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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • The atheist thing is largely due to excitement and evangelicalism, the same way born-again Christians are some of the most obnoxious people on the face of the planet.

    When someone “discovers” atheism, it usually comes with a lot of excitement. They have this new truth, and it’s so obvious if you just think about it. Why wouldn’t everyone want to find this same truth? After all, this truth brings a level of enlightenment that has never been felt before. So they should try to spread this new enlightenment to everyone. Wait, why are you getting angry and walking away? Ugh, it must be because you’re too indoctrinated or stupid to recognize the truth.

    And the same is true for born-again Christians who discover religion later in life. The excitement leads to evangelicalism, because “this is obviously the best thing in my life, and I want to share it with everyone I meet.”


  • My VPN doesn’t work with RCS, which is, at best, annoying. It automatically connects when I’m on untrusted WiFi. Hopefully anyone messaging me has the “fall back to SMS” option enabled, but I’ve learned that several don’t. I learned that because I didn’t get texts from them until after I left work, (and disconnected from the work WiFi).

    Even worse, group texts don’t have any option to automatically fall back. So I don’t receive any group texts at all while I’m at work, but the senders have no way of knowing that. In fact, there have been several instances in recent memory of friends/family being left out of the loop on plans, because they weren’t receiving RCS for some unknown reason, which meant they missed an entire group text conversation.

    My father’s phone is particularly bad about it. It’s an iPhone, and he’ll just randomly stop receiving RCS until he toggles his cell service off and back on again via airplane mode. But who the hell would think to toggle airplane mode, when there is no indication that they aren’t receiving something? It’s a catch-22, where he doesn’t get any notification that something is wrong, because he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be getting notifications at all. There’s no way for him to prove a negative, so the only way for him to reliably get RCS is to toggle airplane mode every few minutes. Which isn’t really a feasible use-case scenario.


  • allowing a threat actor to better navigate your network without needing to do ip scans (which are very obvious and should trigger even basic detection)

    I mean, basically any device will send a DHCPDISCOVER broadcast on 255 when it connects, to see if there is a DHCP server on the network. Unless you’re running your entire network on pre-configured static addresses and have your router set up to intercept all broadcast messages (and treat the broadcasting device as hostile), any device plugging into the network would automatically broadcast a message anyways.

    And honestly, if you’re being that paranoid about your network, you’d probably be better off just using port security and a MAC whitelist instead. It would save you a lot of time with manually configuring IP addresses. That way any threat actor would only be able to connect if they already knew a whitelisted MAC. And gentle device discovery can also be automated without obvious brute force “ping every IP in the subnet at the same time, and blatantly scan common ports on responding IPs” network scans. They’ll take longer, (and passive scans may miss some devices) but they wouldn’t trip the rudimentary “watch for any device firing ping requests out to every single IP” scan detection. Passive scans can be particularly difficult to detect.


  • Yeah, I’ve done the black light check at hotels before. I was pleasantly surprised.

    One tip though: They don’t usually change the top comforter in between guests. They’ll typically change the sheets, but the comforter is only changed on a regular (typically weekly) schedule. But they’ll be happy to change it for you if you ask.

    Unless it’s a honeymoon suite. That shit all gets changed in between every guest, for obvious reasons.


  • Just an FYI, since privacy seems to be a big concern for you… AirBnB used to allow hosts to hide cameras inside of their rented spaces. It was explicitly allowed in their renting rules, under the premise of allowing owners to enforce rules and collect evidence in case of excessive mess/damage/theft. They banned hidden cameras in 2024, but over half of rental owners still admit to using them, and about half of all guests still report finding one inside of their rented spaces if they bother to look.


  • Libertarians are grumpy indoor cats. They’re violently independent and want to be left alone, but their survival is also entirely dependent on the systems surrounding them, which they completely take for granted.

    The grumpy indoor cat doesn’t want your attention, they just want their auto-feeder to activate like it always does. Never mind the fact that you’re the one who keeps the auto-feeder filled. They don’t care about that, they just care that the auto-feeder dispenses food.


  • I work at a roadhouse and art gallery. It’s a cloud-based app that manages our bookings. My list of complaints includes, but is not limited to:

    • The software is just a shell for a VM, running on a server in Canada. This was their solution for “cloud” access… Because why bother coding an actual locally-run program to connect to an external server, when you can just connect the user directly to the server and have it run in a VM? It means everything we do is bogged down by round-trip latency to and from Canada, plus the server’s processing lag because it’s running a VM for every user that is connected. Opening an event’s detail page easily takes 15-20 seconds. So does adding/changing anything in an event. In an average day, I manage anywhere from 10-30 events. We joke that all of our events are planned via carrier pigeon, because of the latency and long load times.
    • It cannot send an alert to users when specific things are changed on a booking. Our labor manager wants to be able to get an alert whenever an event planner changes the labor. Makes sense, right? This was marketed as a key feature of the software, and it was why the labor manager originally wanted to use the software. It is entirely broken.
    • The software also features a website, for the part timers to be able to access the event data… The website is completely broken.
    • The website cannot show event drawings or floor plans, despite the fact that the floor plans are a large part of the part-timers’ jobs. They set the rooms up prior to events, but they can’t see what they’re supposed to set up, because the website doesn’t support that feature. This was marketed as a feature when we purchased the software.
    • To work around the lack of room diagrams on the website, I tried to set up an automated report to compile the day’s event setups, and email them to everyone. I set up a filter to ignore events without a diagram, so only events with listed drawings would show up in the report. The filter works when I run it manually. The automated report ignores the filter, and spits out a ton of blank pages for each empty event. This has resulted in a “boy who cried wolf” effect, where the part-timers don’t bother checking the automated report because they assume it will be like 40 empty pages.
    • the server has a 20 minute session timer. You’d think this means you can be logged in for 20 minutes at a time… Maybe even that it starts counting after your last activity, so you can remain logged in while active, then get automatically logged out after you walk away… You would be incorrect. The server logs every user out, on a rolling 20 minute timer. You just logged in 60 seconds before the timer tripped? Fuck you, log in again. It isn’t even on a nice round number, (like every hour on the :00, :20, and :40 marks), because the timer is based on whenever the server was last rebooted. Logging in easily takes 45-60 seconds for the VM to load.

    Again, this is a non-exhaustive list. These are simply the more mind-numbingly frustrating things I have to deal with on a daily basis.






  • There’s always a trade-off in some way, though. For instance, Toyota is one of the best in regards to keeping physical controls. But they’re basically the worst offender in regards to data privacy. “Insist” is fine on paper, but (unless you’re a millionaire who can afford a custom-built car) you’re inevitably going to have to purchase one on the existing market. And the existing market is all about digital controls and privacy violations.

    Saying “just don’t get one that has those things” is a little like saying “just don’t get a house that catches on fire” after a wildfire rips through an area. It’s not exactly up to the customer, and the average person could never hope to afford the custom work that those kinds of requirements would entail.