Could be! I’ve often wondered if the problem is something I can’t really overcome with practice. I’ve watched many tutorial videos over the years, but my tongue just ends up doing nothing when I try to practice.

I can’t roll my r’s. I speak pretty decent Spanish (took 5 semesters in high school), but have never been able to figure out how to roll the r’s, despite years of trying on and off to figure it out.

It’s never a problem. On the rare occasions that I actually need to speak Spanish, nobody cares that I can’t roll my r’s.

My parents and all their friends used to use PTT with their Nextel phones. It was a super handy feature. I wonder why it fell out of style. Seemed more convenient and less tedious than a phone call for short communications.

They don’t want to sting you.

Maybe they don’t “want” to sting anyone, but wasps can be very territorial and aggressive. Every time I’ve ever been stung by a wasp, I was minding my own business and just happened to piss one off by existing nearby.

I’ve tried the mint extract approach before, but it has never helped keep wasps away from our house. I wonder if efficacy varies based on the specific kind of wasps.

OP says, “with our current current level of technology.”

We have the technology to overcome any logistics issue pertaining to eliminating scarcity (and by extension, poverty). What we lack is the societal structure.

Their products suck. Their markup is excessive and makes their products cost far more than the equivalent meat products.

This seems overly harsh to me. I’ve bought plenty of Beyond products (and Impossible, and Morning Star, and many other plant-based meat alternative brands) over the years and I’ve found them to be fine in terms of quality. I haven’t bought them in a while, but I don’t recall them being particularly more expensive than the other plant-based meats in the grocery store. Though I virtually always wait for those to go on a good sale before I buy them.

Since plant-based alternatives are competing with the meat industry, which is heavily subsidized to keep meat costs artificially low, I wouldn’t say it’s fair to say Beyond’s products being more expensive than regular meat is why their business is failing. Other plant-based meats I’ve tried have generally always been more expensive than regular meat.

Perhaps “sophomoric”

You can request this feature by creating an “enhancement” issue on the Lemmy git repository here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues

I don’t think pop music has evolved so much in the last 10 years that either of those songs would be outside of the definition of “contemporary music”.

I think “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars/Mark Ronson (2014) and “Can’t Stop the Feeling” by Justin Timberlake (2016) are strong contenders when it comes to contemporary dance music. They feel as fresh today as they did a decade ago, and I think they will age well because they exemplify the fundamentals of the genre. They’re energetic, catchy, and have a je ne sais quoi that makes them stand out in a crowd. If I’m throwing a party, these two tracks are easily on the track list for the evening.

I really like the Interactive Relationship Graph on your site. Reminds me of when I used to work with graph databases and could visualize all the information in the database as a handy graph of nodes and relationships.

I agree he had a general depression disorder of some sort, but I dunno if he “had a nice place.” Eeyore famously lives in a tent made of sticks that constantly collapses and needs to be rebuilt. Guy was effectively homeless and lived in the Hundred-Acre Wood equivalent of a cardboard box.

But in spite of that, he definitely he lived in a nice community with good friends.

Cause I was thinking of characters who use guns, which isn’t really Batman’s vibe (aside from his very early years)

It’s certainly a personal preference, but I’ll give some insight as a casual Punisher fan:

A character doesn’t need superpowers to be interesting. People can enjoy the Punisher despite him being “just a guy who shoots people with a gun” in the same way people enjoy “John Wick”, Judge Dredd, “Taken”, Jason Bourne, “Die Hard”, or any movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The archetypal “one man army with nothing left to lose” story is cliched and perhaps “basic”, but can also be written in a compelling way depending on the author. Lots of different authors have written for The Punisher over the years, some being better than others.

I personally think a fun aspect of the character is his understanding that he isn’t a good guy; he (in most continuities I’ve read) hates what he has become and only does it because it’s all he knows. He doesn’t characterize it as “justice”, either. He does what he does as a means of punishment, vengeance, and retribution (and considers it a preventative measure when the criminal is irredeemably evil).

Some of his better stories explore the consequences of this judge-jury-and-executioner approach he takes. For example, killing an undercover cop who had infiltrated a gang that was on Punisher’s hit-list. In that particular instance, he was willing to let the undercover cop’s widow execute him as penance for his mistake. The widow lets him live because she doesn’t want to be like him.

I took a cursory glance through the source code (for the Firefox version, at least), and I’m not seeing any calls to the gitflic.ru URL outside of the update functions (there appear to be two different places where these might be triggered) and one function for importing custom sites:

// Import custom sites from local/online
function import_url_options(e, online) {
  let url = '/custom/sites_custom.json';
  if (online)
    url = 'https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_updates/blob/raw?file=sites_custom.json'  + '&rel=' + randomInt(100000);
  try {
    fetch(url)
    .then(response => {
      if (response.ok) {
        response.text().then(result => {
          import_json(result);
        })
      }
    });
  } catch (err) {
    console.log(err);
  }
}

I noticed in the manifest.json, there is the optional permissions array:

"optional_permissions": [ "*://*/*" ],

Which seems to grant the extension access to all URLs, so maybe that’s why the HTTP request is able to fire on any given website rather than just the ones explicitly defined in the regular permissions array. Though this is speculation on my part; I’ve only ever written one or two complex Firefox extensions. I’m not sure if the “optional permissions” array can be declined upon installation (or configured in the extension settings after installation); perhaps access to the wildcard URL can be revoked so that this update call isn’t occurring constantly.

All looks okay to me, but this was a very quick audit.

Hm, I’m not seeing any of those games as part of this package. Am I missing something?

I’ve had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they’ve all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they’ll usually get the job done.

I’d just type in “Dell Latitude” on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I’ve found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.

I’ve saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.

Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).

What’s the ratio of household income to the cost of living? I understand that’s going to vary wildly from place to place, but my point is income, as a statistic, seems meaningless without knowing the cost of living to see if people are actually able to afford rent, groceries, etc on that 25% increased income.

At my old job (tech support), I watched a new hire once highlight text, right click for the context menu, and click “copy”. And then right-click to hit “paste”. Every time. They didn’t know a single shortcut for anything. It was maddening to watch.

I gave em a lot of help because they were clearly not particularly tech savvy, but it made me wonder how the hell they got through the interview process with such a limited skillset.