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gramie

@ gramie @lemmy.ca

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Comments
381
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is audiophile bullshit cheating?

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  • A group of international sommeliers were unable to detect that the red wine they were tasting was actually white wine with food coloring in it. I think that the bar for genuinely assessing wines by taste is very low.

  • 'Putin will repeat Milosevic’s fate:' – Expert says Putin will be held accountable by International Criminal Tribunal, drawing parallels to former leader of Yugoslavia

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  • Some estimates place Putin's wealth at hundreds of billions of dollars. There is no way he's going to face any consequences.

  • Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked?

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  • I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today's money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.

    My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.

    When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.

    Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.

    Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.

  • Anyone in tech confirm?

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  • The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General's Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

    Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

    The tech may be ancient for us, but it's a superb book.

  • What's the biggest case of planned obsolescence you've dealt with?

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  • I think that the Bip was the battery life champion. I checked sometime in the past year, and I think Amazfit watches typically lasted between 1 and 2 weeks.

  • What's the biggest case of planned obsolescence you've dealt with?

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  • I'm perfectly happy with my Amazing Bip watch. It keeps track of my steps and sleep, and links to my phone so that it will buzz if I get a call or text.

    It's about 7 years old now, and still gets almost a month of regular use on a single charge.

  • Whats the worst book anyone has ever recommended you?

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  • That is actually one of my favorite books of all time. Well, at least the first two trilogies. After that, I don't think he really had much to say.

    What worked for me was a protagonist who was in many ways a terrible human being, but actually thought about the morality of his actions, and respected the values of the secondary characters.

    It was also the first book I ever read that required me to keep a dictionary nearby. I was only about 16 when I read the first book, but I enjoyed having my vocabulary expanded.

    Some people probably dislike the overwhelming amount of similes and heavy use of metaphor, but it made me sit back and think about what I was reading, rather than just burning through it.

  • Have you ever had premonition, a sixth sense, a third man, or inner voice that saved you?

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  • I can't remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn't.

  • Dorset Council ditching customized SAP for £14M Oracle overhaul

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  • Anyone care to lay odds that the actual cost will double or triple?

  • What is a celebrated invention/discovery attributed to a single person but, had they not done it at the time, it is likely that someone else would have done it anyway not long after?

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  • That should be Ransom E. Olds, not Olsom Olds

  • All of them...

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  • Legal Eagle just posted a YouTube video about the crimes Trump has committed since he took office. It took 40 minutes to list them and give a basic description. And Devin speaks very fast!

  • Tesla design flaws caused fiery crash that killed woman, severely injured husband, lawsuit alleges

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  • In the Hyundai ionx 6, you can set the driving mode you prefer. Regular mode with accelerator and brake, and four different levels of regenerative braking, or a special mode that only uses one pedal.

    You can also select the driving mode, so the extreme acceleration is only available if you choose "sports mode".

  • What's your favourite story from history that is actually false or exaggerated?

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  • They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.

    I think that's being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn't use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.

    Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.

    Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.

    The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.

  • The wide range of girl body types

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  • When I lived in Japan, about 30 years ago, it seemed to be a trend among young women to stand and walk pigeon-toed. It seems likely that manga took their cue from what was popular.

  • So now that it's that time of year again in the US, what are some tips and tricks for dealing with that one relative who goes on about the same bullshit for hours and won't shut the fuck up?

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  • Also excellent is The Princess Bride. At the last family party I went to, the parents kept sneaking away from the dinner table to watch snatches of the movie with all the kids.

  • Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

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  • There was a pedophile priest who had the parents of a boy he molested complain to the bishop. The bishop, in his wisdom, moved him to be a teacher in my school. An all-boys boarding school. A few years after I was there, he was convicted of molesting a boy at the school, as well as the original case. His sentence was 2 years of probation. He died in his 90s just a couple of years ago, and his obituary was full of praise and warm memories.

    Meanwhile, one of the boys in my class who I now can see was being groomed by this priest, took his own life before he was 50, after what was described as a very difficult life. I think it's pretty obvious why.

    In the 40+ years since I left that high school, no one from the school or the diocese has ever contacted me or my family to see if we saw or experienced any abuse.

  • Trump admits he didn’t have to tear down East Wing for ballroom, but just wanted to

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  • I'd have said the Evangelical base wouldn't appreciate him having sex with porn stars either, but here we are

  • How Do You Feel About Professional Sports in 2025?

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  • There is so much money involved. I would almost say that there is too much money involved to leave the results up to the athletes.

    How much corruption is there that never gets publicized or even discovered?

  • TIL Mark Twain didn't say "History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes"

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  • But he did say something like, "after I sold my restaurants to a corporation, the chicken tastes like shit".