PhobosAnomaly

@PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk

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PhobosAnomaly ,

In fairness, I very much doubt a chargeback would even get so far as a human.

From what I've seen with other companies across different continents, a chargeback triggers an automatic account ban with whichever retailer and that's that.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I suppose the last one is halfway true. In the UK before internet access was mainstream, you either had to use the school/work network connection and their weird access control packages, or use the local library. In any case, you actually had to get dressed to use the internet.

This was when ISDN was a fat pipe, and if you went to the library, had to plan what you was going to look up because you paid for 30mins of access time. After you'd searched for PS1 cheat codes, Ask(ed) Jeeves for a fact to settle an argument, and looked up pictures of the 555-branded Subaru Impreza, it was time to burn off whatever acces time was left on Lycos, Excite, or Google's directory service to find new cool stuff.

Old school.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I always found it wild how they released Ring and Rasen on the same day - and even though one film was overwhelmingly more popular, the storyline was further fragmented with Spiral, Ring 2, and Ring Virus going in different directions... even before the west decided to go freestyle with Ring 2 and Rings.

I haven't even gotten to watch the Sadako v Kayako films yet!

PhobosAnomaly ,

I watched a few of the current reboot and it was just... meh. It wasn't bad by any means, but I didn't find it to be particularly good - just felt like a college animation project that are ten a penny on YouTube.

I mean, you could argue nothing has changed - but it was fresh in the 90's, not every goon could share their work to the masses within seconds, and the final nail in the coffin was the pivot away from rock music commentary or lampooning pop tunes.

As always though, it's a subjective opinion, and maybe my view is skewed by watching the originals and the 2011 reboot.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I nipped in the Admiralty on Trafalgar Sq last Saturday lunchtime for a swift one, expecting to get royally horsed for being in a) London, b) in a tourist hotspot, and c) generally daring to have a pint outside of my own home.

£6.50. I wasn't even mad. I thought it was even cheap given the above factors, even if it was Amstel.

In my local though, £4.10 for a pint of best or something similar.

Offtopic: I ordered two large blonde lattes at the local Starbucks, and it was £10.10. it's literally cheaper to go on the piss than drink average-but-decent coffee now.

PhobosAnomaly ,

wow

very sale

much eat

so fruit

wow

...

much sad that Kabosu not here

PhobosAnomaly ,

The 2000's world wide web ruined me.

I can't read <3 without hearing this banger.

PhobosAnomaly , (edited )

Alright so, I did first-year university level maths so I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to follow anything exciting.

Where is sin(x) undefined? That's a concept I'm not aware of, and I love myself a function with random quirks - so would love to be pointed in a direction to learn more...

...and more importantly, can you add additional function intervals within the current gaps to draw a single curve in that new interval, so as to output an almighty upwards-trending UwUwUwUwUwU...?

PhobosAnomaly ,

Man that's really cool, I love that sort of thing - thank you for pointing out my oversight.

It's times like this that I wish I'd carried a math pathway forward... and then I look back and think "maybe I should have learned to stay in my lane when integration-by-parts became a thing" 😂

Thanks though, friend!

PhobosAnomaly ,

CuriousReFermat strikes again

Should I avoid or engage in current news right now?

During the last 'election summer' things went haywire but ultimately nothing meaningful really happened, and not a whole lot really changed as a result of that unrest. This time things are going haywire again, and it seems like something big will happen but people thought that the last time... Would it just be better to ignore...

PhobosAnomaly ,

Obligatory Wendover video, he's better than that HAI guy.

It's worth the 18mins of your time, even if it's just to identify that nobody's immune to advertising or propaganda, and what the negativity bias is.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I'm fortunate in as much that my professional accreditations (and being a part time student) get me access to all sorts of discounts, but even still it's worth asking for a student discount (or whatever they offer at the till) all the same.

Nine times out of ten, the retail staff aren't paid enough to give two fucks, so they'll just put it through as whatever discount appears on their till.

