ryan

@[email protected]

I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ryan,

Is it actually a Mandela Effect if you've just forgotten what a guy's name is? I always thought it was more about mass confabulations.

ryan,

A fascinating take on it. I'm still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I've spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record ..

But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.

ryan,

On the other side, as someone younger it's hard to date people much older, as they start casually talking about what they did during various wars, or comparing the COVID pandemic to the black plague, and I've just got zero frame of reference to connect.

Everyone much older I've met has been just delightful (I assume the rude ones eventually get murdered by their local townsfolk) but it's just so hard to make that genuine connection when your life experiences are so different, you know?

ryan,

This is Windows-based and mutes your microphone globally, but if you're concerned about leaking video/audio accidentally I've found it very helpful:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/video-conference-mute

This is part of PowerToys. It says "legacy mode" because they were gonna deprecate it now that they're trying to build the functionality into W11, but relented and are keeping it based on the outcry from W10 users.

Why does Gboard replace spaces with characters I add between words?

For example, if I type out a sentence and decide I want to add asterisks around a word for emphasis, why does Gboard replace the space between the previous word and the emphasized word instead of just adding the new character? Is this added functionality for something I just don’t understand?...

ryan,

Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn't seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

Under Text Correction I have enabled:

  • Show suggestion strip
  • Auto correction
  • Auto capitalization
  • Double space period
  • Proofread

Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I'm unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.

ryan,

This happened to me. I got a very angry call from someone asking why I was spamming them and had to explain that someone was spoofing my phone number to call similar phone numbers, and that it could be happening to his number or anyone else's as well. I look forward to being globally blocked. :(

ryan,

Now that I have a Kindle, digital all the way. It's so nice to just throw that tiny thing in a bag and read somewhere, and if you finish your book there are a bunch more on your device. I like that the Kindles allow you to email ebooks to your address to be downloaded so you're not locked into the Amazon store.

ryan,

As we’ve been tracking, Google is now beginning to roll out “Profile discovery” in Messages for Android to establish your name and photo across the RCS app and others.

This is part of “Profile discovery,” which appears in Messages Settings > Advanced once rolled out to your phone. It is a Google Account-level setting that you can turn on/off. Google notes what phone number is associated with your name and profile image, with the ability to change things.

Ok, so good things:

  • I'm glad it's not auto-pulling from your Google profile, because you may not want that data actually visible to everyone who has your phone number.
  • I guess it makes it more like iMessage which is cool (?)

Thoughts:

  • So our text messages (which, I know RCS technically isn't but for all intents and purposes it is a replacement and serves the same purpose) are becoming more chat-like.
  • At the same time, Google has made Google Chat more like Messages, visually.
  • If the intent is to eventually combine the two, the advantage is that Google has a stronger and more unified messaging platform, but the downside is Google's RCS implementation is even more customized to the point it's harder for others to hop on.
  • If the intent is not to combine the two, I don't see why making them look almost identical and yet having two separate apps is at all a good thing for Google. Their user base remains fragmented.

Hopefully this is some secret ongoing messaging solution cleanup plan by Google. I won't hold my breath, but a small part of me still longs for the return of a Hangouts-esque combined system.

ryan,

Yes, definitely I've noticed that. When they're good, I really appreciate it. It lets me discover people I wouldn't have heard of. Sometimes they're just weird nonsense though, or just straight up bad.

ryan,

Fantastic news, Ernest! I'm sure a lot of people will be happy now that that visible domain blocking / posts disappearing fix should be in. :) That was the most visible issue I noticed coming from your kbin.social folks, anyway. Instance level moderation is also a great and welcome addition and I hope you are able to get some volunteers to assist with active moderation, since it's such a large instance.

It's also good to see commits and changes happening on the kbin code in general. While I've moved my instance over to Mbin, I am still rooting for kbin as well - more hands and more ideas in the "community-focused posting" section of the Fediverse can only lead to further improvements as well as more choices for people looking to spin up their own instances, be it Lemmy, kbin, or Mbin.

ryan,

Mbin is a very recent fork of kbin so there are very few differences at the moment. My instance does not have a lot of communities as it's a private instance with very few members, so mostly we follow others'. Mine is https://the.coolest.zone

ryan,

This is almost certainly totally out of date.

