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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • If this is the same Ghostery that makes the Chrome/Firefox extension, they were in hot water a few years ago for selling the extension to an ad agency. That ad agency almost immediately turned around and started selling usage data to the sites whose trackers were being blocked.

    Basically, Ghostery was selling info about how users were using the extension, how their trackers were being blocked, and which trackers were present on different users’ browsers. And the extension had this data collection quietly turned on by default. It also meant that ghostery was only acting as a middleman in the data collection process (and profiting as a result,) because the trackers were still able to get the info; They just had to pay Ghostery for access.


  • Personally, I’m fine with a working lunch, as long as I stay clocked in. Because it means I either pick up OT at the end of the day, or I get to leave early. But this only works because I have a fairly flexible schedule, set my own meetings, etc… And I certainly wouldn’t try to enforce it on my coworkers, because they may want to be able to walk away and disconnect for a while.

    Meal time is time for whatever you want to do; If you want to stay at your desk and play catch-up on some emails, then great. If you want to walk away and de-stress for an hour, then great. Neither one should be the expectation, because the time should be at the employee’s discretion, not the employer’s.





  • I did something similar when my friend moved to another continent. I shipped her a care package (with some stuff she had left behind,) and every single side of the box had some sort of “there’s definitely no SEX TOYS inside of this box” label on it.

    When I took it to the post office, the worker laughed and even made sure to avoid covering any of them with the shipping label.





  • +1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.

    And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.

    If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.

    Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.


  • There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.

    Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.

    It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.

    The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.



  • Also, the “raise it to $15 per hour” minimum wage debate has been going on for so long that the $15 is now outdated. If the debate started again today, the number would realistically be closer to $25-$30 per hour.

    And if you just got upset because you’re making $30 per hour and don’t want to be equated with minimum wage, then maybe you need to consider how much you could be making if minimum wage were higher. Here’s a hint: You’d be making much more than $30 per hour.




  • It’s misleading, at best. They don’t actually restrict sales on other platforms at all. You’re free to sell your game at whatever price you want. The only restrictions they place are on Steam keys which unlock the game for a Steam account. They restrict the price of Steam keys, because they want price parity for Steam keys. But you’re still welcome to sell non-Steam versions of your game at whatever price you want. Hell, you can give it away for free if you want, as long as it’s not giving away steam keys.

    For instance, GoG doesn’t distribute games via Steam keys, so you can sell your game on GoG for cheaper.