I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it

If they were conscripted tho?

Cyberpunk is considered a sub genre of sci-fi because a bunch of people got together and said that’s what it is. Doesn’t make it a 100% hard set rule. You just like putting things in boxes. A piece of creative work is what it contains, not whatever categories you shove it into.

I accept that the intersubjective framework of literary genres exists, but have my disagreements with it. You can do that. It doesn’t make you wrong, just unpopular.

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

You’re being prescriptive and not descriptive with the definitions. Superficially it is the case, and people have created a neat little categorical hierarchy you can keep pointing back to, but I’m telling you that a lot of cyberpunk creative work is sci-fi in the same way that people say Star Wars is sci-fi (it’s a space opera, at least the movies are)

Science fiction usually carries with it a desire to rationalize and explain the technology it’s built upon, to try and paint a world plausible from a scientific standpoint. You see this a lot with the technobabble in Star Trek.

Cyberpunk has a lot of overlap with science fiction, but usually dives more into the social commentary on society and capitalism, using the technology within as a vehicle to amplify those criticisms. Some cyberpunk works seek to explain their technology and make it seem grounded in the same way sci-fi does, but that is usually secondary to the social and political themes.

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

Radical unschooling?

I know this might not be the most convenient solution, but learning to resolder mouse switches means you can just replace the faulty components (and maybe the sliders too) and just keep using the hardware that works for you. As long as you don’t have a mouse with that awful rubber that de-vulcanizes after about 3 years, and don’t mind the visual wear from your hand on the shell over time, you’ll easily 10x the life of most products manufactured with planned obsolescence. Logitech almost always cheaps out on the switches for their gaming mice, unfortunately. After replacing the switches on my g pro wireless when they started double-clicking after 2 years (almost exactly), it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

ifixit almost always has comprehensive teardown and rebuild instructions for popular peripherals. Bonus points is that whenever you take apart something to do a repair, you can clean out all the hard to reach places that collect random dust and debris. Can be kind of gross but is also pretty satisfying. Additional bonus points for being more sustainable with your consumer habits and minimizing e-waste in landfills!

If you’ve got a mechanical keyboard, you can do the same but it’s generally a lot more tedious since most have the switches soldered on, and LEDs double the amount of joints you have to deal with. I recently did just the WASD and a few other high-traffic keys on my board after one one of them failed, and it was a several hour process

Paywalled article

We could assign it to any point within a recognizable region in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which would probably be the most universally-applicable reference available. One just needs to be able to filter out the noise from surrounding celestial bodies. The CMB does slowly change over time, but so too does the position of stars within galaxies and galaxies relative to one another.

Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.

Life is suffering. Once you accept that fact wholly, you may ascend

Oh yeah, it’s pretty terrible. Sometimes you can order meat from a deli/butcher counter and get it wrapped in wax paper but there’s the extra time spent to order it that way, and there’s a possibility that the wax is actually just plastic lining anyways.

Regardless, if you can find an alternative that works for you, any reduction in plastic is a good thing. It all exists on a sliding scale.

A lot of times, matters such as these should be seen as more risk management/reduction than risk elimination. A plastic lid has much less contact area than a whole plastic bottle, and single use bottles tend to shed more microplastics than reusable ones.

Everyone on the internet is a bot except you

And road design factors into the average driver’s speed far more than a sign with with a number on it

One night, I went to a McDonald’s expecting the fabled Sprite I’ve had before, and I guess their dispenser ran out the syrup. What I got was basically just soda water, and it low-key ruined my night because we got it via drive thru and I didn’t take a sip until we got home 🥲

I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

[everyone liked that]