experbia

every year of high school I and the rest of my class ('08) had was the same curriculum repeatedly.

history: ww2 bulletpoints, same as last year. write a paper about how bad the nazis were but how complex the situation was, actually, so don’t be so judgemental.
lit: baseball?? books and writing exercises about baseball.
math: algebra 1 over and over. I once got sent to the office for a disciplinary discussion for asking if we’ll ever hit algebra 2.
PE: no, none whatsoever.
art: watch whatever movies, free form ungraded discussion aka nobody does shit.
science: watch vaguely sciencey documentaries and write a paper about an animal’s behavior and habits.
electives: none, a myth we heard whispers of amongst older friend siblings.
foreign language: Spanish 1, every year.

i left right before my senior year and started working. I’ve never been sure if that was the right call or not but my friends that graduated are borderline illiterate to this day and completely math averse for sure. so I don’t think another year of ww2 baseball algebra would have helped me much more.

not sure why you’re getting downvoted for this, I had the same experience with my education in the US. high school class of 08, lol. the school never taught a math class past algebra 1. if you finished it, you still needed math credits per year, so they’d just have you retake the same class. seriously. absolutely abysmal. 95% of the math I do now is self taught. from my “education” alone, we never got much past solving basic linear single-variable equations. most of my class graduated barely literate. really, most of my class simply left, myself included - the dropout rate was astonishingly high around 08, and instead of doing the same classes and curriculum for the third time in my senior year, I opted to simply leave, educate myself, and shortly thereafter start my business.

imo, it’s a semantic attack, and it’s been very effective. art, drawings, paintings, animations, movies, shows, music, poetry, books, code, games, any free human creative venture: it is all suddenly (and falsely) insinuated to only be possible when placed inside a “platform”. you and I may know this isn’t true, but most people could not defend against this hostile idea or simply could not identify it as such, and now falsely believe human expression is only “real” when it’s inside a company’s ad-filled self-reinforcing skinner box.

I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it’s so easy to be a villain.

probably. this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.

most of the time they’ll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it’s functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.

if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv’s solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on “totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv” on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.

The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.

everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.

pls no bully

fun fact, when Firefox for Android or its forks hits over 99 tabs, it just switches to a little infinity icon…

They let me avoid human interaction if I choose

I used to like them for this at least, but now my local store has someone come talk to you and do the whole “did you find everything OK?” and loyalty card conversation while the other machines in the background need their attention and people are getting impatient. if you have headphones in they’ll literally just keep trying and wait until you remove them to say “yep, nope, no thank you, don’t need the pamphlet, thanks, nope, yep all good”.

I avoid them entirely now, there’s no value and only drawbacks. I’ll wait in the long human checker line as long as I need. the human doesn’t stop scanning randomly half way through the slow scan, bag, wait loop and start emitting loud alarm noises for an employee to come over (sometime in the next 10 minutes) and be forced to review a video of your whole self-checkout process titled “CHECK THOROUGHLY FOR THEFT” before they can unlock the machine and stop the alarm.

holy shit, get some perspective. how about you reign in the corporate greed, unionize, and demand more than a paltry 8 dollars an hour for your labor instead of crying about the people beneath you who have the gall to purchase meat at the grocery store like you “real” people? seems like trying to elevate everyone in your poverty-stricken county is the easier solution than trying to push the faces of the poorest of you into the mud a little bit harder. what would you have them eat, cheese its and popcorn? perhaps ebt should only allow for the purchase of loaves of white bread and paper towels? perhaps we should just kill ebt recipients, right?

lol. lmao, even. they’re not done with you yet.

be ready for filial support laws (already on the books in many states) to be enforced with gusto. when the boomers run themselves out of money for real, they’ll be weilding the law as a weapon to pull their care expenses and lifestyle needs right from the paychecks of their children, like child support.

OK but piracy isn’t stealing it is basically a harmless free copy. The issue here is corporations want to have their cake and eat it too, but to prohibit us all from either having or eating any cake ever. Corpos like that have zero right to my consideration or care.

Hey man,

you’re probably fine. I don’t know the details, but humans are fallible. you’re only human. friends should know this, they’re only human too. I doubt these friends have all been perfect all the time, and I doubt they’ll do everything perfect from here on out.

If it caused a problem, tell them the truth. you double booked. you had to pick one over the other. you feel bad you flaked. you don’t intend to make it a habit.

if it cost people something, consider making it up somehow. but I would propose that unless it’s cost them real bad, good friends ought to accept the apology without expecting the compensation. they’ll mess up someday too, and it’s better for everyone to be kind.

don’t hate yourself. it does no good for anyone. counterproductive and undeserved. develop a system to help you. you can’t always change your nature, but you can build around it.

I was able to trick mine by connecting it to an AP with all traffic blocked. it assumes their services are down or something? and just slips right back into working fine with no nags or ads.

mine doesn’t do this fortunately, but once in a while when you turn it on when it isn’t connected to wifi, it will bring you to a wifi selection screen instead of your last input, and the list is sorted so that unsecured APs are at the top, and the OK button highlight (which you’d normally use to activate the feed from your last source when you turn it on) just so happens to activate the top unsecured AP, to which it will immediately connect and launch into the “internet connected” onboarding process.

this almost happened to me once when I first got it… so I set up an AP on my router that has all traffic completely blocked, and connected the TV to that. it periodically tells me to call support about internet problems, but all the nags and promos and “sign in” begs went away otherwise, so I guess it’s just happy to hear from my router.