The scenes of Clooney as the President in Spy Kids 3 were allegedly shot by Clooney in a day in his own living room with a camcorder he just had lying around.

This is a question I see from time to time, and it's a good question to ask.

Your question as I understand it can be phrased another way as:

The square root of -1 has no defined answer. So we put a mask on it and pretend that's the answer. We do math with the masked number and suddenly everything is fine now. Why can't we do the same thing to division by zero?

The difference is that, if you try to put a funny mask on the square root of -1 and treat it like a number, nothing breaks, but if you try the same thing with a division by zero, all sorts of things break.

If you define i = √-1, that is the only thing i can ever be. That specific quantity. You can factor it out of stuff, raise it to that exponent, whatever. And if it is ever convenient to do so, you can always unmask it back into that thing, e.g. i^2 = (√-1)^2 = -1. All the while, all the already existing rules of math stay true.

A division by zero isn't like this, because if you tried it, every number divided by zero would equal to the same thing. If we give it a name, say, 1 / 0 = z, then it would also be true that 2 / 0 = z. We could then solve both sides for zero:

1 / z = 0

2 / z = 0

then set them equal:

1 / z = 2 / z

then multiply both sides by z:

1 = 2

which is a contradiction.

i doesn't have this problem.

I really question how much overlap there is in the Venn diagram of "people who pay for television", "people who hate Fox News", and "users of Lemmy". I can't imagine it is very big.

I imagine telling an Arch user you use Gentoo is like telling a Texan that if you cut Alaska into two halves Texas would be the third largest US state.

This is somewhat a "people live in cities" graph, but not as stark of one I expected. Not all big cities are so educated, plus there are a lot of rural places that draw in a surprising number of people with advanced degrees.

Still, I'm amused that Interstate 29 in specific lights up like a string of Christmas lights.

perhaps they should just lay square eggs

Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it's because they aren't different.

They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application's name. It's literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.

Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.

Is this another one of those "by law, the addition has to look visibly distinct from the historical structure" renovations?

Same thing that allegedly happened to this one?

Regardless whether you support her general conduct, I think we can all rally around one tenet here:

Don't harass a shitty company's T1 support out of priciples against the company in general.They're in no better position to effect change in the system than you are. They exist only to be slightly more competent phone robots, turning your whiney noise into itemized actions, and filter those actions down to a restricted subset of system commands the company permits them to do.

If anything, they're on our level of the totem pole. Any outrage directed at them for actions of their broader company are a gross misdirection and wholly counterproductive.

I don't know who this lady was speaking to on the phone. But if it was some minimum wage phone bank slave who is just the ablative frontline of the customer support hotline, I don't support her threat in that context.

Don't forget how to put yourself out if you spontaneously combust, and acid rain.

Ah. So it's a gauge system. Like steel plate or copper wire thickness.

5-gauge ham.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we'll help you find your footing.

Humans are famously garbage at comprehending statistics, and most Darwin Award winning conservative behaviors are born of it.

Take any mundane thing that was part of a status quo of a previous era in recent memory. Anything at all. Research comes out suggesting that thing has a small, but non-negligible risk to be quite harmful. So we collectively shift to a new behavior that tries to eliminate the risk. A shift that, in most sane and civil peoples' opinions, is so unobtrusively small that any theoretical benefit we're trading away is probably well worth the risk elimination.

But oh, a certain group of people will bitch and moan and scream and piss all over themselves in rage over how you dared to take away something so integral to their culture and lifestyle! The risk aversion is never worth the vain fringe benefit of whatever perceived quality was lost because the risk is completely invisible until it actually hits them personally.

Milk used to taste so great! God's gift to the world! Then we all started boiling it and now it tastes worse! And for what? Because a couple of weak-bodied cosmic lottery losers were getting a few tummy aches? The vast majority of us are all suffering over nothing! Life was so much better when we weren't all scared of things that won't happen! We did it for millennia and we turned out just fine!

Then you point out all the people actually getting hospitalized from pathogens in raw milk, the very thing we were trying to avoid in the first place, and if they even believe you at all they simply consider it an acceptable price to pay. Better to live in a rich and interesting society where you're free to risk harming yourself and others than a milquetoast one where imperceptible threats have been preemptively eliminated at great cost.

And then they turn around and work to ban books that mention trans people or ban porn websites to save the children or some other dumb shit.

If you make $50k/yr after taxes, the equivalent fine would be on the order of about $120.

Where I'm from, that's a speeding ticket.

I'm not sure what's regrettable about this information.

In the next scene where the date takes place, they embrace their old school cool, knock it out of the park, and have a blast. It genuinely romanticizes being this old and made me look up to being this old when I watched as a kid.

All this meme is telling me is, "Congrats, you made it, now go find people in your cohort and live it up with them in ways that mean things to you, even if the kids think you're cringe," and that's wonderful.

+1 for Reddit API exodus.

Lemmy was sold to me as a Reddit replacement. And it is, superficially. I knew it wasn't going to be drop-in going in. But the longer I use it the more I think it's not really quite like Reddit, and never will be. And that's fine. Lemmy is its own character and I like it for what it is.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy doesn't scratch all the itches for me. But only old.reddit on the desktop and on mobile with a UI de-shittifying extension. I'm amazed they still offer it at all. Once that's cut off, something I've been bracing myself for for years, I'll consider the UX enshittification to have fully completed and I'll truly bail. I simply refuse to use their gentrified UI. And I'm tired as it is having to slap on compatibility layers just to keep their less terrible alternative on life support; I'm not going to do the same thing to make their mainstream UI somewhat more palatable.

"Anymore"? I've never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don't even know how to do it if I wanted to.

I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I've never met another NoScripter in the wild.