wizardbeard

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

There’s at least one public story from an ex-googler who worked on search having a big QoL feature update killed at the absolute last moment before it went live by someone in marketing/ads because it decreased click through rate for the “sponsored” results at the top of the search page.

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

There’s at least one public story from an ex-googler who worked on search having a big QoL feature update killed at the absolute last moment before it went live by someone in marketing/ads because it decreased click through rate for the “sponsored” results at the top of the search page.

wizardbeard, 21 hours ago

On android I use Revanced. It patches the official Youtube app (patches are open source) to greatly expand the base functionality and offer a lot more customization of the UI.

For me the best features are ad block, sponsorblock (skips in video sponsored segments), and complete excision of shorts from all aspects of the app.

It also works on Youtube Music, effectively allowing free premium (just don’t get the local downloads of your most listened tracks to help save data, but I have unlimited anyway).

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

… you think they don’t? You need to read the fine print again. It’s not proven where it’s going, but they absolutely have the right to sell your genetic information and already do.

wizardbeard, 3 months ago

Always good to see more options! I think mgba is king in terms of accuracy at the moment, but I’d love to see a GBA emulator with some sort of MSU-1 like functionality. It would be great to be able to use the many soundtrack restorations to bypass the sound limitations of the GBA. Even with clearer output, the samples themselves are crushed to fit the file size limitations.

wizardbeard, 26 days ago

I use EAC- Exact Audio Copy. It’s definitely more hardcore than the average person needs, including features for testing the physical capabilites of your disc drive and having settings for detecting and attempting to re-read CD sectors that have errors, but after you set it up you can easily rip to .flac (lossless, technically the best format to rip to, but larger) or to .mp3 vbr0 (99.9% of people can’t tell the quality difference from flac, and it’s much smaller size).

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

I think most people have moved on to other programs past VLC. I think the “informed nerd choice” is MPC Classic now for videos, but don’t quote me on that.

For music, the last time I checked it was MusicBee. Intensely customizable, tons of skins, visualizers, and some (kinda janky) support for WinAmp visualizers.

wizardbeard, 1 day ago

The ads in the OS are disableable as well. They just aren’t off by default, and are labeled something like “software suggestions” in the settings app.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago

Outlook has “rules” you can configure to route incoming mail into different folders and mark as read (if you have access to their web client, configure the rules there so they run even when the desktop client is closed).

I know Google’s web interface has similar features. If it’s not built into Thunderbird then I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an extension for it.

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

Sometimes you can’t just wait for things to get better, you have to act. Other times all the actions in the world won’t do shit but waste your energy.

Wish you luck in telling the difference, and in making it through whatever you’re going through.

wizardbeard, 7 days ago

Not 100% of the time. My job is pretty much “I’m building what we need to do it the better way, you have X months to get ready. If you have objections talk with my manager. He can get legal or information security to tell you that you aren’t special enough to get an exception.”

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

There’s a lot of great advice here, and I was definitely in your boat, faking it for my wife’s sake quite a bit.

This is an important takeaway: what you are feeling right now is not unusual.

But seeing my daughter, holding her for the first time, watching her grow, learn, develop a personality… her first “dada”, mush mouthed “love you”, her big grin every morning when she sees me, when she hops off mama’s lap and crawls over to me babbling “dadadada” then a few minutes later crawls back to mama and then tries to get us to sit in a way where she can be touching both of us… there are so many moments nearly every day that make it all worth it.

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I think your main issue is how you’re framing this in your mind (or at least how you’ve framed it here) and how I assume you’ve framed this with your wife.

This isn’t about whether or not you made the “right” choice. It’s far too late for that now anyway, and framing it that way carries a shit ton of subtext for your wife that you probably aren’t cognizant of.

Do you not want a kid? Do you not want to be a father? Do you not want to be doing this with her? Do you just want to not have responsibilities? Do you feel like you were pressured into this? Is this some resentment towards her? Will you resent the kid?

These are only some of the really fucking negative ideas that could be put into her head when you say you aren’t sure you made the right choice.

