Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

Peddled by disaster capitalists and Russian money/propaganda.

And now the Tories want to pull us from the ECHR, to tear away workers rights and further privatise everything to funnel money into their own bank accounts.

It’s damn sad there will never be a “we fucking told you so” moment, because the useful idiots that were used as fodder in this whole mess are too fucking thick to ever understand the gravity of it all.

Sure, those are good examples of negatives, but that is just the way of it. This happens all the time when new technology emerges. Just think about the audio industry, all of a sudden people could produce music from their spare bedrooms- jobs weren’t needed anymore. But the music industry is now far more saturated than ever as a result, as it is so much more accessible to people, without the need for specialist equipment and stacks of cash.

Not OP, But, Stephen Hawking could have kept his voice, as an example.There are probably lots of beneficial uses of this technology. Automatic TTS voice messages would be another 🤷‍♂️

A very long time ago, a large group of us had a night of drinking around 3 miles from our small town. With a drunken adolescent sense of mob mentality, a sprinkle of rebellion, and a bucket load of mindless teenage stupidity, we descended upon the town to cause some trouble. We wanted to put our stealth skills to the test, and devised a plot to separate into multiple teams of 4. The name of the game was Gnome Hunt, and the aim was a heist that would make Danny Ocean shit his pants.

We agreed on a time limit of 2 hours where we would rendezvous back at the threshold of the town, count up scores, and fade back into the rural night from whence we emerged.

Quickly, the game evolved from simple gnomes, as drunken brains decided larger scores would net more points, so why settle?

After the 2 hours had passed we all met up again with our prizes. We had no scoring mechanic, of course, so we just all decided “good game”, shook hands, and sauntered back into the dark countryside.

Left behind, on a wall at the entrance to a housing estate, was a glorious display of all sorts of garden ornaments, arranged in a way that would make B&Qs seasonal team take pause.

The following weeks were a blaze of entertainment. The local paper had a photo of the full display, and a piece written as to the mystery of it all. Locals played along, with “wanted” and “have you seen this gnome?” Posters put up around town. All in all, the town seemed to enjoy a good laugh at the whole thing. None the wiser that it was simply reckless abandon from stupid, yet polite, drunken teens.

I used to get this a lot, until someone reversed it on me, and I’ve thought about it this way ever since: If you can’t let yourself suffer because others might have it worse, then you also can’t let yourself be happy, because others have it better.

It’s all about personal experience and perspective.

Yeah, I did say someone recently told me this was a feature. I’ll find some time at the weekend to make the switch, it’s really far past time now I think.

I use Chrome, but Firefox on my android phone. I have had ublock origin installed since the beginning. I only really use it because I manage my YouTube and Google accounts through it, and its handy for sending tabs between my macbook and PC, as well as the various other workflow features I’ve come to rely on over the last decade or so.

Though I recently heard this was a feature on Firefox now. I used to use Firefox prior to chrome, about 15 or so years ago. I’ve been intending to switch back recently but haven’t got round to it yet.

I remember reading that thread! Well, kindly asking my half-german wife to translate it for me. It was very helpful!

Oh my god, I’ve been using ublock for as long as I can remember and had no idea about this! Thank you, now I just have to figure out what I’m doing.

It’s just one of the culture war angles propagated by the rich to keep everyone angry with each other while they reap up as much of the world’s wealth as possible before any of the forthcoming disasters- whether that is climate crisis migration, the next financial crisis, AI unemployment crisis, further war, food and water shortages worldwide, etc…

The writing is on the wall, a majority of people can see it too if you ask them, but unfortunately people can’t help but get sucked in anyway. Probably because it’s a distraction from facing the uncertain future we all have.

OR, this is just a tinfoil hat getting the better of me. It feels like a logical conclusion, so maybe that’s the fallacy I’ve fallen for.

Champ, I knew someone here would be able to improve on it!

Ah thanks, like I said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about! Good to know.

I’m not in the US, it’s a local council/regional thing. And most areas here have chromebooks for every student so that’s just become the default, I think. But yes, our IT tends to be a good 10-15 years behind the curve anyway. No money for resources either.

Firefox + ublock origin is the way forward.

However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you’re trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.

Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I’m not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;

javascript: var v = document.querySelector(‘video’); var t = 16; v.playbackRate = parseFloat(t)

Oops, yes, this. A perceived doubling!

I wouldn’t imagine noise cancelling headphones would have the ability to output high enough for serious damage. But some people do experience discomfort and pressure when using noise cancelling headphones for the first time, this could be due to a number of factors though.

Yes, sorry, I didn’t phrase that well at all. The sound pressure is actually cancelled out, but with the hypothetical example of the jet engine, anything going wrong could double the dB level instead of cancelling, and because we’re talking milliseconds difference, it would be quite easy to go wrong in this sense.

Absolutely, this is spot on, but if they can find ways to work around this like with these microphone swarms they’re proposing, then there could be a lot more applications for it. Some quite scary.