How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can't sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it's 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I'm so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I'm ready. I've been ready. How about you?

How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don't work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it's worth it to you, that you're willing to get uncomfortable, that you're willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.

My intrusive thoughts need to know.

I think about this but like, I’m not sure if it’s a stupid question so I’ll put it here.

It's common to receive a mail from some service that they're changing the terms and conditions of their service (internet provider, gmail, etc.) These changes are unilateral and can be about anything, from their privacy policy to the money they intend to charge me.

Why can't I unilaterally send them a mail and say, I am changing the terms of my patronage and will now insert my new policy (pay only xx amount, or demand a mint Chico chip ice cream every Tuesday)?

I just installed this cheap LED with a brightness of 4600 lumen, which is really great. Now I can finally work without falling asleep.

But.

It's humming, faintly. Which is annoying. Any ideas on how to rectify this?

If you choose to be reborn, you will not have magic powers, but you will unlock a status window and a skill tree that you can use to give yourself new skills and abilities and improve your physical characteristics.

You'll get the same thing if you choose to be reincarnated, however, magic will be a factor. And the age of the world will be somewhere like 50-ish years before the full rollout of the industrial revolution, technology-wise. (minor clarification, you keep your current knowledge either way)

However, you will not be the hero or the chosen one. You're just going to be a person with a perk.

So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed "to bring balance to The Force," but I never understood what it meant.

Star Wars is extremely dualistic--there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.

The "good side", the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide "balance" while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren't. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.

I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that's about as far as it goes.

I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke's vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.

Can anyone square this circle?

Edit: It's funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.

From one of my favorite books, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold:

Here, he explains how to setup switches and lightbulbs in two locations with the purpose of communicating by turning the lights on and off according to some previously established protocol/code.

My question: is he oversimplifying - because that isn't the point of this chapter - which route/path the current would take when both switches are closed? As in:

Would the wire, which I awkwardly marked blue, also become charged and/or carry current? Or would there be no current because the cathodes of the two adjacent batteries cancel out any difference/voltage in the "blue wire" that would otherwise cause a current?

A few months ago I went to Japan with some friends. At a hotel we stayed at, they provided a big sampling of traditional Japanese food for dinner. One of the things I was surprised to like was a small vegetable dish. I'm usually pretty picky and that can make it hard to get veggies in my diet, but this was good and seemed like it would be pretty simple to make once you had the sauce.

I want to try to replicate it at home, but the problem is I don't actually know what it is called and I don't know the exact ingredients. It's been a while, but I think it was a mix of shredded carrots and some other small shredded or stringy veggies. Maybe bean sprouts? I think the sauce was sweet/savory and colored the veggies brown. I imagine at the very least there was soy sauce in there, but I don't know what else.

Any idea what this might have been? I'd also be happy to get some other recipes that would make for some easy veggie meals/snacks/sides for a picky eater.

I don't feel non-drugged until well after 6 PM. I'm sleeping very well. I even tried caffeine pills and even caffeine doesn't budge the "just come to under general anesthesia" feeling. I've been under before, and that retch-y feeling is the same. People have also noticed that I'm moving slowly. I don't drink alcohol, so this isn't a hangover. It started rather gradually but is getting worse.

Someone suggested it could be low b12, but I've been having the sublingual spray for months and there's no improvement.

Am I just getting old and this is something I'm gonna have to put up with for the rest of my life?

The way I was taught to play Uno, the reverse card changes the direction of play.if you're taking turns clockwise, it changes it to counterclockwise.

However, I often hear people say "uno reverse card" in the context of saying "whatever you just tried to do to me, I'm turning it around on you". That seems to me to imply that in the game, the reverse card turns things around on the other player. Like if they play a +2, you can play the reverse card and make them pick up 2. Is that the way some people play?

Is this one of those "house rules" situations where some people make up rules different from the official ones? Like the famous Monopoly rule where people put a pot of money in the middle that you win when you land on free parking, even though the official rules say nothing happens on free parking

Hello everyone, and sorry for my bad english. So lets start with a usual topic about Open Source, and that is "everybody can see the code of a OpenSource programm to see if it is malware". And my question is: how people that cannot read a single line of a programming language manage to do that? I mean, they can just trust in everybody that say which software is secure or not. If the software is a virus or malware, or poses security risks, people won't know that unless they're programmers, and so the same thing happens to these kinds of people as used to happen with proprietary software: they have to rely on those who “know” to find out if something. I find this quite problematic because, as I said, anyone who doesn't understand the code wouldn't be able to verify whether such a program is secure or not, and would have to place their trust in third parties. That aside, it's also worth noting that most software has hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code, which would make it take longer to parse all that code—and even more tedious than reading a typical "EULA." Can you think of any way to fix this?

I tried googling and I got a lot of hits for what reader mode does and how to enable it, but nobody can explain what the browser is actually doing.

Do sites have pared-down versions of their pages specifically for reader mode? Or does the browser just scan for particular HTML tags?

I’m not new to link aggregators/communities, but new to those outside of Reddit. About a month ago I joined Lemmy and today my curiosity led me to Piefed, although I’ve come across the name before.

My research told me Piefed is developing at a much faster pace than Lemmy, is that true? I like the onboarding of Piefed better, because it allows you to select things you might be interested in as part of the process, which is helpful. Overall, it’s a much more guided approach.

I’ve also gotten to know it doesn’t really matter for the average user which of the platforms one joins. So I’m specifically posting this question on a community on Lemmy through my Piefed account.

I’m based in Europe if that makes a difference, which I believe it doesn’t. Nonetheless I’m happy to read your thoughts. Thanks

I currently have these apps on this phone and my A16 that I'm setting up as a travel phone, and I've been wondering since using them on what would happen if I just deleted them? Would all the apps I remove come back into the phone? Could I get rid of Canta and Shizuku if I wanted to? I really would not want to break my phones if that happens😳

I am rewatching The Little Mermaid and during the scene where prince Eric's ship is hit by a storm, you can see some shorter shots of the sea beneath its surface and it looks pretty calm, while the surface is absolutely ravaged by the storm.

Is this an oversimplification or is this actually the case?

I've been hearing a lot of talk about using satellites for data processing lately. The benefit is better energy generation as I have understood it. But isn't there a problem in that satelites are bad at expelling excess heat, since they can only do so passively?

It never really occurred to me I might just not have those specific social skills nailed down. 😅 Because irl, I have plenty of ease chatting people up and making new friends. Same with dating or professional networking, it all comes naturally in person.

But online, in writing, it's so awkward for me. I see folks make long term friendships just hanging out in group chats or discord servers. Meanwhile, I manage to just get into arguments and not really manage to share anything interesting about myself otherwise. I might just not be finding my people, but who knows where that is right?

Anyone got pro tips for making friends in text chats or forums?