The worst they can say is no, after all - and that costs nothing.

PhobosAnomaly ,

"they have spoken the words of our elders, maybe humankind and cowkind share the same ancestry?"

...and thus, the cow level was born.

PhobosAnomaly , (edited )

Lifeforce Tenka (or Codename Tenka) in NA territories was underrated.

A PS1 FPS that experimented with having just one gun, but could be modded to provide different weapon functionalities (or weapons in real terms), and the soundtrack was absolutely banging.

Classic Psygnosis really.

Speaking of whom, there's also Sentient - perhaps not necessarily good, but tried so many new and inventive things that are common in modern games, that it deserves it's own post really.

edit: in fact, how can we mention Psygnosis and not me tion G-Police? That was a fantastic game, with great graphics (let down by a short draw distance), awesome gameplay, and a absolutely amazing storyline. Well worth a play, especially for the particularly mental trailer.

PhobosAnomaly ,

SCE was the first edition I played, I loved playing as Bison, and I got to be made to look really silly when I went round a friend's place to play a SNES edition and Bison wasn't a selectable character.

Great port though.

PhobosAnomaly ,

See aw these weans cuttin about wi their AI or GPT Mistral or fitever it is, kiddin oan they've done their homework kennin fine well that Sam Altman or fa'sever it is aats i meatball that's done it really - they can al get tae fuck so they can but, nae cunt's replicatin how loons are gabbin awa iday, eh?

PhobosAnomaly ,

Consider the young persons of today - going about their lives with their AI functions and ChatGPT or Mistral technologies - trying to hide the fact that they have cheated on their school homework, when it's really the tech created by that rogue Sam Altman that's done the research and drafting of it - but they should hang their heads in shame, because it can't replicate how the boys in Scotland talk amongst themselves in this day and age.

Fuck me I wrote that, and still struggled to rewrite it in British English.

PhobosAnomaly ,

A shit post duel awaits.

The winner gets seven statues on all continents, each facing a finely-calibrated direction - the intersection of their gazes meet at a point where the secret to humanity is buried.

The loser gets a year using the upside-downternet, six months on ISDN, or a week on MySpace as the only communication method with the outside world.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I feel seasick

Anyone else have to watch recorded lectures at 2-3x speed?

Currently studying for an exam tomorrow, and I now realize why I'm always so sleepy in class: the prof. speaks sooo sloowllyy with pauses - in-between - most words. I can't keep focused because of that; thankfully, he has narrated powerpoints that I can download and watch... at 3x normal speed. Which is nice because a 37 minute...

PhobosAnomaly ,

If I can, I'll use the "advance ten seconds" button or tap the right arrow key to skip 5-30 seconds depending on the client, until I find what I'm interested in and scrub backwards until I find the natural start point.

I can count on one hand the number of tutorials or lectures that I've been genuinely enthralled by from start to finish.

I had one tutor that every time they said "oh sorry that's wrong, I've been coding in python today, not Java" I just used to log out and check out someone else's material on a video streaming site. Fuck you for pissing my time up the wall - if I wanted to do that for £1300 a year, I'd ask my local barman about his opinion on the taxation structure of the United Kingdom for those straddling tax brackets.

edit: and/or barperson - if they can pour a decent pint, they're all awesome to me.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Intelligence is domain specific.

I need this on a plaque above my desk phone. It's perfect.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Slightly off topic: the IE red-X symbol is beautifully functional - does the job without needing any language at all - but the Netscape Navigator symbol is just wonderful. It didn't need to go that hard, and it's iconic (literally).

PhobosAnomaly ,

It's like trying to read in a dream - when you've got something that you need to read pretty fuckin' quickly but it's just a wall of nonsense.

That said, that could apply to any post in this community now I think of it!

PhobosAnomaly ,

I'm not quite sure why anybody gives a fuck about what she tweets.

