the piston. Check if there's gas in the tank first.

Finally, a DMM is a digital multimeter. This is your basic tool to measure voltage, current resistance, capacitance, et c.) You can't do much troubleshooting without one.

Hope this helps.

I'm dense. Who are you two talking about?

Off-topic: I initially thought you misspelled 'flaunt,' but 'flout' is indeed the correct word to use. Nice!

If you do, please post a link here! The book is still backordered on bookshop.org.

Wow.

"top notch" indeed. Oh wait, it's a 'dynamic island' now.

I don't mean to be pedantic, but not always--see the recent DigiCert delayed revocation issues. I will admit it is rare though and more often than not, you (should) know when your certs are going to expire.

Diphenhydramine/Benadryl is extremely effective if you're looking to be permanently thirsty with a side of terrifying thoughts.

Seconding VoIP.ms - they're great. Calls are billed at about 1c/min depending on if they call you (DID) or you call them.

Opera did that for a while, but in a different era. I'd pay for Firefox today though, just to keep someone fighting Google's vision of the Internet (ugh) alive. :/

Come on, that's not necessary.

I believe it was a 50% refund on the (purchased) battery; not a 50% off coupon on another. That's how I read it anyway.

I favorites this comment a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228359