It’s weirdly difficult to remap the “office” key so that pressing it won’t open an ad for ms office 365 and pressing office+L won’t open linkedin.com, and a few more equally valuable core OS features.

In the end I just had to grab a small bit of C code from GitHub, compile it, move the exe to the startup folder, have Windows Defender yell at me for having obviously installed a particularly nasty brand of trojan, and make Windows Defender put the executive I had just compiled back.

But really, I deserve this for using a Microsoft natural keyboard in the first place.

I’d say, let’s have everyone brainstorm the best way to go about this, and let a thousand flowers bloom!

It is time for the mainland to come back into the fold.

I agree the mainland should be allowed to maintain some amount of self rule during the transition.

Pixel 7 with a barely customized Nova Launcher, because I’m basic but I need rounded square icons.
The background looks iffy in the shot, but it’s a live wallpaper from Shader Editor running Machine DNA’s GLSL shader with minimal tweaks needed to make it fit on the phone.
That weird twitter icon is a Firefox PWA running twitter.com with various userscripts installed, to remove antifeatures and bad logos.

I vote for xX-[X]-Xx

Alas, this being the darkest timeline, we’ll probably end up with X Social.

I’ve been having fun writing a dumb userscript to help me cope with this.

Yes, it can put back a bird of your choosing as a logo, but why stop there.

Instead of tweeting on Twitter, I can now spez on Reddit, skeet on Bluesky, or just eXecrate on X, the Elon way.

It’s ridiculous and pointless, and I’m not sorry.

Well, this was before his dark period. He was still trying.

And also, how dare you sir!

I just watched the trailer, and it feels really familiar, like I’ve seen it before, but I don’t really remember anything about it…

…so I guess I’ll just watch it (again.)

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yes, there’s an underlying taste of “oh my god look how they massacred a great idea” to it, but I’ve learned to swish it in my mouth and savor it by now.

Next (2007), starring the One True God, alongside Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel.

It’s a brilliant movie (loosely) based on a Philip K Dick short story. It’s been nominated and won actual awards (Worst Actor and Worst Supporting Actress from the prestigious Razzie Awards, Worst Foreign Actor from the Yoga Awards), and it stands the test of time comfortably at 28% on the tomatometer.

I wish I was kidding. I’ve watched this over a dozen times. I can’t stop. Send help.

Instead of simply blurring them, it’d be technically possible to feed their images through a stable diffusion prompt, like “humanoid lizards” or “frantic lemmings”…
Also, I understand that a large language model could be made to rewrite articles about them with a matching prompt.

That would be very silly, of course.

Honestly, it depends on your job.
Some jobs will fire you for taking too long in the restroom.
Those are not good jobs.

At other jobs, nobody will flinch if you send a quick note saying you gotta leave now for personal reasons and just take off.

No True Christian would ever activate a fully automated sentry killbot that doesn’t use at least one of its compute cores to pray to the Almighty on a loop.

I’ve been an immigrant for about 25 years now. Not sure if that counts, but I’ve been slacking and haven’t gotten a citizenship yet, so… probably?

I can confirm that I’ve up until now always been on one of the health plans my employer made available to me. It certainly made things easier that I was never out of job, and all of those jobs provided great benefits (typical white collar computer nerd stuff.)

However, I stopped working last year, and my 18 months of COBRA (a continuation of employer-provided coverage after leaving a job, except you pay yourself the premiums your employer was paying (about ~$2000/month for me)) are running out very soon, so I’m discovering the bizarro world that is US healthcare without an employer plan.

I’ve contacted some insurance brokers to help me find a new plan, and each one of them has tried to push weird non-ACA-compliant plans to me under false pretenses (ie. they’ve actively lied to me about what the plans were.)
Sometimes the awful stereotypes about a profession are awful for a reason.

Which leaves me with the ACA marketplace, where every single plan is significantly worse than anything any of my employers ever offered, both in terms of breath of network, prescription coverage, and geographical coverage. I didn’t mention the famously terrible mental health insurance coverage because it was already impossible for me to get in-network care there even with my employer plan.

And then if you figure out which is the least bad plan in the 100+ sad plans offered to you, and you commit the faux-pas of googling them, you’ll get a deluge of screaming victims of those plans wishing they had picked anything else because their experience was a literal nightmare.

So that’s encouraging.

In specific terms, the ACA healthcare.gov site I linked above lets you put a list of doctors and medications to see which plans support them, and the answer for me is “none.” None of the plans available would cover all the medical care me and my wife are getting on an ongoing basis.
So it becomes a matter of picking and choosing what I’m going to pay out of pocket.
For example, right now I pay $0 for various insulin pens, but a great number of those plans won’t cover those, or cover a little bottle of insulin instead you’re expected to use with disposable needles each time you’ll fill yourself and inject yourself with, and hopefully not fuck it up. Out of pocket, with some “discount card” (GoodRX or whatever), a month supply of the pens would add up to roughly $800. So something that was “free” to us (if you ignore the large insurance premiums) is going to feel like quite the luxury instead.

One of the aforementioned lovable insurance brokers suggested that I create a fake company in order to be eligible for reasonable employer-sponsored plans and avoid this nonsense. Sounds great, except for the whole fraud thing and the risk of getting found out and denied at the time when I’d need it the most (which would probably also be when an insurance provider would look the closest to try to find any reasons to deny a large claim.)

And then, there’s the quasi-scam that targets religious (and/or desperate) people, known as “health care sharing ministries.”
They appear to be very affordable plans with great coverage, managed by “faith-based organizations.”
They are not insurance, and ostensibly claim to simply “share the burden” of healthcare across all their members.
Notably, they are not actually obligated to meet any of the (low) bars set by the ACA, or to simply pay any of the insurance claims their members send them, and so sometimes they don’t. Tough break.

At the end of the day, I’m still going to pick an ACA plan and just pay out of pocket whatever isn’t covered. I just have to settle on a plan, which feels like picking from a set of shrunken and half torn blankets the one to use on my bed.

Anyway… what would I change? Nothing obviously. All is for the best in the best of possible worlds.

I’m still occasionally browsing spezworld in read only mode and I thought I was doing okay but I just found old.lemmy.world and now it feels like I’ve relapsed.

“I’m not X but <position statement that clearly requires them to be X” and “I don’t want to Y but <proceeds to do exactly Y>” are used by people that mistakenly believe a disclaimer provides instant absolution.

On the other hand, I’ve never had anybody threaten to yuck my yum in exactly those terms, and I’m slightly intrigued by the prospect.

I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets “subscribed to” because it generated “engagement”, no click needed.
This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

Almost entirely unrelated, but I’ve been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It’s also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I’ll be satisfied.

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It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it’s difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.

For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.

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