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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Sometimes.

    The smaller independent theaters are a nice old timey experience. Most venues have a better sound system than anything most of us can afford - so that’s a good improvement. There’s something romantic about the whole thing, I don’t know. You see a movie the way the filmmakers intended, and being part of an audience, all gasping or laughing together can be powerful.

    Big theater chains like AMC are no worthwhile for me. They’re always riddled with unruly teenagers. Like half the time, they’ll be snickering during serious scenes or whatever.

    I mean, give it a try. You might like it. You might hate it. It’ll cost you like ~$18 to find out. Not that much.



  • As an accountant, I was like “what does Adjusted Gross Income have to do with anything?”

    I’m somewhat agnostic if we’re living in an simulation. It seems slightly more likely than any religion, but I have no evidence to support it. 🤷

    I don’t think AI will kill us all. All it has to do is kill one person before we turn it off or legislate it’s limitations (like Asimov’s 3 Laws). I think it’s more likely to save us like develop technologies to combat climate change or create medicines.

    Torn on the concept of free will.




  • My theory is that drugs, excessive sex and to some extent petty crime are partly a result of boredom for teenagers.

    Teenagers today have less reasons to be bored than a generation or two ago. Instead, they’re getting dopamine fixes from social media and gaming.

    I’m not sure if that’s related to dieting.

    If done right, the cultural climate to change from eating living things to lab grown meat will be as simple as ordering the same dishes at restaurants with substitute ingredients that nobody notices.

    And cost. It’s hard to justify a diet change otherwise.

    Americans went from eating sheep to cows in the 1800s because cows were cheaper per pound, more resilient to diseases and easier to maintain.

    Veganism is popular because it’s still a cost effective diet. Mass farming is compatible with it.

    I can easily see “Pepsi Challenge” style ad campaigns where people blindly guess which bite was the real meat - and which one they prefer.

    Though, I also see a backlash. In a way that the proliferation of hybrid and electric vehicles created the anti-environmental practice of “coal rolling”, whereas asshats modify their truck engines to produce more pollutants to own the libs.



  • My best friend was on The People’s Court.

    She has a small claims case against a mechanic or something. She lost, but was paid a per diem for her time that was similar to the amount she was seeking anyways. She says good things about meeting Judge Marilyn Milian.

    My friend didn’t seek being put in the show, she was approached by the producers when she showed up to the courthouse. Said, “why not”.


  • Accountant here.

    Nobody needs to balance a checkbook. We have live access to our banking 24/7 with apps. And who even uses personal checks anymore? Maybe just for rent - if you have an old landlord. Even then, it’s one check a month.

    But yes - having basic financial literacy is really important and should be part of any High School curriculum. It’s a little discouraging when we hire folks, tell them a 401k is part of their benefits and hear “what’s that mean?”


  • I don’t mind my fellow liberals being critical of one another. I mind when we eat our own.

    Liberals often lose because we fight a two front war. Conservatives just have to fight liberals. Liberals fight both - conservatives and other liberals.

    There’s a lot of “purity testing” we do that I don’t see on the other side. If liberals did a better job of accepting imperfect allies, we certainly would’ve won 2016. Maybe even won 2004.


  • YouTube currently makes sense of centralized hub because we haven’t found a way to compress video files in a way that makes sense for individual entities to get into storage. You need next-level resources to run a site like that.

    All of Wikipedia can fit on about 25 gigs. Reddit, probably half of that at best.

    YouTube’s server farms must have incalculable space, how many thousands of terabytes are being updated each day? It’s biggest competitors like Vimeo are a fraction of the size.

    With where technology is, the alternative for YouTube wouldn’t be a different website. It would have to be mods that bypass ads and customize the experience.


  • Of course it will hurt the migration. Lemmy.world should’ve halted open registration and directed folks elsewhere until they were able to get their house in order.

    Instead, a migrant’s experience was as follows:
    “I can’t create an account, the site won’t load”.
    “Okay, now I have an account, but I browse anything because the site won’t load.”
    “Okay, now I can browse, but I can’t make posts or comments because the site won’t load”.
    “The site’s been wishy-washy for 5 days, I guess it’s always like this”.

    Most don’t understand they should’ve joined a different instance. But hey, this QoL stuff affects all Lemmings, because the biggest communities are in the affected instances.

    So instead of a great Reddit alternative, migrants got a product that didn’t work as advertised. And a message board, no less - a technology that’s existed since the dawn of the internet.

    So, I get it. But I’m not upset because I understand Lemmy is an emerging technology that’ll require a little patience. Replacing one of the biggest websites of all time is not going to be easy.

    r/Lemmy is going to reflect the layman. We should listen to their feedback, help them out and take criticism seriously. I’m of the camp that Lemmy needs as few barriers to entry as possible - which is why I’m loving the progress of some of these mobile apps. Some (like Memmy) have an onboarding guide for new users. We need more of that.