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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2024

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  • I don’t have a cat.

    I have a weird-ish cat that sometimes follows me on my walks. I’m his best friend when we’re hiking buddies. When I see him on the trail, he’s all meowing at me, rubbing up against my legs trying to get me to pet him. And if I stop petting him, he bites me. So that makes me think I’m special.

    But, if I happen to go over to my neighbor’s house (his owner), he won’t come near me. He runs off if I try to speak to him or coax him to come over to me.

    Till next time I see him on the trail, and we’re back to love bites and heavy petting.



  • My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

    I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

    Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.





  • I found it interesting that Trump claims if he wins the election, he’ll have the Russia / Ukraine conflict resolved BEFORE he even takes office. I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s how I interpreted what he stated.

    If that’s the case, then it seems like he could choose to end the conflict at any time. Why doesn’t he just end it now? Save countless lives. Minimize injuries. Prevent suffering. Save money. I’m sure that’d change some voters’ minds if he did it. Might even win him the election.

    Yes, this is a rhetorical question. I have no doubt that he can’t actually end it without basically giving in entirely to Russia.






  • Edit: I need to see what dried beans I have and maybe go shopping. I will give this a try with a couple different types of beans and report back if I fart or not.

    Hope you have some alpha-galactosidase at your disposal.

    The simplified explanation: A reason beans give some people gas is due to certain types of sugars and carbohydrates they contain. Those sugars are water soluble. Seems like brewing beans would concentrate those sugars and lead to epic tootage.

    Also, one method for reducing how much gas that beans cause is to soak them in lots of water. Basically, soak them for up to 8 hours, drain, rinse, and repeat a couple more times. It works on the same principal, that the soaking process will remove at least some of the problematic, water soluble sugars. Supposedly adding a small amount of baking soda helps, too. I’m less certain about that.


  • When I post something totally innocuous on Lemmy that I’d think nobody would ever take exception to, I generally only get 2 or fewer “AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY” type replies that I can see so long as I stay away from the crazy Lemmy instances and communities and block enough of the insane users who still manage to break through.

    On Reddit, there’s much more "AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY"s and no upper limit known thus far, sometimes with dozens of people repeating more or less the same “AAAAAAAKSCHUALLLLY” but perhaps worded slightly differently.


  • Earlier this year one of my relatives came for an extended visit. We were discussing what we might have for dinner that week and both of us were on board for the same ingredients, such as asparagus. My relative was also happy with the video services I’m currently subscribed to because I have a couple options they don’t have at home, so they were telling me about how they were rewatching some older Harrison Ford movies. And then there’s the age-old (or old age) conversations about our current health issues.

    In the following days, my relative kept bringing up the fact that their phone and tablet are listening to our conversations. Proof? After we had the food conversation, their news feed was suddenly filled with asparagus recipes. They were also getting ads for more Harrison Ford content on the service that they don’t subscribe to. And to top it off, they were seeing ads for a prescription my dog takes but that they had never even heard of before our conversation the day or two before. Isn’t it obvious? They’re listening to our conversations.

    To me this was easily explainable by Occam’s Razor. All our devices are on the same IP address. After we discussed the asparagus I went online that night and did a search for asparagus recipes. And when we were talking about my dog’s health condition, I used my phone to look up the active ingredient because I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. Plus, when Hulu or whatever random service sees you’re watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies, it makes sense they’d advertise others you might like.

    That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less complicated of an explanation than “our devices are always recording our conversations and uploading them to the internet as a basis to send us advertisements”.

    Sure it’s technically feasible, but if it were happening, surely they would be a lot more incontrovertible proof than a questionable and likely misinterpreted news source that seems to be more of a “sly” advertisement for a tech solution that the big players aren’t actually using.


  • I recently joined WTF and based on the list of the instances this place is federated with, my assumption is that’s the basis for the WTF name. So, maybe something like this could be useful for choosing an instance that’s not 1/2 filled with bat shit insane posts by default rather than requiring significant and immediate curation (i.e. blocking stupid shit like hexbear and ml).