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What are some items that really aren't worth paying the expensive version for?
  • I guess with all things, depends on the financial position of the customer.

    If you're stretching yourself to get any phone, then yeah, diminishing returns for forking out $800+ for a flagship.

    That being said I've owned multiple phones in each price category, and can say that the best phones are unfortunately among the most expensive.

  • And we pay 10% of our income for the privilege.
  • Speaking of "paying 10% for the privilege", one of the things irked me was my dad's insistence that tithes had to be monetary. Per him, volunteer work didn't count.

    I was roped into running the computer, or doing the sound, for all 5 services Saturday + Sunday, plus practice before hand. 16 hour commitment twice a month.

    My day job was only 20 hours/wk back then, so in terms of time, my volunteer work was ~30% of all my work. Yet my dad still insisted I payed 10% of the taxed cash I received...

    That was one of many "cuts" in my "death by 1000" for being religious.

  • Scientists Successfully Simulate Backward Time Travel with a 25% Chance of Actually Changing the Past
  • The problem I'm going to assume applies here is the same as why we can't train self-driving cars with a simulation. It's a paradox; if the simulation was robust enough to train cars for the real world, then creation of the simulation itself WOULD be the solution since it already knows all the rules and correct reactions.

    In other words, I'm sure they got their simulation to work, within the confines of a limited, non-paradoxical, error-prone programming.

  • 15 years of Android memories – When did you get your first Android phone?
  • My dad had the T-Mobile G1; if I recall, first ever commercial available Android phone!

    That was handed down to me after a couple years. It has as much chill factor as it did nerd factor. People laughed and were amazed at the same time. I loved it, lol

  • Locked
    Lemmy.world removes its rules against discrimination
  • I just replied this to another commenter, but that's a bad faith argument. The ToS also says to not engage in illegal activity. The admonishment of Nazi's and Racists is an admonishment of illegal evil.

  • Locked
    Lemmy.world removes its rules against discrimination
  • That's a bad faith argument. The ToS also says to not engage in illegal activity. The admonishment of Nazi's and Pedophiles is an admonishment of illegal evil.

    Your inclusion of Republicans is a bit of an extreme juxtaposition. Feel free to admonish the individual evil views of Republicans, but to discriminate against Republicans purely for their association is rightly against ToS.

  • FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote
  • T-Mobile users; be aware that T-Mobile has prepared for this and are trying to automatically transition grandfathered accounts with unlimited everything into their new plans.

    I'm not 100% sure if the coverage of the new plans are technically worse, but they're definitely more expensive. And I wouldn't be surprised if the new plans had contact language to do a rug pull in the future.

    You need to opt out of the transition.

  • Locked
    Lemmy.world removes its rules against discrimination
  • In my opinion this is actually better than the CoC. The only thing "missing" is the definition of which qualities you shouldn't discriminate against. But that's now generalized into "groups of people".

    I still can't discriminate against people based on any qualification. Hell, I technically can't discriminate against "pineapple on pizza eaters".

  • When a user is banned on one Lemmy federated instance, are they banned on all federated instances?
  • As far as I understand;

    A user is specific to one instance. In order to interact with the fediverse on that specific account, they need to log into that instance. If they're banned from that instance, they cannot log in and interact with the rest of the fediverse.

    There's nothing stopping them from logging into an alt, whether on that same instance or on another instance.

  • Temporary (mid-term) closure for forest-fire not allowed?
  • Not really tricky at all. Especially if they limit the expiration date to be within the gap of the current closure logic (min 3-6 months).

    Especially "especially" if they made the expiration date a new field, one that offline users could ignore, and navsoftware could use imperatively.

  • Temporary (mid-term) closure for forest-fire not allowed?
  • Hmm, OSM is perhaps the biggest base for alternative navigational software. Seems like a huge design flaw.

    I'm obviously oblivious to the implementation difficulties, but it seems like it should be extremely simple to add something akin to a "temporarily closed until" field, so that uses can set and forget, and it'll resolve itself without a secondary edit.

