dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

“Everything I don’t like is terrorism.”

What is this, 2001 again?

Elysium actually had some semblance of working technology, though.

That’s basically what it is. The stuff is incredibly sweet.

Yes, I worked in a Chinese takeout retaurant, too.

There is no “technically” about it. Your list of ingredients there quite carefully left out the entire ladle full of cane sugar. By volume it’s about one third of the sauce by way of how every takeaway place I’ve ever seen prepares it.

Random General Tso’s fact: It’s the same sauce as the sesame chicken, but the latter has sesame seeds in it and the former has crushed chili pepper paste instead. Otherwise the base is the same (i.e. mostly sugar).

I’m not going through all that BS just to reward the manufacturer with a sale. It went back, fuck 'em, and I replaced it with a normal cheap computer monitor which is what I told him to buy in the first place.

That won’t save you anymore. My boss bought a smallish smart TV in contravention of my explicit instructions for use as a CCTV monitor because it was “cheap.” It nags you on power up with a popup whining about not being able to access the internet, and if you don’t feed it your Wifi password it will subsequently display that same popup every 30 minutes or so requiring you to dismiss it again. And again. And again. Apparently the play is to just annoy you into caving and letting it access your network.

Instead I packed it up and returned it. Fuck that.

Existing roomscale VR games already come pretty damn close.

You must not live in an area where dumbasses paying tons of money to ruin their cars with crackle “tunes” is popular yet, then.

There’s one asshat with a Mustang around here that he’s got deliberately set to backfire about twenty times every time he takes is foot off the gas, and he goes ripping up and down the main drag all night. I’ve timed him and you can quite literally hear him coming from about two miles away.

I’m a pretty live-and-let-live sort of bird, but damn, bro. Give it a rest after midnight, will you?

I think before any technical aspects are considered, you need to figure out what to do with the gibbering hordes of idiotic users who seem to be drawn to these sorts of forums as if by powerful magnetism.

I have been led in desperation many times to a Quora thread in my search results. I have never in many years, not even once, arrived at a Quora thread that actually contained the correct answer to the question being asked at the top. It’s useless cesspit and insofar as I can be bothered to determine it always was.

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that “no one in Minnesota is above the law.”

That includes you and your goons, dumbass.

I employed the super secure expedient of never exporting my keys. I have no idea what they are, I never did, and I never will.

There’s really no irreplaceable data on my Windows machine. If I have to reformat it some day A) that’s no big deal, and B) it’s Windows, what else is new.

Using Rufus still works. I did it as recently as a couple of days ago.

If you sign in with a Microsoft account at all I don’t believe there’s the capability to opt out.

I only use local accounts. I have never had a Microsoft account. I never will.

They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”

Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.

Douglas Adams, apparently ever prescient, was on top of this long before the rest of us. This is from The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, which I will remind you was published in 1988 and in the foreword says it was typeset on a Macintosh II:

There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than Michelangelo rather liked them.

He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

“Dobby, I deed a fridge.” (At this point in the book, Dirk has recently been punched in the face and is talking funny due to a broken nose.)

“Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

Dirk found this highly unlikely.

“Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

“This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

“What would a microprothehtor be doing in a fridge, Dobby?”

“Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons I won’t trouble you with.”

“I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not home at preddent.”

“Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”

I’ll bet if you tried it the dealer would refuse to take it back.

I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that court case.

“Look, kid. Let me tell you the secret of show business. Step one is to find someone with a great act. And step two, steal it!”

Hey, I like my 3D TV. Every once in a while I manage to find a pirated video that’s in 3D and it’s pretty neat. And unlike the current avalanche of generative/LLM bullshit, I can turn the 3D off, and when I do it works just fine as a perfectly ordinary TV, and in no way does it nag me incessantly to turn it back on.

Well, which do we think would annoy nerds more: Lego bricks changing so that they or some combination thereof achieve a truly cubic aspect ratio (currently they’re not and they never have been; a 1x1x1 Lego brick is taller than it is wide or deep, and no approved combination of stock Lego parts can produce a truly cubic 1x1 piece) or Minecraft blocks suddenly changing to be vertically elongated to match Lego?