She wrote a handful of successful books (I can't comment on the content, I never read them), made a fucktonne of money, wrote a few other plays and books under a rando name... and yet she's being quoted and reported on every five seconds.

Taking a step back a bit - my entirely personal opinion is that 95% of the people ranting and raving about this new law are the people who are gobshites anyway. The other 5% are quite rightly asking the question whether the law is proportionate, whether the police service is the right way to enforce the laws, and whether this could have been delayed to launch with the misogyny bill.

edit while I'm on a soapbox: as for Musk and Rogan, who gives a fuck what they have to say? Musk has probably been in Scottish airspace more than he's been on Scottish soil, and Rogan is so far removed from Scotland politics that he might as well be on Pluto.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I didn't quite catch your username first time round, a happy co-incidence!

I was under the impression that her tweets weren't illegal - even if she is being a bit of a bellend about it. I'm not sure whether it is outright legal, or whether it just doesn't meet the threshold to secure a likely conviction.

PhobosAnomaly ,

I know I'm speaking for an older and non-Apple hill here, but why the fuck is undo mapped to a gesture?

Speaking anecdotally now, I can't remember the last time I used the undo feature on a mobile device that wasn't in an image manipulation app, and there's usually an onscreen button for that.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Nah that's cool, I'm not wholly against the feature - in fact it's great to hear real life use cases. I hadn't even considered the accessibility element of things either, so that's cool too.

It just seems from the outset to be an over engineered answer to a question nobody asked.

Cheers for your insight though!

PhobosAnomaly , (edited )

I'm in an industry where pay bands are public and everyone knows who makes what.

The easiest way to find out who's a cheap fuck is to offer up and buy a round of coffee. Nine times out of ten, you'll get a coffee back next time they're swinging by. Happy days.

Even for the one in ten, it's not a deal-breaker. If my round comes round again, then yeah everyone gets offered. Nine times out of ten, you'll get one offered back.

If someone either doesn't collar me privately and say "hey thanks for the coffee but don't expect one back" or "sorry man, I don't feel comfortable doing rounds" then that's absolutely cool, I qint here to judge reasons - but if you take two coffees and offer fuck all, then that's a cheap and easy way of finding out who's not the giving kind. Even if someone was brave enough to say "dude I can't afford a round" then I'd happily say "pipe down, these are on me then".

I don't judge them. I just don't offer a coffee in future.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Honestly I'd love to have some logical, economic, or entertaining argument to debate you but I don't have one - you're right.

Problem is, we need to make 24/7 coverage of this task and honestly some people are just minging - we've come in to coffee pots with mould on the surface, and as much as I'm willing to become one with nature, that ain't tickling my fancy.

We are however lucky enough to have an indie coffee shop in our local town so at least our pennies are going to a decent pocket, and in fairness the owner is a lovely bloke so I'm quite happy to plan my mortgage payments around him.

Point taken though, I appreciate it 😁

PhobosAnomaly ,

Good ol' Tara. Obviously doesn't get paid enough for this shit.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Just to be an awkward git, one of the best but also the worst jobs I've had was working for BT as the emergency operator - you know, the goon that answers with "Emergency, which service?" when you dial 999 or 112.

Genuinely loved that job, but it paid an absolute pittance. It was both fast paced ad fulfilling, but some of the shit that you hear still rattles my cage even today. Most of the calls were a blur while the job was getting done well, but some of them made you feel pure helpless slow-motion despair while you tried every trick in the book to fast track a particularly horrible call to the appropriate service.

I'm glad I did it but I absolutely wasn't ready for the emotional devastation that it caused, and still caus es.

10/10 would do again A+++++

PhobosAnomaly ,

It's been a while, but there's some clear time wasters - a guy phoning in demanding the police because he had bees in his attic, a dude wanting to phone the police because he didn't like the circus he went to, all sorts of menial bollocks borne out of people unable to manage their own lives. Most of the time, the standing instruction was to pass the call to the requested agency - at the end of the day, we were only listening to a snapshot of what's happening, so we weren't in a position to make a judgement of whether they really needed an ambulance or police attendance or water fairy or not.