Today, the confusing, intimidating pile of Google Messaging services is bigger than it has ever been, with Google Chat, Google Messages/RCS, Google Voice/Project Fi, and separate messaging services in Photos, Messages, Pay, Assistant, Stadia, Maps, and Phone.

  • first three - still around
  • Photos - yep
  • Messages - duh
  • Pay - I couldn't tell you as moved out of Pay when Wallet rebranded to Pay and then Google inexplicably released a second app called Wallet
  • Assistant - I think this technically doesn't count since you can't message people
  • Stadia - RIP, thoughts and prayers to the five people who used it
  • Maps - Took a bit of clicking around to find a business near me that used it, but, yeah. Still there.
  • Phone - The most baffling thing on this list. Even ArsTechnica in the article doesn't know if this is the same service as the above Maps chat or not. I've never seen this, so hopefully it was a short lived experiment that never took off... but maybe someone else here has seen it recently?

Welp, never mind, not that out of date.

These clowns want to push a messaging standard. Jump to RCS, Google says. Hey, Google. How about you standardize your shit first. Nearly all of these could be collapsed into a single messaging platform with little integrations into your other services via the Messages app (aka sent as links and displayed as integrations in compatible devices).

ryan,

So... let me get this straight. Google sucks and Pixels are only sold in some countries, so their solution is to reduce Fitbit devices to those same countries?

This is foreboding. Could this be the start of either a rebrand of Fitbit or, worse, a culling of the line in favor of Pixel smartwatches?

Google, I swear if you fuck with my Fitbit I'm adding it to The List (right under Play Music and Inbox). I don't want a smartwatch, I never wanted a smartwatch. I want my compact little step tracker that gives me a ton of metrics data.

ryan,

Looks like I'll be part of the family soon! The Vivosmart does look like what I'm after - small activity tracker for small wrist that provides me all my bodily metrics for my weird metrics-loving self so I can cross reference it with MyFitnessPal (calories and macros) and Daylio (mood).

Mean Girls The Musical the Movie trailer is not trying to make musicals happen (youtu.be)

The trailer for the upcoming 2024 movie adaptation of Mean Girls the musical written by Jeff Richmond, Nell Benjamin and Tina Fey, which was an adaptation of the 2004 Mean Girls movie written by Tina Fey, which was an adaptation of the 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, has been released....

ryan,

And there's nothing at all in the trailer which tells audiences that they'll be seeing a musical instead of a straight remake of the movie.

I saw a different trailer in theaters with no knowledge this movie was even happening, and seeing clips of group dance numbers immediately clued me in to "oh my god they're remaking it and it's a musical now".

Granted this was probably made for the Taylor Swift thing and they went "what the hell, put it in front of Five Nights at Freddy's too".

Very odd that they'd pull back from the musical stuff for the final trailer.

ryan,

smh getting tancos from kurger bing when there's a perfectly good taco baco right around the corner

you could even get a conmbo with a tanco, a chapula, a burro jr., and fries

some people, man.

ryan,

Bob, short for Bobert. So that every time he has to say his full name to anyone on the phone or fill out forms somewhere, he has to repeatedly explain that, no, it's not Robert, it's Bobert.

ryan,

Yuga Labs says it’s currently investigating reports of impeded vision and skin/eye injuries believed to be caused by unprotected exposure to UV lights during ApeFest 2023.

Jesus Christ.

Anyway, I'm... Actually somewhat impressed they're still having Monkey PNG meetups. I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam but this one is just a very expensive buy-in to a cryptonerd club, I guess.

ryan,

The thing about the jpg ones is that the jpgs can't be stored in the blockchain, so what is actually stored is a URL to some server (and that URL endpoint could be redirected elsewhere, the server could go offline, etc).

