Well, sort of. They’re not for secutiry, that’s for sure. They were originally about making it harder for automated bot requests to go through and overload the server. ReCAPTCHA then started turning it around to make OCR better using machine learning, which is commonly agreed to be a Good Thing since it helped digitize old books and things like that. But of course, this in turn made it possible for bots to get past the CAPTCHA, and everything spiraled from there.

At some point everyone kind of forgot the real point of a CAPTCHA, and it’s now much more of a free training data generator and much less of an obstacle for bots. But it still can prevent complete rookies from making thousands of requests per second with a simple python script, so it does serve a little bit of that original purpose.

Love this webcomic. Original source: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/014.html

It’s an open-source comic. The Krita project with all the original layers is free to download, and the SVG and text for the speech bubbles is hosted on git so it can be translated to many other languages. I’ve never seen a webcomic do this before, it’s really neat. And of course, the artwork is just beautiful!

It’s an awesome comic.

I don’t use one myself for much the same reason as you. But I think a lot of people just need their phone and up to 3 cards (credit card, license/ID of some sort), so a wallet phone case isn’t that much bulkier than a simple phone case. Yeah there’s other things you’d put in a wallet, but they aren’t strictly everyday carry things, so you can put them in a separate wallet or purse/bag and only take that when you need it.

For my mom I think she just likes a case with a front cover, and it happens to have space for cards so she uses it. So the “bulk” of it is a direct result of what she’s after (the front cover), it doubling as a wallet is just a bonus.

I can never see it as cool, maybe because my mom uses one. But it’s practical.

Pretty much all of them, up to and including biting me. 🥰

that is without a doubt the liquidest cat I’ve ever seen

I highly doubt they were talking about gaming.

Yeah, you’re right, and that sucks. Mastodon is much better at this.

The Fediverse’s biggest onboarding problem is having too many choices that seem important but don’t really matter. Namely, which instance to sign up on. Listing two different platforms that do the same thing and even federate with each other would only make it worse. I’m guessing that’s why they only listed one.

As for why choose one over the other, I don’t have a horse in this race, I’m sure they had their reasons.

Maybe the necessary codecs just aren’t installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they’d bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn’t want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.

I’m just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.

You’ve got some courage standing in the middle of the street with no visibility like that. A car can just appear out of the blue and run you over. Glad it didn’t!

Though, if it was as quiet as it looks then you could reasonably expect to hear a fast car long before it got near, so perhaps it’s not as dangerous as it looks.

I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.

BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn’t using the better options.

I got a (very cheap) Thinkpad from my university. It had that proprietary Ethernet port. It came with a ThinkPad-branded USB to Ethernet adapter. The adapter came with the laptop and still didn’t use the proprietary port!

Now, there is a chance that the university IT which set stuff up before giving it to me, is responsible for disappearing the proprietary adapter. But because the USB adapter is branded with ThinkPad, I really think it’s just what it came with.

Out of curiosity, what do you recommend instead?

That’s great. That’s not the world we live in.

That’s nonsense.

That’s why patents are relatively short. A patent grants exclusivity for the inventors, which incentives people and companies to invent in the first place. But it’s limited in time so that the whole world benefits eventually. Everything that was invented over 20 years ago is now public domain. This includes a ton of safety mechanisms, some in cars, that never would have been invented if there wasn’t a financial incentive for it.

I don’t like this all that much from a moral standpoint, but this is a good compromise for the world we live in. To say it would have been better if it didn’t exist it all is just plain wrong.

Same video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-the-hidden-engineering-of-runways/ (16m36s, presumably because it skips a sponsored segment)

I’m actually surprised he doesn’t look to Nebula from the blog post version of the video.

Sorry, I don’t feel like slipping into a huge argument. Most of what you said, I don’t feel is relevant criticism for the video, it basically amounts to “he didn’t say the things that I wanted him to say to confirm my opinions”.

But I don’t want to spend hours dealing with your gish gallop so you win.

You rock. Thanks for being a voice of reason. I like to think that someone out there will read this conversation and see that you’re the only one being reasonable, so it’s not in vain. I definitely couldn’t keep a cool head in this comment chain like you did.

Can you be more specific?

He doesn’t tend to at all, ever mention anything like right or wrong, morals, stuff like that. He talks about geopolitics, negotiation power, what states and militaries are capable or doing or what they’re likely to do. I can’t recall him ever saying any opinion about who’s morally right or wrong. So I don’t see how what you said could possibly be, but if it did, please share a link and a timestamp.