    That way, offline users can ignore this field, and nav software must use it.

  • Temporary (mid-term) closure for forest-fire not allowed?

    Hey guys.

    There's a highway that connect the coast to inland, and without it drivers have a 4-hour detour. It has been closed for the past month while a forest fire has been fought by lots of fire crews. It's been burning since August 15th, so over a month now actually.

    They've finally mitigated the fire enough that they are temporarily re-opening the highway, however it's remaining closed 8am - 4pm Mon-Fri so that the firemen are not blocked by congestion. When it's not closed between those hours, only 1 lane is open and traffic is led by patrol cars. There is no ETA for a full re-opening.

    I went to go apply a condition, when I realized that no one had actually closed the road in the first place. So I added something like "conditional=no @ (Mon-Fri 8:00-16:00)" (I forget the exact syntax).

    A day later, someone came in and reverted the change saying "the consensus is that only changes lasting 3 or more months should be made. There are people who download these maps for offline use. So no temporary closures."

    But, the DOT of both states this fire is affecting are begging drivers to stop using GPS to the coast on this route - people are driving into active fire zones.

    Does concession for offline users actually supersede safety?

    11
    Is there a master list somewhere of compatible parts for the Inventor Hub (I think the same as Technic Large Hub 88016)

    I bought my son a Mindstorms Inventor set back in like February 2021 thinking we'd be able to buy cool expansions for like at least a decade. But, he was a little too young both to build and program, so it's collected dust since then.

    He recently expressed interest in it again, and so we built one of the 5 robots. But, he doesn't want to disassemble it to make anything else. So I was just going to buy an expansion set.

    Well... I just saw that the whole IP was discontinued like a year ago... So I'm trying to find parts that are compatible with the hub, so I can see about getting them individually.

    When I look on lego.com and open listings for individual parts, I see "Connect to the 88016", but I'm wondering if other parts will work (such as Color and Distance Sensor 88007, which says it's compatible with the 88009 Hub, but not explicitly the 88016 large hub).

    So I guess two questions:

    1. Are every motor/sensor with male plugs that physically fit into 88016 compatible with it (and with the Scratch software)
    2. Is there a master list of compatible motors/sensors for 88016

    Edit / Follow-Up: are the Spike parts compatible? (45678)

    1
    Piano pedal question, if that's OK; Anyone have a good modern alternative to a TC Helicon Harmony-M? The MIDI version of Harmony-G?

    I already have a Harmony M. I bought it over a decade ago; it's my first and only pedal. I was interested to see if they revised it and gave it some modern features, but it looks like they've fully discontinued it. I'm not well educated on what to look for.

    I wad curious if you guys have any knowledge/recommendations of modern MIDI controlled pedals (or perhaps any non-foot-interacted musical equipment) that offers vocal harmonies, and maybe other niceties like looping and whatnot.

    2
    Factorio @lemmy.ml MrMusAddict @lemmy.world
    My take on a lane balancer, and a 2-belt overflow balancer. These could probably be optimized, but they have proven useful (although a bit unconventional)

    So first off, here's my lane balancer. As far as I know this allows 100% throughput (just a bit big).

    !

    And here's what I'm calling a 2-Belt Overflow Balancer. It will keep the inputs on their output belt (top stays on top, bottom stays on bottom), and will only actually balance between the two if either are backed up.

    !

    And lastly, here's two lane balancers, followed by the overflow balancer:

    !

    3
    Home Improvement @lemmy.world MrMusAddict @lemmy.world
    My (newish) 30-min dial timer for my bathroom lights keeps sticking. I've been told that some silicone based lubricant should be safe to spray into the mechanism. Am I going to burn down my house?

    To clarify; I have not yet sprayed anything into the dial mechanism.

    This used to be a light switch, but my son kept leaving it on. So I swapped it out for one of these dials about 2 years ago. Now it seems to be getting stuck around the 10-min mark and being left on all day.

