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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.

    Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.

    Similar story with VHS to be honest.

    There’s a “minimum acceptable quality” which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.

    Audiophile now is very different, because it’s not a mass market consumer format any longer - it’s a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.


  • I’m fairly sure a lot of places have to wait, unless you have an electric shower.

    In the US people usually have an immersion heater tank for the hot water. Here in the UK I’ve got a combi boiler that produces water for hot taps, showers, and also central heating radiators.

    In both cases there’s some distance of pipe between where your hot water is coming from and where your shower is and that’s what you are waiting for - for the water to get where it needs to go.

    How does your stuff work?



  • I’m two ways about this.

    In recent years I’ve become quite a coffee lover. I’ve experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)

    At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that’s what I’ll get, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it’s got that taste of nostalgia lol.


  • Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.

    I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.


  • In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.

    Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.

    There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.

    I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.






  • To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

    The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

    The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

    It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.


  • They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.

    By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.

    There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.

    Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.