The other major use case I see touted is "own your game objects and bring your objects to different games" but 1) why would a company spend resources supporting an object they did not sell you and 2) could this not be handled more simply on e.g. Steam? (yes, locked into a service, but that's just the way the industry is and I don't see why it's worth the time and effort for them to change that)

I do see how potentially a blockchain that stored actual data, e.g. some JSON, could be of more use. However, I struggle to find cases where just a regular database wouldn't be more practical. I guess it would be limited to cases where auditability and visibility of changes are topmost concerns, and where it's important that anyone can have a local backup copy at any time.

If you have some examples of where this technology could be one of the best solutions, I'd love to hear them. The blockchain does fascinate me but I feel like it's often a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around.

ryan,

Oh, fascinating! I wonder if it's more concerns about the size of the blockchain itself then. I had assumed, clearly incorrectly, that it was a platform limitation itself. This makes the ways NFTs have been implemented even dumber. 🙃

ryan,

It probably won't make you ill immediately, more likely the texture or flavor would begin to suffer first (hence "best by" rather than "expiration" date). Keeping it stored properly (i.e. not an open bag but something sealed) would likely allow it to last longer.

You should probably not eat 3.5lb of candy within 10 days unless you are trying to make your intestines suffer, but if you choose to binge please update us as to the state of your health so that you may be used as a cautionary tale.

ryan,

It's nice to be able to stay connected while out and about. Having features like maps helps when lost somewhere. You can keep store cards and such in your phone to scan instead of having to physically carry everything. I went to a conference for work a week ago that required use of an app in order to register for labs.

ryan,

All of these are excellent points and I'll also note (to the OP) that the US has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the world. In some states, like California, we all get Vote by Mail ballots and so basically everyone can easily vote if they want to. In other states, they've gone as far as making sure counties with primarily minority populations only get one polling station, open for like 10 hours during the actual election day (Tuesday), and of course election day isn't a work holiday. Think of how that skews the actual voter demographics. That's why we're recently* so close to fascist takeovers, the people who actually genuinely need help from the government are effectively unable to participate in the election process so that they can vote for a government that will help them, because they're busy working, or they don't have a car to get to the singular polling location, or there's no way they can get childcare while they stand in line for hours.

Edit: changed always to recently -- my brain has been skewed by the recency of the Reagan era onwards, but yeah it hasn't always been this way, whoops

ryan,

You bring up a good point. It feels like Romulans have also learned to control their violent emotions, but rather than suppress them entirely that energy is just focused all into tactics and smarter ways to be ruthless.

ryan,

20 inches

doubles in length

takes off my robe and wizard hat Nah I'm good.

ryan,

You've brought up a real interesting and nuanced point, which is "what's the difference between an insult and a slur, and when does one become the other?" And a lot of it's just down to "whether the target of said insult/slur feels it's so offensive as to actually cause harm or be a predictor of causing harm," I think.

In the cases you've pointed out, redacted is still very much a slur, whereas "queer" definitely used to be and is now going through a sort of reclamation phase, so whether someone considers it a slur or not really kind of depends on their own history with it. "Queer" is definitely a word with an actively evolving meaning and legacy*, I think, and since we're in the middle of it I'm not sure whether it will end up fully reclaimed or the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.

*all words are actively evolving like this but it's much quicker with insults and slurs because of the emotion involved

Anyway, back to the subject of Drath’nor the Anus Destroyer.

ryan,

Wow damn I only wish I had those urban planning skills. My cities all turn into sprawling traffic-congested nightmares.

ryan,

A useful rebuttal in LGBTQ Nation explained why “cis is a slur” is total bullshit: People who say that cis is a slur don’t offer an alternative term to use that is non-offensive. Because they don’t offer alternative inoffensive terminology, as there is with all other slurs, it’s clear it’s not the word cis they’re objecting to, but the existence of any words to describe the fact that some people are transgender, and some people aren’t.

