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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 21st, 2024

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  • That sucks! I got dengue fever once, and it pretty bad. I can’t imagine getting dengue and two others at the same time cause I was just hanging out. And this dude got it in New Hampshire. He wasn’t even in a mosquito paradise like Africa or the Caribbean. This guy got West Nile Virus from a mosquito in New England. Fuckkkkk 😩

    I imagine everyone that’s been around him was feeling odd since it could have happened to them too. Kind of like if I had been stopped at a light right next to a car that got rear-ended and put the driver in the ICU. Also, I know I’d be hypervigilant of any symptoms for like 2-3 weeks, reading all of the early symptoms of each disease the guy got. “Oh no, I think I have EEE/St. Louis Encephalitis/West Nile Virus, too. I’m fucked.”



  • When working on long-term goals:

    1. Set a date for completion.
    2. Create a tentative schedule working backwards from that date. Include dates for completing main tasks.
    3. Give extra time in the schedule for minor setbacks between tasks.
    4. Give extra time in the schedule for a potential major setback overall.

    For example, let’s say the goal is to paint a house:

    1. I can say I want it painted in 2 months, so I set it for the date of 9/17/24.

    2. I figure I can paint a room every other day, so since the house has 5 rooms total, I think I can start painting 10 days before on 9/07/24. However, I need to consider that finding and purchasing paint and equipment will take time too. I think about it and consider that paint shopping can take me 2 days since I want to try out several stores, so the newer date is 9/05/24.

    3. Now, I add some room for minor setbacks between each task. Rather than assuming I will paint every other day, I add two days in between. That means starting on 8/30/24. This allows me to take my time with rooms, skip a day if I feel tired, or adjust if I the rooms take longer to paint than I had anticipated for whatever reason. I also increase the time allotted for acquiring materials because so many things can happen: traffic, tired, unhappy with selection, need time to test samples and ask people, etc. Rather than only include 2 days for this, I include a whole week so I can see the paint samples on the walls and see which ones feel the best. We are not starting on 8/23/24.

    4. Lastly, maybe something major could happen, such as getting sick, the store runs out of paint stock, my car breaks down, or I change my mind on one of the paint colors after seeing it up on the wall. I might even realize that I completely overlooked tasks, such as rearranging furniture, painting over errors/accidents, and clean up. I would then add a cushion of 2 weeks to the schedule to allow for that should it happen. So the actual start date is 8/9/24. This is much sooner than if we had gone with the original start date of 9/07/24, almost an entire month!

    With this style of planning, I can take my sweet time, enjoy the process, and not get stressed out if something unexpected comes up. If I finish early, then I have extra time to work on details or enjoy the rest.







  • First Union, which was bought by Wachovia, which was bought by Wells Fargo was my first bank account. Sometime around 2009, it came out that they were doing some pretty shady shit along with going out of their way to fuck their customers out of money by posting their purchases in a way that would maximize fees. It was a blatant dickhead move. I immediately closed my account with them and will never go back.





  • If faster than light travel existed, then a species would possibly be able to colonize anything in less than an instant because they’d be traveling backwards in time.

    However, it might be possible to change locations faster than light by cutting through spacetime using a wormhole.

    Yet, in support of your argument, I think I also remember that perhaps there are ways to warp spacetime around a ship so that locally, the ship is not traveling faster than light, but the warping of spacetime is. I don’t understand this concept well enough to have a confident opinion on it tho. For example, is it possible to warp spacetime faster than light without violating general relativity?



  • Think of the Internet as being able to send opened letters with a destination address and return address. Anyone that handles the letter to help deliver it can see what it says, who’s sending it, and where it’s going.

    A VPN is like asking a company to help you transmit the letter with more privacy. The VPN creates a secret code between you and the VPN, so that only you two understand what is in the letter. Then, the VPN communicates with whomever while not sharing your identity so that no one knows who you are unless you specifically tell them in the letter.

    Say you want to know what the symptoms you’re experiencing after a sexual encounter are, but you’re embarrassed and don’t want anyone to suspect anything in case it’s nothing. You tell your VPN you want to send a letter to the medical info center. The VPN tells you to use a code that was created automatically so that no one knows what it means besides you and their code machine, and was sent to you earlier when you signed up for their service or at a regular update. “Use code 5 we sent you last week.” You write the letter and address in code 5, then address it in normal language to the VPN, sending it via the mail system. The VPN machine translates the code to normal language but changes the return address to its own address. The medical info center receives a letter saying that the VPN wants to know the info you requested, so they respond. The VPN receives the info, translates it back to code 5, and sends the info to you.

    As far as everyone in the mail system is concerned, you sent and received info from the VPN, but only you know what it was because the mail system couldn’t understand it, and the VPN handled it through an automated machine. The medical mail system and medical info center then knows what the letter said, but thinks the VPN requested that info, so they don’t know it was you. Since the VPN handles tons of mail, no one knows who is requesting what specific info through the VPN.

    Note: This assumes the VPN doesn’t keep logs. Some VPNs might actually track what you send, so they could keep track of your messages. That’s why people that value privacy recommend to use VPNs that don’t keep logs.






  • Reminds me of a scene from some show. The main character was known for being a rich dude that never developed any practical skills, yet had an inflated ego. Someone asked him what his skills were, and he responded, “People say I have really good taste.” That guy’s inflated ego rested upon the belief that other’s like his choices. He contributed nothing to society.

    This AI status reminds me of that. A user will have the AI write some status for them, and then the user will choose to post whichever they prefer. Essentially, other users would be liking the statuses that were chosen, not composed, all for the sake of feeling valued. It’s like everyone is unknowingly making the decision to live in a joint delusion where they are contributing, but really they are are just choosing which AI contributions to voice.