Fuck the private restaurant business. Just tons of fuckery on taxes and wages. From underreporting tips to working off the clock to writing off trips to France as a “business expense”. Glass of wine or 3 at a vineyard and now it’s a wine-buying-and-research trip.

When you have to compare yourself to a “third world country” to feel not so bad it’s not a compliment.

So we’re still rolling the dice as far as getting a bad covid. Yeah, the virus has generally gotten less serious, but it still has the potential to be serious, and it’s still killing lots of people.

So it’s not the same as sneezing.

I look forward to carrying a dumb phone again.

This also proves that they are deliberately screwing you on a price they have no trouble lowering to keep your business. Only to overcharge you again as time goes by.

The day RES quits working is the day I stop using reddit at all. Right now it’s a mix of the fediverse and some reddit, but not having RES (or old.reddit) would kill it for me.

Yep. There’s the occasional rare site that demands chrome. That’s when chromium comes in handy. I can’t think of a single site I use that I’m willing to install chrome for. Your needs are different, though.

Wasn’t that a character’s name in 1984?

But even Starbucks has fallen far from its roots. Does nobody remember the ‘90s Starbucks that were actually comfortable places with good wifi, good living room seating like couches and low tables? Some had small libraries of free books and newspapers? The coffee was actually pretty good! The pastries were pretty darn good too, with a wide variety.

Now it’s all institutional, cheap metal hard seats. The spaces are smaller and far less welcoming. The pastries come out of a plastic bag. They want you to buy your shit and leave.

For the record - I travel a LOT. If you want to go to a coffee shop and look for instagram shops, that’s what you’ll find. Any decent city has its own independent shops with a variety of styles and better coffee than any chain.

I can’t remember the last time I used Google Chrome.

Nothing but Firefox and a Linux chromium browser.

Screw these guys.

Why can’t they release the server code or whatever so the community can keep playing the games. I’ve got a bunch of games that I can no longer play because there’s no servers. There was a community attempt at putting something together, they were working from scratch, but it seems to have failed.

The devs won’t support it, but they won’t let anyone play with the abandonware either. Took their ball and went home.

All true. DDG is my default search engine now. Yeah. I use others often enough, Google, Bing, searXNG…but I find that if I can’t find it relatively easily on DDG it means I’m going to have to sift through a bunch of SEO sites and sponsored links on Google to find it. It won’t be much easier. One of the most frustrating thing about Google is the “fuck you” they’ve given to search modifiers. The “-“ and quotes are pretty much meaningless. For instance one can enter an error code from a program, perfectly quoted, and Google will tell you there aren’t any good search results. BS. They just can’t figure out how to jam ads into what you’re looking for or something. Bing or DDG will return what you need, it might just be on page 2.

Google really has failed as a search engine.

Absurd.

Every one of us a) wouldn’t have come into existence, because birth is a trauma with plenty of bleeding and potential for infection on both sides, and b) you’d die from your first infection or bleed out from your first cut.

They’re still out there. People seem to think there needs to be a centralized platform or symbol for them to exist. Most of us, I’d guess, are ex-Reddit or have frequented enough social media platforms for us to have curated our feed to limit the noise, limiting comms to those we follow or friends. Or at least I have. That excludes the insanity that is the open-to-the-public postings of every stripe ever. Nextdoor. Facebook. The comments section on popular news sites. Heck, even here where we defederate stuff like hexbear. The comments immediately degrade into fear, hate, paranoia, racism, lib-bashing, conspiracy theories, JAQing off, and everything else we’ve seen before.

Just because we don’t hear the Q noise doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. They may not cling to the “Q” part, but they haven’t changed. They just make up new memes, but it’s the same old hateful insanity. They very much still exist.

Yep. People act like they’re suddenly safe because they switch IP addresses. All those addresses are logged and can be traced by history. Heck, even VPNs can be rendered useless if they keep logs and are subpoenaed, or you forget to log out of services that communicate automatically your IP address when you switch to a VPN. Just takes a little more effort to link the VPN traffic.

People don’t understand that the only thing between them and legal trouble is the willingness of the system to expend the effort to track them down, not that there’s any real security in the easiest methods people use to avoid detection.

Flying hypodermic needle.

Those guys cross dress not because they’re closeted homosexuals, but because they’re like the friend showing up at the airport baggage claim with the big sign, the friend’s name, and something like “welcome back from your 10 year prison sentence for being an asshole” or some shit.

It’s not about them possibly being gay, it’s about them making a statement of derision about trans/gay people and the discomfort of the public display making it funny to like minds.

Oh, good. So whenever some fool tosses a phone out of a car to get crushed on the roadway, shoots one because TikTok, or otherwise mangles a phone, we now have a potential for radioactive material to be spread around?

Is this not exactly what people said would happen? Is this not exactly the point of AI? Aside from the fact that layoffs have been going on for a year or more, of course.

Game of Thrones.

Read the books and got maybe to the 5th book? 6th? And gave up. It stopped going anywhere, the politics went away, it was just people going from A to B and getting killed somewhere along the way. Just like the show, they lost direction and floundered, Martin couldn’t finish it off.

So I never bothered to watch it. Never will.