The EISEC system used to pick up landline addresses (and sometimes mobile addresses if the mobile operator signed up to the scheme), but also automatically provided public phone box details. There was one phone box serial number that used to strike dread into you, because by the time your eyes set on the number and your neurons were firing thinking "oh no, I recognise that phone box number...", this prolific caller had already started ranting about the new world order, how we're all being led down a path of damnation and that we should repent, all this bollocks. That was one of the few times we could drop calls actually, where they quite clearly weren't listening to us and weren't in any immediate audible need of help or danger.

Some of them were real headscratchers - someone phoning from a landline wanting the coastguard because something had capsized... in Birmingham.

Unfortunately, most of the nonsense calls were a result of an already creaking social care system - people phoning in experiencing severe mental health issues, hallucinating and all sorts; some because they felt like they had nowhere else to turn; and some were just lonely and wanted to speak to someone. I did Operator Assistance calls too (where you dial 100 from a BT landline) and a good chunk of those were old men and women who just wanted someone to speak to. If I was killing time, I'd quite happily chat shit to them for five minutes, on the understanding that as soon as the dot matrix board showed a 999 call queued, they were yeeted and the emergency call was taken.

I learned a lot about the world, myself, and how to speak to folk to get what you want in the world without being a complete penispump to someone on the other end of the phone.

Sorry about the long post.

Disable tracking on Chevy Bolt 2019 ( sh.itjust.works )

OnStar reports location and speed data to the car manufacturer. Sometimes they will sell this data to insurance companies to raise your premium, as several news stores pointed out a few weeks ago. I couldn't really find an advantage to OnStar, (I have my phone to call emergency services) so I disabled it by pulling it's fuse....

PhobosAnomaly ,

Obviously the final answer will be different in every jurisdiction, but I would think it'd be less of a fraud issue - you can't be accused of sending false information if you're sending no information.

I suspect where things would get dicey is in the car-as-a-service part - where the EULA of a car software would open you up to legal challenge if you changed any hardware or software function of the car.

It would absolutely 95% get laughed out of court, but not without leaving you with a hefty legal bill no doubt. Obviously the full answer would depend on your local legal system and lawyer's advice.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Maybe she's fast charging by induction? Who needs naps when you've got radioactive power box to give you more blep time?

PhobosAnomaly ,

Excuse my ignorance, but what is the status of Irish in Ireland?

I only ask because my (perhaps erroneous) assumption was that Irish is a recognised language, but English is the most spoken language by a considerable margin - aggregated across all areas.

I always assumed that it had the same status as Welsh in Wales and Gaelic in Scotland - but happy to be proven wrong!

PhobosAnomaly ,

Yeah that's a great point, thanks for the insight!

How does data sent over the internet know where to go?

I saw a map of undersea internet cables the other day and it's crazy how many branches there are. It got me wondering - if I'm (based in the UK) playing an online game from someone in Japan for example, how is the route worked out? Does my ISP know that to get to place X, the data has to be routed via cable 1, cable 2 etc. but...

PhobosAnomaly ,

Every time

sex.com 🔨

PhobosAnomaly ,

I was at a Hard Rock Café in Paris (yes I know they're overpriced, but the historic stuff on the walls is pretty cool), and I hobbled my way through a conversation in my very basic French, before adding a little self-deprecating "je suis désolée, mon Français est mauvais", to which he replied "yes, it is a bit shit".

I laughed, he laughed, my other half laughed, I paid over the odds for a pint, the French dude got a kick out of pointing out the flaws in my attempts, everyone went on their day.