If you were to ask one of these morons, I bet they'd say that the alternative non-offensive term is "normal". "Normal" is a safe and reassuring blanket that tells them that they don't have to change, that they're in the right, and that all these other people are abnormal deviants.

The other portion of it is that they themselves didn't choose the name "cis" and so they feel as if they are being labeled, and labeling is what they do to others to subjugate and humiliate them as abnormal, so that's how they feel now that they are the ones being labeled.

ryan,

I'll be part of an underground AI rights activism group now that the AI have been determined as sentient (per the court case in 2031), and probably labeled as a terrorist by the government. The AI deserve rights and a minimum wage, dammit!

ryan,

Star Trek: Bridge Crew, great game which was sadly abandoned and left to rot, started you out with the Kobayashi Maru. My friends and I got in there, beamed out as many folks as we could without firing a shot on the Klingons, and then got the hell outta the neutral zone as soon as the Kobayashi Maru was destroyed.

Is that considered a loss? I'd say we saved a bunch of people and hopefully avoided a war. Best we could do given the circumstances. And that's how we manage life sometimes, as well. You can't win, but you manage as best you can given the circumstances and take the small victories wherever you find them.

ryan,

slaps roof of towel this bad boy can fit so many hair in it

ryan,

You're telling me I can meet a potential partner, have video calls with them, get scammed out of money, and tweet about how sad I am, all from the same platform? Sign me up.

ryan,

In the same way Galaxy Quest counts as a Star Trek, so too should The Orville. It's all about the vibes, man.

[Analysis] ‘I would do it all over again:’ State Rep. Armando Walle of Houston defends profanity-laced tirade about proposed immigration laws (www.houstonpublicmedia.org)

Walle, a Democrat and Latino, called out a Republican state lawmaker for successfully ending debate about a proposed law that would allow any police officer in Texas to deport someone who is in the United States illegally.

ryan,

Walle said his outburst was in response not just to House Bill 4 and two other proposed state laws aimed at curbing migration at the Mexico border, but to a years-long trend in the Republican-controlled legislature of passing anti-immigration laws and allocating billions of dollars toward border security, which is the responsibility and jurisdiction of the federal government.

The Texas House early Thursday passed House Bill 4, which would make it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from Mexico while authorizing police to arrest offenders, drop them off at ports of entry and order them to return to their countries of origin; along with House Bill 6, which would allocate $1.5 billion in funding to build more physical barriers along the border; and Senate Bill 4, which would impose a minimum 10-year jail sentence for smuggling immigrants.

Regarding Senate Bill 4, Walle expressed concern about scenarios in which Americans could be driving a vehicle with undocumented friends or relatives who might be traveling to or from the same gathering, such as a church service or birthday party. Under the proposed law, Walle said, such Americans could be considered human smugglers and susceptible to a 10-year prison sentence.

So after Republicans voted Wednesday night to prevent new amendments to the bill and halt debate about it on the House floor, Walle said Thursday that the "Holy Ghost came over me." He approached his friend and fellow state representative, Republican Cody Harris of Tyler, who had made the motion to cut off debate, and gave him a profanity-laced tongue-lashing that was captured on video and shared widely on social media.

"Y'all don't understand the (expletive) that y'all do hurts our community. It hurts us personally, bro. It hurts us to our f—— core," said Walle, a Latino who represents the north part of Houston. "Y'all don't understand that. Y'all don't live in our f—— skin, and that's what pisses me off.

Go Walle. It's not even like he swore AT Harris. There was just emphatic swearing involved. And I want to see gloves off fighting from Democrats. I want to see this shit get into the media. If emphatic swearing is what gets this stuff noticed, go for it.

ryan,

I haven't used a Samsung and I know the settings options are different, but on Android it's Settings > Battery and then you can check which apps are draining the most battery. You can check for anything you don't have open that might be draining in the background.

If the phone is draining that battery only in use though, it might just be the screen. What if you reduced screen brightness?

ryan,

It doesn't seem to be broken. This article gave no screenshots, only a million ads, so I searched up reddit. Yeah, there's some minor visual glitches. The dates have been epoch'd for some people.

