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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I misunderstood what “war machine” meant.

    I heard phrases on TV like “it cost $1 billion dollars per month to keep the war machine running” and “the US captured 100,000 barrels of oil per day to feed the war machine” and I thought this thing must be some epic beast.

    The terrorists better watch out! We’re sending the war machine! It must have, like, sawblade hands and tank tracks and breathe fire and have machine gun turrets.

    Imagine my disappointment when I learned that THE WAR MACHINE was just a metaphor and not a Mecha Godzilla


  • I find it really concerning how little we seem to care about potentially harmful chemicals in our food.

    "However, if someone is drinking a soda a day, every day, they should be careful and check out the ingredients.”

    When I was a young teen I used to drink well over a liter per day of Mountain Dew. That was when it still contained bromine. I drank that much for nearly 10 years.

    As someone who thought they lived in a sane society, I assumed it was safe to consume products that were labeled and sold for human consumption



  • Disclaimer: this was a long time ago so things might be different now

    I flashed the “international version” of Cyanogenmod on what turned out to be the AT&T version of my first android smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S2) and nearly bricked it.

    The install froze but I knew I should never interrupt a flash, so I left it there for about 2 hours until the battery died. However, the flashing process also replaces the battery manager firmware, so it was not possible to charge the phone until I flashed the correct ROM, and I couldn’t flash the ROM because the battery was dead.

    Thankfully, that phone had swappable batteries so I solved it by buying a second one online (and waiting for shipping). But today’s phones’ batteries are usually soldered onto the board, so if it happened today I’d be SOL.

    I personally wouldn’t chance it unless someone with the same device confirmed it was OK





  • Hosting video content must be insanely expensive so I have some amount of sympathy for YouTube. However, ads earn such a paltry amount that I can hardly fathom how anyone can put up with it.

    The total amount of ad revenue between all sites is only like $12 per user per year. So IMO it is a net benefit to block all ads (save your sanity!) and simply pay the creators of content you like.

    Even just one $5 Patreon sub is worth more than all ads I’m likely to see so I block everything I can and IMO my conscience is clear