PhobosAnomaly ,

.../Four Seasons Landscaping/Press Venue Hire

PhobosAnomaly , (edited )

If you like Garbage's stuff and you love Shirley Manson, then oh boy check out Stephanie Cheape and Queen.

It was as if it was made as a love letter to Garbage

PhobosAnomaly ,

Yeah it's a bit of a weird one, her star was rising pretty quickly at the time that came out - all over the Scottish media, seemed destined for bigger and better things... and then there wasn't any new material and she seems to be enjoying herself on TikTok now.

Good on her - would have liked to have seen more tracks off her though.

PhobosAnomaly ,

A bit of a narrow audience, but I bought The id Anthology - basically a greatest hits collection of id Software's games up to Quake.

I bought it for a laugh really a few months after it came out for about £25, and kept the cool trinkets inside it.

These days, it's worth anything from fifteen times that to fifty times that, judging by eBay's completed listings.

It's cool, and I've no plans to flog it, but it's nice to know that there's a small holiday's worth of funds tied up in it.

PhobosAnomaly ,

If I've posted once in a day, and it's gone against the grain in a particularly emotive topic discussion - then yeah I can't say I've not said "oh here we fucking go" when I've seen the little badge with a number on it that's not 1, because that's usually when I've posted a YouTube link and the bot picks it up.

In fairness, 70% of it is a valid dissenting opinion to my own and I've got the opportunity to learn from someone else's view, even if I'm still not convinced.

29% of the negative comments are just fannies just picking up a point which isn't entirely clear and then interprets it in a way that's logically and factually disingenuous to prove some sort of point, and I can count on one hand in the last thirty years or so the number of times that I've rattled someone's cage to the point where they feel the need to PM me death threats or offer physical violence - by that point I've already figured out that they're either deeply hurting and it's manifesting itself in that way, or they're deeply unwell and it's well outside my skillset to help.

Lemmy overall is much more open to debate than Reddit, and the downvote button is used less of a "disagree" or "fuck you" button than it was on the latter site.

PhobosAnomaly ,

A lad I know was off on the sick with an injury for a while on full pay, played the game, turned up to his welfare interviews with his employer, complained that his injury was getting slowly better but still keeping him at home... and only got busted because he appeared in a photo in the paper having come second in a local half marathon.

Another boy I know who was on light work duties in the office because of a supposed back issue, got pulled in for a "meeting without biscuits" because he was spotted refereeing an ice hockey game one weekend by someone from the office.

Outstanding levels of fuckery.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Clearly a distro-hopper, my hero.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Now, I'm not the greatest fans of mortgages because of what they represent, and the fact that a good chunk of a country's economic well-being is dependant on people forking out a big proportion of their take home pay to have somewhere to live, but...

It's frustrating to see so many people labour and stress about meeting thresholds and jumping through hoops to get a mortgage in principle, let alone find a home that they can make an accepted offer on, and these chuckle fucks make it difficult for everyone to go through the same process, much post the changes introduced in 2007 (admittedly for different but related reasons).

Absolute wankbadgers.

PhobosAnomaly ,

Well, they've got a point.

I'm surprised they didn't put the boot in to the UK's shameful abstention too.

Disgraceful.

PhobosAnomaly ,

In the UK, the colloquially named Chair Force had some NCO's go through who stuck out their term in a field that had lots of factors that transferred across to civilian employment. Top of the tree was air traffic controllers - certain branches of the RAF's ATC capability was based at Swanwick anyway so if they ever went to the National Air Traffic Service, a lot of the time they could pick up their stuff from their desk on their last Friday, and move it across the room to another desk for when they came back in new clothes on Monday morning.

Vets are another field that is great to get into if you want your fees paid for, but most of those are officer grades, same deal as pilots. The clerks are generally well trained too - those who used to "fly a desk" as they put it, went on to be good accountants and heath and safety ninjas.

Certainly for the UK, the military gave the option to poorer backgrounds to get expensive qualifications while not generally going near theatres or on deployments.

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