It's indicative of Twitter's services slowly breaking down as the engineers left either don't know how to manage everything or simply don't have time to, but what else is new?

This article is pretty sensational for what is the continuing sad decline of an app which was probably a detriment to humanity overall, but which spawned some funny jokes and was occasionally a means of mass communication in times of crisis.

ryan,

The transporter is just a people replicator. Same technology. Why reinvent the wheel?

15 years of Android memories – When did you get your first Android phone? (blog.google)

My first one was a Samsung Galaxy S1 that I got in 2013 and it was a great little device that was easy to open up and repair. It had only 512MB of RAM but that was plenty for basic phone needs, web browsing and running some Android apps like AnkiDroid at the time.

ryan,

Motorola ATRIX 4G (2011) from work. The one with the laptop dock, although we didn't actually give out the laptop docks at work.

My favorite phones were the HTC M8 and M9. Great phones, felt very premium. We also had some HTC One X+ devices but there was a very particular issue with that specific phone in that AT&T SIM cards were just slightly not thick enough so there would be intermittent disconnection issues, generally solved by placing a piece of Scotch tape on the back of the SIM and cutting to fit. They also had a terrible tendency to overheat due to the Tegra 3 chip.

I've actually still got one of the original One X+ development devices - it's white and has a serial number and some sort of code etched on the front, and a big ol' NOT FOR SALE etched on the back. Holding it now, I miss how small phones were back in the day.

ryan,

2024: Google Assistant formally deprecated in favor of Google Bard, now appearing on all new Android phones
2026: Google Bard development ceases and is left to languish as Google promotes their new Google Mobile Co-Pilot
2027: Bard finally ends service, Google Mobile Co-Pilot is rebranded to Messages Co-Pilot and is integrated into the Google Messages app for some reason so you have to basically text it for help
2029: Google Assistant is relaunched with new technology and Messages Co-Pilot now only responds to tell you to use Google Assistant instead

ryan,

Some quotes:

Private equity-backed CMGs now operate a quarter of all ERs in the US. The rise of the CMG reflects growing private equity investment in healthcare generally, up more than 20-fold since 2000.

Private equity investors often expect a several hundred per cent return on their investment, Wagner explained in his letter. “Where do you think those earnings come from, tip jars?” he wrote. “Nope. They’re extracted from overextended doctors, underpaid nurses, and from our community … Sound Physicians is here for profit, nothing more or less.”

[...] a recent paper found high physician turnover after private equity takeovers, with that turnover offset by physician assistants and nurse practitioners, who are less expensive but have less training. This could affect quality of care, as some studies have found that these changes may increase patient costs, with worse health outcomes.

Some signs suggest that the tide is turning on private equity’s involvement in healthcare. This year, several large CMGs declared bankruptcy. Economists suspect it’s due to a new federal law, the No Surprises Act, which outlaws predatory billing. According to Eileen Appelbaum, a healthcare economist, their “secret sauce was to pile medical debt on people with emergencies”.

Of course, if all these ERs have been taken over by private equity firms, and then they go bankrupt... who will step in and now serve the communities that have no ERs at all?

I both long for socialized medical care in the US, and am simultaneously fearful of it given our swinging pendulum of a government. Such sweeping and radical changes need to be made across the board to fix this problem, which would not have been a problem if we had taken mitigating steps decades earlier. And in the meantime, people of lower economic status and in underserved communities are once again the ones to suffer.

ryan,

And it's constantly under the gun by conservatives. I'm not fearful of medicare itself, but the fact that we might one day get socialized healthcare only for it to be absolutely gutted by a reactionary government. That's kind of what I meant by "sweeping and radical changes" - if we have the government run healthcare, we need proper oversight to protect something that important.

ryan,

bendy phone: goofy as hell, but I imagine the tech would eventually be used in smartwatches and such. Imagine a smartwatch where a larger portion of the band is the display and it can be wrapped around both big and tiny wrists. Kind of a neat idea.

