I tend to front-load my comments as much as possible, to try and avoid just that. Make the main point ASAP. But even then, there’s only so much you can do without sounding messy.

For instance, I front-loaded the part about reader comprehension. All of the “why” is in later paragraphs. But even if they only read the first few sentences, they’ll at least get my overall point.

It does make nuanced discussion impossible though. I work in a pretty specialized field (professional audio) with lots of snake oil myths about what will or won’t make your system sound better. There have been several times that I have seen people parroting this snake oil type stuff as if it is genuine advice. And often, this advice happens because the person only has a surface-level understanding of how audio works. Something sounds plausible, (and they don’t understand the underlying principles that would disprove it,) so they end up perpetuating the myth. So a lot of discussions boil down to “well kind of but not really” and people won’t bother reading anything past the “well kind of” part.

Ding ding ding. I actively refuse to do homework from randos on the internet.

This is also due to a distinct drop in reader comprehension. One of the largest parts of reading comprehension is being able to infer the intended audience for a particular piece of work. You should be able to read a news article, see a commercial, read a comment, etc and infer who it is aimed at. And the answer is usually not “me”.

People have become accustomed to having an algorithm that is laser focused to their specific preferences. So when they see something that’s not aimed at them it is jarring, and they tend to get upset. Instead of going “oh this clearly isn’t aimed at me, but I can infer who the intended audience is. I’ll move on.” Now they tend to jump on the creator with whataboutisms and imagined offense.

Maybe you make a post about the proper way to throw a football. You’ll inevitably get a few “bUT wHaT abOUt WhEElcHaiR uSerS, I hAvE a baD ShoUlDer aNd cAn’T thROW SO wHaT abOUt me, I haTE FoOtbAll wHY aRe yOU SHowiNG tHIs to Me, etc” types of comments. It’s because those users have lost the ability to infer an intended audience. They automatically assume everything they see is aimed at them, and get offended when it isn’t.

I have even noticed this started to affect the way media is written. Creators tend to make it a point to outright state their intended audience, just to avoid the negative comments.

The chocolate thing is because American chocolate manufacturers use butyric acid to preserve the milk. Basically, using fresh milk in chocolate is expensive, because you need to get it shipped directly and be located near enough to the dairy farm. So they intentionally spoil the milk in a controlled manner. This allows them to preserve the milk (as opposed to having it spoil naturally and go completely rancid,) which allows them a much more relaxed manufacturing process. This controlled spoiling method produces butyric acid in the milk.

The issue is that butyric acid tastes like vomit. Americans are used to the sour taste and don’t even really recognize that it’s not what chocolate is supposed to taste like. To them, that sour note is just part of chocolate. But Europeans come to America (and are used to fresh milk in their chocolate), and they are horribly disgusted when they taste American chocolate for the first time. Because Europeans aren’t used to having that sour note in their chocolate.

This is also why so many Americans fawn over foreign chocolate. It is seen as more luxurious, but most Americans can’t really place why it tastes so much better. The reason is the lack of butyric acid.

it’s far easier to start a business than to get a job

Also why so many Koreans run donut shops or nail salons, and why 7-11’s are almost universally franchised by Indians. They’re all relatively easy businesses to start, can be run out of any strip mall near a neighborhood, and all have the potential to hire and train your family members. And if your cousin owns a donut shop (and you’ve worked there enough to know how it works,) you can go open your own across town. Because if you come in on a work visa, your ability to stay in the country is held hostage by your employer. But if you start your own business, that’s not an issue.

a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

Ironically, the lump might have been what gets him into trouble. If he’s concealing a firearm without a permit, it can land him with some pretty hefty penalties. And if he has a permit but is printing (meaning the concealed weapon is visible through his clothes, like a lump) then it can also land him with some penalties.

It’s dependent on where you were, as each state has their own concealed carry laws. But in general, you’re not allowed to conceal a firearm without a permit. And if you do have a permit, you’re not allowed to have that concealed firearm be visible (even indirectly, like printing.)

Plus if you’re open carrying, Walmart internally bans them anyways. They’re a private business, and have the authority to dictate what people are or are not allowed to do while in their stores. The company has a blanket policy against open carrying, and (assuming they’re not barred from doing so by state law) the dude should have been told to leave his guns outside (like in his car) or be trespassed.

Nah, Yuzu is still working fine on mine. Basically, if you had the emulator installed prior to the takedown, EmuDeck will continue to use it.

Which is honestly a pretty good argument for just installing every single emulator (even if you never think you’ll use them!) because they don’t really take up that much space, and you could potentially lose access to them if you never bothered before a takedown.

