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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • An API is like a question a service provides that it will programmatically answer. So reddit provided questions for getting all of its content for free. People built front end apps for viewing the content to match their preferences, provide anonymity, avoid ads, etc.

    There were a lot of good reasons for reddit to stop providing that service free of charge, but they went full Corporate enshittificatioon where they made the pricing so awful it forced most of the apps to shut down.

    Couple that with the protecting of /r/theDonald and other non-humanist political subs and, for me anyway, it was clear that the company wasn’t run by good people but by greedy people and things would only get worse.



  • Ya, I personally didn’t swap between two different ones during that time and I remember the first time u went back to a single board qwerty keyboard I struggled for less than an hour and then the muscle memory kicked in. I think my wires get crossed when I jumped between the two while learning and I decided to just stick with the one until I had “recovered” and that really helped.

    Good luck!


  • I switched to a new key layout and was slowed down for like a month, and almost every day I could literally feel myself speeding back up. It was such a cool experience, and one that I imagine has beneficial like neural effects, that sometimes I think about switching it up just for fun.

    I’d suggest just sticking with it. I now use English, German, and my custom Workman layout at home without any issue switching between them. Practice makes perfect and cause a bunch of work and fun things encourage typing a lot, practice comes easy and getting back to your normal speed happens quickly.

    Picking a new layout like Workman or Dvorak where you can feel the benefits, plus a split keyboard’s ergonomic benefits, and I think anyone would struggle to go back (assuming they do it for a month and give it a fair shake).


  • To add, I’ve gotten dozens of hours out of:

    • the lab*
    • beat saber*

    20 hours out of:

    • elite dangerous

    10 hours out of:

    • Alyx**
    • squadrons
    • keep talking and nobody explodes
    • Pavlov
    • space pirate trainer*

    5 hours out of:

    • budget cuts
    • super hot VR~*
    • Arizona sunshine
    • hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades

    Less than 2 hours:

    • job simulator
    • I expect you to die
    • quivr
    • bone works
    • Vegas infinite
    • VR chat*
    • duck season
    • gorn
    • 9732 blade runner*
    • Truly a unique VR experience that I loved and consider making my Index purchase worth it. ** What I’d consider to be on par with other AAA game experiences that are story focused and cross the bar for me on being considered “art” (most videogames are “art” but I mean to say this game crosses into Celeste, God of War, BioShock, Papers Please territory).

    I probably have less than 150 hours in VR but I was moving for most of the years I owned my vive or index and in small rooms for their use, and I sold my index a little more than 2 years ago because I moved from the US to Germany and assumed valve was releasing their next set anyday.

    I’ll be buying the first headset that seems next gen, most are getting close but always missing something I consider rather important like HFR or decent pixel density or outside tracking (although I’ve heard maybe inside out is getting better).

    I think another factor to consider when looking at my 150 hour estimate is some amount of that is with other people. My dad, my less engineering savvy friends, at house parties. Those hours are worth more than X hours on my normal PC. It was an amazing experience to put my friends in their first VR headset and see them light up. I’d pay what I paid twice over to be able to give that experience to more people.

    Which I think highlights that hours in VR needs to always have a multiplier applied to it because you can’t get that experience elsewhere. I imagine a good racing setup or horas setup would have the same intrinsic value compared to normal gaming. Now that I think about it, same thing applies to handheld gaming too. These different unique modes or experiences are worth more than their hours tell.




  • The amount of investment you’d need to reduce your need to work takes the average person multiple decades, that’s literally what retirement is. And even if you only considered a part time retirement that still takes decades. In fact my current understanding is most people’s retirement funds will be insufficient when they go to retire.

    No amount of investing will save the majority of people from needing to work for the majority of their life. The other alternatives to selling your labor to capital, like starting your own business, requires up front investment and even then isn’t a guarantee. The number of jobs that require minimal investment and can serve as a sole source of income do not exist in sufficient quantities.

    So no, investing is not the solution, becoming an entrepreneur is not a solution, at the scale of our society there are few solutions and the primary one is taxing corporations more and taxing billionaires out of existence.