    I'd prefer not to replace this dial again; the house is old and the wiring in that receptacle was already pretty hard to work with. But I mean I'm not going to burn my house down in an effort to save myself 10 minutes and $10.

    Is it safe to use a silicone based spray on it?

    !

    !

    8
    I'm bad at art, but there's been more than a handful of times where a "Kombucha Girl" (surprised approval) emoji would be useful.

    Funny that the first post on this Microsoft community is an emoji request, lol. But hey... gotta start somewhere.

    I would genuinely use this all the time.

    0
    Mod Response & Survey Meta Discussion (Mod Approved)

    I couldn't figure out how to message the mods (or even individual users) on my app. A space to discuss the survey and your post would be nice.

    ---

    Edit: Got mod approval to keep this up

    80
    Crucial P3 Plus 4TB for $160 any good?

    I'm seeing this on sale at the moment. I don't care about bleeding edge speed; I'm used to SATA SSD speeds. Is this thing decent?

    I feel like there's a catch.

    2
    Progress on my base

    In the middle of my spawn base

    !

    Looking out towards my elevated rail network

    !

    Birds Eye of my Spawn Base

    !

    My Turbo Fuel power plant (~27 GW)

    !

    New plastic factory WIP in the distance (4,400/min)

    !

    Plastic factory up close (second level)

    !

    0
    [Solved] Is there anything funky going on with comment replies?

    There's a specific comment I'm trying to reply to in the lemmy.world/c/games community, agreeing with how much I love a game they mentioned. But after drafting the message, on mobile it just acts like I haven't pressed the button. On desktop, there's and endless loading circle.

    I tried posting the comment before bed, and again this morning, same issue.

    I was able to make a top-level comment in another post.

    I did post something controversial so maybe they blocked me (although it doesn't look like they commented on my controversial post). But I don't even know if that limits replies.

    The only other thing I can think of is they're a kbin.social user.

    Does any of this explain why I can't reply? If they did block me, would I expect to see some sort of error message? Or should I expect the endless loading circle?

    14
    Some good-faith questions of some seemingly apparent benefits of a potential Corporate Fediverse, and the detriments of defederating from a Corporate Fediverse. Could I get some answers?

    Hey guys. I admittedly am mostly a layman to the Fediverse as a concept. So I am coming into this post with the knowledge that I don't understand the technical intricacies of it.

    I fully expect that Meta will act in as bad of faith as possible, that is something that I think we all agree on. But from what I understand about the Fediverse, I'm just having a hard time understanding how we would not be shooting ourselves in the foot unless we at least try to federate with Threads.

    I am aware of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

    ___

    Here are my understandings of the goals as a non-corporate fediverse:

    1. We love decentralization
    2. We love privacy
    3. We love self-reliance
    4. We would love to see the non-corporate federation grow

    ___

    With those understandings, here are my questions:

    Doesn't the fediverse have an inherent protection and/or immunity from corporate take-over?

    As I mention above, I am aware of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. But, how is that a risk for the Fediverse?

    QOL features, and gimmicky capabilities can be replicated.

    The only thing we may not directly be capable of are 1st party Meta acct/apps integrations.

    Aren't we protected?

    Threads requires effectively all personal data from its users. But only their users. We are not forfeiting any personal data by federating with Threads; we are isolated to, and protected by, our individual instances.

    Is there anything currently stopping Meta from scraping the Fediverse for our content?

    If even anonymized privacy is a concern, why do we think that defederating will protect us? We're all posting our content on private servers which are wide-open to the public.

    Won't we grow & educate?

    If we keep corporate instances in the federation, isn't is safe to assume that the non-corporate instance will grow massively? Connecting with Threads and others will allow us to proselytize the benefits of moving off of threads, and improving their digital wellbeing. If we are not connected, they will largely remain oblivious to us.

