Spyke

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What's your superpower?

I can hear CRT screens. They emit a high pitch noise that nobody else in my family can hear, I assume most people actually can hear it but never noticed it. My family used to think I was crazy or had tinnitus (jury's still out on both) until they tested me by making me close my eyes and tell them if the TV was on while turning it off and on at random, with sound off. It was a weird test from my perspective, since I could hear it fine anyway. So far I haven't noticed a decay due to age, but if it had little use when CRTs were widespread, it's now completely useless.

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A Novel Approach to Youtube Ads

Everyone's hating on this approach but I think it's nice that we have other options. I'm sure Ublock is going to come out on top of this cat and mouse game YouTube is playing with them, but if YouTube manages to temporarily disable Ublock I'll look into this solution. Thanks!

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Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes

A lot of people are replying as if OP asked a question. It's a link to a blog post explaining why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes (exactly as the title says!). OP knows the answer, in fact they know it so well they wrote an extensive post about it.

Thank you for the write up! You should re-check the spelling and grammar as some sections had some troubles. I have a sentence I need to go to the post to get, so let me edit this later!

Edit: the second half of this sentence is a mess: "The factors don’t solely consist of twos, but ten are certainly lot of them." Otherwise nothing jumped out at me but I would reread it just in case!

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That's why it's called science fiction duh

Maybe I am in a different environment (particularly not being American), but the old scientists still exist and are still hard at work. In fact, all scientists I know (and I work in academia) care very little for misinformation on their day to day lives. They'll make fun of it, but don't have any more contact with them than anyone else. They still spend most of their time working on their actual projects. The only thing that changed is that now they're bending over backwards to include AI in their grants to make sure they're accepted, but having to include the latest buzzwords is nothing new.

Science communicators, on the other hand, yeah, those probably have their hands full with fixing misinformation.

memes

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Every time

This is me whenever someone asks me to stay in their team.

Suddenly all the apparent skill I displayed last game is revealed to have been an illusion

news

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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

Appending “site:reddit.com” to a Google search has become a popular trick for weeding SEO farms and other attention-seeking websites out of Google results, but if this change goes through, you might not be able to access Reddit from search at all.

Even this article knows.

If this goes through then my reddit usage will officially reach 0, as Google results are how I end up there nowadays anyway.

memes

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Mint snaps Ubuntu or something

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This response is perfect and I don't know if it's supposed to be a joke everyone is missing but me, or if it's 100% serious and I read too much into it.

There's comedic genius in: "I hate talking about Linux, it's just a tool" "In that case here's a distro recommendation for you"

world

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Macron: Russia has once again demonstrated it doesn’t actually share desire for peace

Man, I know people dislike Macron, and I still think his handling of the Le Penn situation last year was a dramatic misplay, but I've always had a huge amount of respect for him. Maybe because I don't live in France (although I was almost accepted into a job there earlier this year!), but he seems like such a role model in terms of political leadership. He's been handling the Trump/Putin situation much better than most other world leaders, in my opinion

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Have you ever been accused of something that wasn’t true, yet you had no way to prove your innocence?

More recent than the other posters here.

I had a job interview for a huge company that I was super excited about. I had applied to an entry-level job position, and they even contacted me and told me that my profile would match a non-entry position more closely, so my process was transferred. I was nervous, but excited!

The interview was remote, which was not usual (this was pre-pandemic! Around 2018 I believe). Once they arrived, I was surprised that they didn't want cameras on; it was a fully audio-based interview. Whatever, I thought, I'll just do the interview anyway.

It didn't go very well, as I was just a silly kid straight out of university with no interviewing experience, but I thought it wasn't catastrophic or anything. I still do. They asked me a couple of questions about my industry that I had no idea about unfortunately. I still tried to answer as best as I could, but I could tell my answers were not the ones they wanted. The dude was nice anyway and told me "that's OK" whenever I didn't know an answer.

A couple of days after the interview, I get a call from a very nice HR lady and she said "unfortunately you were not selected for this position, but feel free to apply for other positions in our company!". I was a bit sad but wanted to make use of this as a learning experience, so I asked "do you have information as to why I was not selected?" or something to that effect.

She said: "let me see... It says here they were not looking for someone with your profile...

... Oh! Also, you were googling the answers to questions you didn't know, as we heard you typing"

This broke me. I had done no such thing! I started trying to tell her that was not true (and that if it were, I would have gotten the answers right!). But I quickly realized that it was a losing battle. They had made their decision, and I was just wasting their time. If only they had turned on the camera I could have evidence that was not true. But I decided not to further sully my reputation and just said "Thank you for your time, I hope to talk to you again".

Since I did not get that job, I applied to and was accepted into a PhD programme so I guess that was a pretty important moment in my life. I am about to finish my PhD and that company is one of my options afterward, so I sometimes wonder if they still have that lie on file.

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Now that's an interesting question

I have seen variations on this online for a long time, and this has always baffled me: do strangers in America really go up to random people who are speaking foreign languages and tell them "you are in X, speak Xese", a language they may or may not speak? Even among people who share their native language?

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What's something small you achieved recently that you're proud of?

Tl;dr: I asked a girl out :)

I met a girl in a flight and thought we got along well, but she was only in a layover flight while I was in the last flight of my trip. Still, we kept in touch, and she's apparently coming to my city for a few days in two weeks.

So I did something I had never done before (even though I've been in a few relationships before) and asked her out! She said "maybe" (her trip was already planned and she is busy and staying with some friends, she seemed genuinely sorry) so in two weeks I may have a date :)

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...

Oh, I'm sure someone is going to hate me for this, but I really liked Lua when I was making simple games in Love2D. I think it's a shame how there's basically no applications for Lua outside of game development and modding.

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Why do people brush their teeth first thing in the morning?

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This website is wack:

"We detect that you are in one of the member countries of the UK/EU/EEA, which is now subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Unfortunately, a tracking-free version of our full website is currently unavailable in these countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to this market

While we continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will allow all readers to experience our content, we are providing you with 10 articles that highlight the breadth and quality of our content. You are on this page because you disallowed the purposes listed in the “How we use your data” section of our Privacy Settings page."

I wasn't expecting the website to outright refuse me from accessing it after refusing to be tracked, and with such bullshit lingo too