    People deserve a right to live. I’m not saying people shouldn’t plan for retirement, I’m not saying don’t try and start a business. I’m saying to you stop framing it as dependency, that’s a fuckin crazy thought process. The overwhelming majority of people go to school and then get a job. Those people deserve to thrive without having a perfect stock portfolio which will materialize in 40 years, without having a second job, without turning their art into a commercial enterprise.



  • “Dependency on a single wage is the entire problem people are having” is a crazy statement to read from someone who is trying to give advice on the Internet. The entire problem is not that people have one job, it’s that all the profits are going to the fewest people in our society. No one should have to work two jobs to survive, that’s an insane status quo you’re attempting to defend.

    Stop defending the status quo, stop defending corporations, stop trying to normalize surviving this system and start normalizing changing it. We need large societal reform and every additional person who has to work two jobs is another family ready to do so through violent means.


  • I think the solution is attack the systems themselves and when that isn’t sufficient there are only a few people at the top with power.

    I am leaving or unsubscribing from as many monopoly powers as possible: Google, Amazon, meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc etc. Be vocal about it, take friends and family with you if you can. I’m choosing open source when possible over more polished closed source, like jellyfin and Linux (transitioning this weekend 🤞), and donate. These actions take a small fraction of their income from them and if enough people do it I believe it will cause them issues.

    I’m trying to not just leave these things but build communities for when we leave. For me this looks like trying to get a blog off the ground for friends and family, developing friend circles that have these discussions frequently, and then contributing/volunteering within my direct neighborhood or community (working on this one as I’m new in Germany and that comes with it’s own time taxes).

    Also, if you can afford to, buy local. Buy from someone you know. Buy from people with good supply lines. Be vocal about how this is critical and necessary. The more money that goes to our neighbors instead of the 1% somewhere else in the world, the better. That’s all the shift of power, and it starts with not shopping at whole foods or Walmart and buying bespoke or sometimes worse products for sometimes more money so that those good people can work on their process and products.

    But these are small steps, and personally I don’t have any idea of the connective tissues between a person or group of people and the political systems most of us exist in. I guess in the past political parties were more grassroots driven, like get in a room with your neighbors and develop policies and debate. I’ve never lived in that reality. Getting back to that is probably incredibly important. I guess new age political parties and old school unions are the best path forward there.

    But the inevitable path, if all else fails, is violence. That is the reality. That becomes a lot less personally risky the larger a community you have before starting it, but as we’ve seen one Super Mario brother is sufficient to make changes.


  • Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.

    I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.

    I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I’d like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.




  • The whole of Spain. I grew up with a lot of people who loved Europe but had never been to it or really anywhere else. Spain for some reason got a lot of love and attention in my social circles but I didn’t engage with it meaningfully so I didn’t understand it. I started my international travels in “the east” and had a wonderful time. By the time I visited Spain I expected a normal travel experience but definitely not the elevated grandeur my highschool years would have had me believe. I had average expectations.

    Then I got there and every meal was bomb. Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona - I couldn’t go wrong I loved the local food. Worse, I loved at least Madrid and Barcelona’s ability to recreate other cuisines too. Some of the best sushi I’ve ever had was in Madrid and I make a point of getting quality sushi where ever I go (including practically gorging myself into a food coma in Japan).

    Then I went to an art museum and it moved me, found some artisanal stores, got fresh orange juice at multiple grocers, saw a movie in a decent theater, you know the normal like “show me what it’s like to live uniquely here” stuff. Ya, Madrid stole my heart for what it was and Spain as a whole surprised me.




  • I think part of convenience is name brand recognition. I don’t know how you took a heartfelt compliment and made it hostile, but the reality is I grew up knowing what Google was and using it as a verb. Gmail was an obvious and convenient tool to pickup.

    I just found out about Protonmail, or at least heard of it for the first time that it broke the barrier of not-caring into carrying. I imagine user numbers reflect that pretty readily.

    That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying Protonmail is worse in anyway, please don’t assume I am. It’s okay to like a product and admit it’s flaws, in this case the only flaw I’m suggesting it has is being less known than Gmail and even then only for me and my small corner of the world.