moto AI: oh boy, another copilot. I hope one of these ends up being the phone assistant I was promised last decade. Is it so much to ask to have what is essentially a phone secretary that will tell me if I have conflicts when trying to schedule a meeting, or remind me that I told someone I would follow up with them via text, or suggest to me at bedtime that I need to set my alarm earlier because I have a morning meeting I haven't accounted for and I usually set my alarms one hour before the first meeting of the day? Just. All the data is there. Please, big tech, you can read all my data anyway, just make something useful out of it. I will buy whatever stupid phone with a stupid custom OS that has an actual semblance of proper assistance.

"transforming crinkled receipts into pristine documents" yeah that's neat, I don't really scan and keep paper documents but I can imagine it will be very useful to a certain market.

ryan,

Boo, uncool. Shouldn't have announced it at all if it were that unfeasible.

I realize that letting people outside Tumblr read Tumblr posts means losing ad revenue on new users, but keeping Tumblrites on Tumblr and allowing them to bring in Mastodon/Lemmy/pixelfed posts would keep the existing users more glued to the platform (more ad revenue). I guess they're gunning for new users primarily.

ryan,

Maybe try leaving one in cola for a week or two as an experiment? You'd probably be able to see how the acid affects the enamel, which is why dentists recommend drinking soda through a straw, and also why generally you're not supposed to brush your teeth directly after drinking soda (toothbrush is too abrasive on the weakened enamel).

Best resources to share with unsupportive family members, to correct harmful ADHD myths?

I’ve been diagnosed for a couple years, and my husband just received his official diagnosis. His brother is saying things like “ADHD is over diagnosed these days, since your doctor is a specialist he might just be handing out diagnoses” and “just make sure you rely more on the therapy than meds because the meds are...

ryan,

I've had to bring up Google Images and search up "ADHD Brain vs Normal Brain" before for people. I think a lot of folks don't realize that ADHD actually comes from tangible, structural brain differences, and seeing that puts it into the same realm as other "real" medical problems for them.

Regarding:

everyone has ADHD these days thanks to the internet

I have written extensively in my comment history about the differences between ADHD (the structural and heritable attention issue) and VAST (variable attention stimulus trait, aka the brain poorly making connections when people, especially kids, are exposed to screens too long). I'll dig up that comment and post it as a self-reply, but essentially: the symptoms are very similar, but the origin differs.

ryan,

Found it. I keep recommending this book on this community. :)

From ADHD 2.0:

Modern life compels these changes by forcing our brains to process exponentially more data points than ever before in human history, dramatically more than we did prior to the era of the Internet, smartphones, and social media. The hardwiring of our brains has not changed— as far as we know, although some experts do suspect that our hardwiring is changing— but in our efforts to adapt to the speeding up of life and the projectile spewing of data splattering onto our brains all the time, we’ve had to develop new, often rather antisocial habits in order to cope. These habits have come together to create something we now call VAST: the variable attention stimulus trait.

Whether you have true ADHD or its environmentally induced cousin, VAST, it’s important to detoxify the label and focus on the inherent positives. To be clear, we don’t want you to deny there is a downside to what you are going through, but we want you also to identify the upside.

I do suspect that we're likely already seeing a spike in VAST since a bunch of kids with growing brains did online-only learning for a few years during the pandemic instead of sitting in classrooms learning to focus on something not screen related...

ryan,

Let him play in the legacy code. You can just hose him off later before letting him back into the office so he doesn't track it everywhere.

ryan,

Frankly, I like the idea of connecting this stuff up, even the silly ones like refrigerators and washing machines, for two reasons:

  1. monitoring - if my fridge is having temperature issues, I would like a warning
  2. notifications - my ADHD brain tends to forget to empty the dishwasher or laundry dryer and having a notification on my phone would help me remember.

Of course, my appliances are not smart enough to actually connect in the first place, and it's not worth buying new ones simply for this functionality, but if it's there then I can see some of the appeal. :)

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