Or is this what’s going on (the far more likely situation with most future fathers): You’re scared as shit about everything coming towards you, you’re scared about the amount of work this will be, concerned about how this will effect your relationship with your wife, worried about how your life will change in ways you can’t even imagine from this side, lamenting the loss of free time and freedom you see coming, worried you might not be ready to handle this or raise a kid properly…

Fears, being scared, worrying? Those are things you might be able to bond over. I’d be surprised if your wife wasn’t scared of a lot of these things too. My wife and I were scared.

But what seems like just a subtle semantic difference between “Oh shit what have we signed up for” and “I’m not sure this was the right choice for us” has a massive gulf in terms of emotional meaning and undertones.

I highly reccomend you try to take some time to try and figure out what you’re really feeling here. Maybe you are resentful of the situation. I hope you aren’t. Like I said earlier, most future fathers go through some terror of “what the shit am I in for what did I agree to?”

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If you’ll excuse a bit more ramble, what you’re feeling now might come back from time to time after your kid is born. Particularly when things feel tough, it’s not unusual to feel the weight of all the work you’ve stepped up to do. I still do from time to time, a year and some months in.

But this is what you signed up for. Just like marriage is for better or worse, and relationships can be hard fucking work, so can children. You’ve made the choice with the idea or gamble that what you get out of it will make the toughness and hard times worth it. The overwhelming amount of the time, it absolutely will be.

You’ve made the choice to do this, it’s too late to turn back. So are you going to trudge through it like a member of a chain gang, or are you going to cherish every little thing there is to cherish and be there for your wife who is giving up just as much or more than you will be?

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

I feel like this is a very “shoplifting, public intoxication, nuclear warfare, and jaywalking” way to present things.

wizardbeard, 8 days ago

It absolutely confounds me how Christianity has become a stereotypically right-wing thing when in the context of the time Jesus’s actions are mostly that of a radical progressive who amassed such a following that the power structures of the time had him killed.

Like how in the hell can you run around hating homosexuals and immigrants when you account for the company Jesus kept in the context of the time? Only if you completely fucking ignore it.

My wife’s grandfather was a pastor, and a saying that has passed through her family is “On the day of judgment, there’s going to be a lot of Christians facing a very unhappy surprise”.

Signed, former apostate who has found his way back to being an incredibly frustrated Christian.

wizardbeard, 1 hour ago

Considering they still haven’t really figured out online multiplayer…

wizardbeard, 3 months ago

Lol, right?

The sheer ego to tell your customers to reserve judgement on a massive, company changing event for over a fucking decade! Delusional.

Especially when they’ve been completely beat out in their market niche for ages and are now only holding on due to brand recognition. It’s easy to have grass roots community support when you were the only product in your niche, but they’ve been coasting on that for ages with no real work to truly stay relevant.

wizardbeard, 2 hours ago

Wow, $300

If you dig through the pictures there’s a decent bit more to it than just the initial diorama, but still.

Hope the bootleggers do a good job copying it.

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

Lol, what? db0 is a medium sized instance ran by one of the former /r/piracy admins when they jumped ship during the exodus, and it’s reasonably active with a decent amount of real users and a very active owner.

World is by far the largest instance by a huge margin. It is such an outlier that it effectively should be disregarded in comparisons with other instances.

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

Transport the waste out of my bladder right into the matter recycler.

Transport the nutrient and vitamin mix into my stomach.

Transport the fat from my body.

wizardbeard, 3 months ago

My man, of all the spinoffs to make this complaint about, you choose part 2 of the reboot/remaster?

wizardbeard, 3 hours ago

You missed some nuance. Don’t drive on their roads. You can drive unregistered vehicles on your own property with no issues. Many homesteaders and farmers do this with work trucks that never leave their property.

That’s where the edges of these people’s thinking begins. There’s so many tiny caveats that they believe there has to be some secret set of true rules out there for people clever enough to crack the code.

wizardbeard, 1 day ago

Her mother’s there, and isn’t the boy compilmenting her from the party she and Zuko went to on Ember Island?

wizardbeard, 3 days ago

“I’ve my mind set on you” or Weird Al’s take “This song in just six words long”

wizardbeard, 2 days ago

Man, it seems so alien to me to use anything related to your legal identity as a username online.