    EDIT: I think this is a benefit because the people who want off of Threads and into the Fediverse are the people who strive for Freedom. This atricle claims the fediverse is not looking for growth, but we do want it to grow with people who agree with its goals, right?

    Aren't we worried we're forcing an ultimatum while the Fediverse is still in its infancy?

    If we disconnect now, we are telling everyone "choose the shiny new Threads, or the clunky up-and-coming Fediverse". This affects prospective users, and existing users.

    What's the harm in pulling the ripcord if we try it, and it's truly not a good fit?

    If we pull the ripcord now, we allow Threads to grow in their walled garden.

    If we pull the ripcord later, we make an informed decision.

    If we never pull the ripcord, we allow Threads to pull the ripcord if they ever so choose. That encloses them into their walled garden, which is exactly where they'd be if WE pull the ripcord now.

    "What about an influx of low-quality content?"

    This is a whataboutism I've heard. What's stopping individuals from blocking their disliked communities?

    "What if Meta doesn't moderate well?"

    This is another whataboutism I've heard. I personally think that Meta has a vested interest to moderate Threads enough to stay out of the news. As a publicly traded company, it's in their best interest to not scare off their advertisers and shareholders.

    If some low-quality moderation does persist though, we still have the ability to block users & communities.

    ___

    Thanks for taking the time to answer any of these. I will likely have follow-ups, and if/when I do please understand I am asking them in a good-faith effort to try and clarify/understand.

    30
    Did someone say BEANS? How about a bean screensaver?
    editor.p5js.org p5.js Web Editor

    A web editor for p5.js, a JavaScript library with the goal of making coding accessible to artists, designers, educators, and beginners.

    Source: https://editor.p5js.org/MrMusAddict/sketches/M3HFyuMTI

    0
    YSK: Feel like you only see the same 2-day old content? At least on lemmy.world, you can change your homepage's default sorting type & scope to "Hot" and "All"

    Sorting Type

    On lemmy.world at the very least, posts are sorted by default to "Active". Active will decay posts based on the popularity of its most recent comments. This keeps the most discussed topic on the front of the page, and they'll stay there until people stop talking about it. This also makes it possible that a "dead" thread can get revived if enough people newly discover it & comment on it. This is a very valuable feature, but for us content junkies it may not be your desired default.

    Switching to "Hot" will decay posts based only on their age & popularity (not their comment's age & popularity). When filtered to "Hot", you will see a lot newer, less-popular (but more current) content. The decay doesn't seem to be tuned to how a lot of us may be used to - it's more of a "Rising" than our typical "Hot" - but nevertheless it at least gives a constant stream of semi-popular new content.

    ___

    Sorting Scope

    On lemmy.world at the very least, posts are filtered by default to "Local", which only contains communities created on lemmy.world.

    If you switch your default to "All", you will open up your content stream to everything within the fediverse. Warning: this does include NSFW content & communities (but if you are OK blanketly removing NSFW content, you can disable it in your settings)

    If you are having trouble grasping the concept of "Local", "All", "Instances", "Fediverse", etc, if you have any experience playing an MMO, there's an analogy that may help connect some of the dots;

    • Lemmy Federation = MMO Server Regions (a cluster of servers connected to each other)
    • Lemmy Instances = MMO Servers/Realms (a place where each account and its content is saved on the same physical hardware)
    • Lemmy Community = MMO Guild (a group of individuals with similar interests)

    Searching on "All" is akin to playing an MMO with cross-realm/server features enabled. ___

    Sources:

    • https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
    • https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
    42
    In Bedrock (PC), is there a way to view mobs through walls with cheats, commands, or mods?

    I cannot for the life of me find some mobs that are making sounds around my base. I've stripped mined for like 30 minutes, and I'm over it 😅

    I then spent another 15 minutes trying to figure out why the /effect ... glowing command wasn't working, only to realize that Bedrock doesn't have glowing...

    What're my options at this point?

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MR
    MrMusAddict @lemmy.world
    Posts 24
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