You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)

Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.

Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).

Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.

For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.

As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.

Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.

And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.

And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.

Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.

If you’re referring to the wavy pattern along the cutting edge, that’s not from the folding process. The hamon is added to the blade during the quenching process, by adding clay to the steel. The clay causes the covered steel to heat differently than the uncovered steel. That differential heating is what is visible as the hamon.

It’s largely decorative, but does have function as it determines what part of the blade can be sharpened to an edge.

Yeah, Japanese steel wasn’t great, but they were working with what they had available at the time. Katanas were basically made out of iron dust, which had been melted into slag by filtering through charcoal. The resulting chunks of steel were basically straight up slag, not nice even ingots. So the steel they got was actually extremely high carbon in places, but that also meant it was brittle as hell, because those carbon pockets were prone to shattering.

So the folding was invented, to even out the steel’s carbon content (just like how a Damascus steel blade has visible stripes, Japanese steel had invisible stripes of high and low carbon steel) and to lower the carbon content overall; Every time you heat for another fold, you’re evaporating some carbon. So the folding process took the steel from extremely high carbon pockets to a more evenly distributed carbon content.

Now that modern steel processing exists, the only real reason to stick to the folding method is tradition. There’s no need to fold modern steel ingots because they’re already homogenous and can be produced at whatever carbon level you want.

Yeah, something like that. Dump five gallons of apple juice and two pounds of glucose into a carboy. Add champagne yeast, cap with an airlock full of vodka, and let sit for a few months.

The result is an extremely dry apple wine that’ll kick your ass. If you’re not a fan of dry wines, just add a splash of sprite or 7-up to the glass to back sweeten it.

If your drink has more than one type of alcohol in it, you need to go to the ER. Methanol is horribly poisonous, and it is not a pleasant death.

Alternatively, I have had several injuries that should have gotten stitches, but have never been in the ER. Growing up poor in the US means you end up rawdogging your injuries.

Sports are just soap operas for men. What will happen next? Who will get traded? Who will be benched vs played? Who will get injured? Which team will throw a game at a critical time? Find out next week!

Same. I was just kind of a boring kid. Went to parties, but was just never interested in getting wasted. Saw all of my friends getting blackout and puking their guts out 15 minutes later, and wanted no part of it. My first drink was actually on my 21st. And it was just enough to get buzzed, not even wasted. It turns out “just say no” is really fucking easy when you’re autistic; Peer pressure just doesn’t work on you.

Once I started drinking, I quickly realized how many young people have binge drinking tendencies as a result of their younger drinking habits. Kids drink to get wasted before they get busted. There’s a time limit on how long they can drink, so they binge to get drunk as quickly as possible when it’s available.

Ironically, now I homebrew mead and apfelwein.

This looks like it was a timing analysis attack. Basically, they’re trying to figure out which user did something specific. They match the timing of the event with the traffic from the user, and now they know which user did the thing.

It can be fuzzed by streaming something at the same time, because now your traffic is way harder to time analyze when you have a semi-constant stream of data running. But streaming something over Tor is an exercise in patience, (and it’s not something the typical user will just always have running in the background) so timing analysis attacks are gaining popularity.

Yup. In a properly secured facility with the best digital security, the weakest link is often the front door. All it takes is a careless front desk attendant, buzzing an “elevator repair tech” into the facility without bothering to check and see if anyone is actually scheduled to be working on an elevator.

I’d argue that this is also the job of language and history teachers. “How to do research and vet your sources” could be an entire class on its own. Reading comprehension is in the toilet, largely because people have lost the ability to infer a piece of media’s intended audience. That’s a major component of reading literacy; Being able to read a news article, see an insta reel, see a meme, read a comment, etc and infer who it is aimed at. You should be able to see a news article aimed at conservatives, and recognize that it has a conservative bias and is aimed at conservatives. You should be able to notice the different ways they will phrase the same events, to add a particular spin on them.

People have become accustomed to having everything spoon-fed by an algorithm that is tailored specifically to their interests and worldviews. When someone sees something that doesn’t perfectly conform to their interests or worldviews, they used to go “oh this isn’t aimed at me” and they would quickly move on. But now they have a tendency to attack the creator for failing to aim it specifically at them.

You see a comment talking about the proper way to do something physical, then there is an entire swath of “but what about the people who can’t do that physical thing due to illness/disability/inexperience/etc” responses. Because those responders have failed to infer the intended audience. If you’re disabled and can’t do something physical, you’re obviously not the intended audience. But people have forgotten how to recognize that, because they have gotten so used to having everything on their For You page be specifically chosen for them.

If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.