I itemized for the first time this year so I couldn’t use it, but I did fill it out completely as a comparison point to make sure itemizing was worth it. It was pretty painless, not very different from free filing through various other companies.

We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.

We haven’t progressed far enough to be detectable by intelligent life in other star systems, even the closest ones. The filter can easily be in front of us. It could just simply be that interstellar space travel is too infeasible, so intelligent species never reach beyond their home system.

My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.

It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.

Getting screenshots or videos off the Switch is laughably arcane. Nintendo is so weird about modern tech conveniences.

I got a 2023 Bolt earlier this year. I just connect my phone wirelessly for maps and music and don’t touch most other things on the screen. I LOVE the heated steering wheel for winter and cooling seats for summer. That particular package is well worth getting.

Definitely DO NOT give OnStar your credit card info though. The dealership will sit you in the car and initiate the OnStar call before you know what’s happening. Just refuse to give credit card info, the extended trial whatever isn’t worth the hassle of OnStar charging you when they said they wouldn’t. I ended up having to do a chargeback because OnStar straight up lied to me about when charges would occur.

I disagree that that’s what it means, IMO “shuffle” explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It’s a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.

I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.

My current workplace has an official policy of flexing hours for salaried employees. Which is exactly what you just described: if you work time outside of your regular hours, take comp time off for it. And my supervisor is probably the best boss I’ve ever had, she’s super respectful of our team’s time and work-life balance so we don’t even need to run flex time by her. As long as we mark it on our calendars we can just do whatever. A good boss makes such a huge difference.

I’m also 9-5 salaried, hybrid with 1-2 days in office each week and the rest from home. It’s very nice.

Salaried can be a double-edged sword. The occasional self-motivated “I actually really need to get this done” is no big deal, but some workplaces will pile work onto salaried workers with no respect for work-life balance. So you’re left with either not getting your work done and feeling stress because you can’t keep up, or regularly working extra hours for free so you feel stress because you don’t have enough personal time. What kind of job it is can depend really heavily on your direct supervisor and general workplace culture. I had to suffer through a few of the bad kind of salaries positions before I lucked into finding a good one.

Let’s be real, if Israel succeeded in a full genocide of all Palestinians in the region Biden would still be defending them saying they still haven’t crossed the red line because Palestinians still exist in our memories.

This shit is unacceptable. Made all the worse that they think they can get away with it simply because of the man they helped put into power. I fucking hate this country.

Oh nice, I picked this up a while back to play on Steam Deck. Very nice 2D Minecraft/Terraria-esque sandbox game. Looks like I’ll be starting a new playthrough for 1.0. 😁

That’s how I feel about them making Harry pet into sTV series.

It was cat print well and most characters will be hard to replace. I can’t imagine it not completely bombing.

Are you doing okay?

It’s probably different when he sees it coming from a fellow Chinese citizen.

Stardew Valley, the 1.6 update adds lots of small new content in all the right places to really take the game to the experience I imagine ConcernedApe always wanted it to be. This is something like my 10th playthrough and it’s easily my favorite one since the 1st.

Whenever it comes out, I’m so excited for Haunted Chocolatier.