That sounds like it should be a slang term.

LOL. Same. My tolerance for ads has dropped down to zero over the years of aggressively blocking them. The more you block ads, the more you realize how much you hate them. Once you start using DNS level blocking, there's no way back.

I’ve been thinking about those ever since smart TVs took over the market. I’m still using my over 15 year old FullHD TV with my HTPC. Is there something I should know about those commercial displays before buying one?

As browser extensions tend to be an important part of fingerprinting, it could make sense to run a very minimal setup, like just uBlock origin or Adnauseam but nothing else. That way, you should be able to blend in with the crowd a bit better, as opposed to using the 20 extensions you currently have. Also, having a random collection of plugins that changes every hour could be good too. Surely, there's a way to fake that. The browser should send a signal to the website about 50 extensions that supposedly are installed. Basically, like a random MAC address, but with extensions.

If you hand out the same email everywhere, eventually data brokers begin to connect the dots. If this email shows up somewhere, it means that they like this stuff, buy that stuff, they've been here before etc. All of that and more will be revealed when you create a new account with that email.

I consider that a privacy concern. Companies use data brokers to exchange data and build a more comprehensive profile of you, and your email address is a part of it. There's a lot more though, so escaping that kind of profiling is tricky. Using unique emails is a good start though.

Imagine someone looking at terrible slop and saying: “You know what, this is good enough to be published”. Does that person really exist somewhere in the chain? Does that person really know what they’re doing? Maybe there are multiple people like that.

I’m always amazed at the amount of ads people tolerate. Why do people even watch TV. The programs are only mildly better than the ads.

Many people don’t have infinite email aliases. They get to suffer from spam and tracking.

Pressing the back button is the correct option. Better stay away from that site.

Yeah, it’s weird how roast level 1 is so hard to find, but anywhere from 3 to 5 is well represented.

A moka pot is kinda special. If you want something a bit stronger than normal drip coffee, it delivers quite easily.

It can also blow burning hot steam through the grinds unless you know what you’re doing, which results in bitter coffee. Hoffman made a great video about that, so be sure to check it out. If all you want is convenience, get the cheapest coffee you can find and let the steam do its thing. Use plenty of milk to cover the flaws of both the method and the beans. With milky drinks, the coffee doesn’t really matter. The milk does the heavy lifting, as long as it has enough fat.

If you want to make good coffee with a moka pot, watch the Hoff video and grab the cheapest light roast you can find. It doesn’t have to be specialty coffee, as long as it’s light. In my area, every supermarket carries at most 2 light roasts at very reasonable prices due to the massive production volume. The rest of the aisle is occupied by approximately 40 medium roasts and 20 dark roasts, which I ignore entirely. They don’t taste that great even though they cost more.

You’ll need to put some time, effort and skill into the brewing technique, but you can make something quite tasty. Due to the dimensions of the pot, the result is always going to be strong. Don’t expect anything close to drip coffee. With a light roast, you can drink it as is. I’d recommend tasting it before adding any milk.

You can also cut the brewing short halfway, which produces something closer to espresso, but without the fine grind and high pressure. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference when I tried it with Lavazza Espresso beans. Apparently that’s where I bump into the limitations of my tasting skills.

One thing you shouldn’t do: don’t put your fancy light-roasted specialty beans in a moka pot. Pour over and AeroPress will produce something far more delightful. Could be a skill issue, but I’ve never been able to make the most of expensive beans in an espresso machine or a moka pot.

With espresso and moka pots, always go with something on the cheaper end of the spectrum. Check what’s available in your area, look at all the lightest options, sort by price, and pick the cheapest. Ignore all medium and dark beans for now.

Can confirm. It’s adequate. Also, I’ve been permanently spoiled by single origin light roast specialty coffee. When I’m having a random cup from somewhere, in my mind I immediately compare it with something that costs at least 3 times as much.

Lavazza is fine if you’re playing around with an espresso machine and want to learn the basics. It’s also fine if you’re mixing it with milk.

So, people work for the sake of working? Are you saying these companies exist without justification?

There’s always a small amount of coffee beans in the room temperature, and everything else is sitting in the freezer. Doing it this way also allows you to switch between different coffee types each week.

Currently, I’m brewing espresso, so the basket size determines the mass of coffee beans that goes in for each cup. If the leftovers don’t match that, I’ll use an aeropress to make a custom cup. It’s a very flexible brewing method, so so it’s perfect for leftovers.

This is getting so stupid, it’s beginning to sound like The Onion. Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.

Here’s an idea: Every day you get 5 Reddit Emeralds for free, and you can use them to read 5 posts. If you want to read more, you can get more emeralds from Common Reddit Loot Boxes. You can buy those boxes with Reddit Rubies.

You can get Reddit rubies from Rare Reddit Loot Boxes, and in order to get those, you have to use Reddit Diamonds. If you have 19 Common boxes you can also craft 1 Rare Loot Box. Doing so will also require 10 rubies.

You can also buy Reddit Diamonds with Superior Crypto-Augmented Money (SCAM), and getting those coins requires real world money.

Ok, so now that you have all these gems, you can put them to good use. Emeralds are used to read posts. When you comment, there’s a 50% chance that it will be deleted within 30 minutes, but you can improve your odds by spending 1 Reddit Ruby. For each Ruby, the odds improve by 10%. Posts have the same mechanism, but you need to spend Diamonds instead.

I’ve noticed that the search results are getting less and less relevant to what I’m actually looking for. I guess one day the search bar will disappear like the headphone jack of the iPhone.

relevant XKCD

Better not get vaccinated, because the vaccine kills you and covid is just another harmless flu anyway… oh wait.

Seriously though, antivaxxers already have some sort of psychological issues going on, so adding a literal brain injury to the list might not even make a big difference at that point.

This is what I call a “wild goose chase”. LLMs like to do that sort of thing, and it’s your job to notice that and pull the plug as soon as possible. If you’re not qualified to evaluate output, the risk of an aimless never ending chase increases dramatically. The good thing is, that you’ll learn to be more careful next time. Take those half hallucinated answers with a spoon of salt.

Text written before 2023 is going be exceptionally valuable because that way we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t contaminated by an LLM.

This reminds me of some research institutions pulling up sunken ships so that they can harvest the steel and use it to build sensitive instruments. You see, before the nuclear tests there was hardly any radiation anywhere. However, after America and the Soviet Union started nuking stuff like there’s no tomorrow, pretty much all steel on Earth has been a little bit contaminated. Not a big issue for normal people, but scientists building super sensitive equipment certainly notice the difference between pre-nuclear and post-nuclear steel