discourse cw?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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rustingbridges:

The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food after I made it, and the boss let me keep it”.

Covering some food during travel is pretty standard, I think, since it’s a business expense and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it. My old roommate worked at best buy (which was by no means a great employer) and even they gave him a per diem which covered (cheap) food.

B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

So the question with this is kind of, where does it end? I think if I put my back into it, I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.

And even if you are counting labor costs, you can buy food at the supermarket for $1-2/day. It just gets really boring.

We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?

>>and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it.<<

I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way. Sure, it’d be *nice* if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.

(I speak from some experience here: my job *did* used to provide some free food each week (but only a small amount, and only from a limited selection of the cheaper menu items), but later switched to an employee-discount system. And every friend or family member who learned about it got angry on my behalf *even though I wasn’t angry about it myself*, and it was really annoying having to try to calm them down and defend against their attempts to instil negative emotions about it in me.)

—

>>It just gets really boring.<<

I would be perfectly content to eat peanut-butter-on-a-spoon for lunch every day for years on end. The *occasional* variety in food is nice, but as the exception, not the norm.

(Also I have a low metabolism and an appetite to match, which is helpful.)

I barely even have to try to knock my food budget down to about four USD a day, so in practice I haven’t done that much other than severely cut back on restaurants.

—

>>I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.<<

How?

—

>>Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?<<

…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.

(Is it something to do with, like, dignity or some shit?)

Our expenses are already extremely low by developed standards even without going full-on rice-and-beans [link]–a thousand USD per person per month would be enough, with room for a small emergency fund–but underemployment is a big problem.

(Though to be fair, I have a positive amount of money and have never been homeless, which makes me better off than most of my friends. (From multiple social circles, at that.))

Tags:

#food #disordered eating? #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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shieldfoss:

It’s probably gonna get old if it keeps happening but business travel is still incredibly interesting to me.

This has been one of the cooler hotel rooms. (Not featured because it films poorly in the dark: The ocean past these east-facing windows)

tumblr_inline_po66hmmufz1tl8dj9_500

 

shieldfoss:

how is the hotel internet?

Internet is your standard Big City Scandinavia internet (75 MBps so less than at home but fast enough for my purposes – fast enough that I didn’t even think to check it before you asked)

and how is business travel interesting to you?

I’m just not super used to travelling, nor staying outside my own home. I don’t have to worry about breakfast, lunch or dinner and while I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it, I sure haven’t yet. Also if I was at “regular” work tomorrow I’d be writing some astonishingly dull product design specs for a new component in our software but tomorrow and Tuesday I’m ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ instead and that’s kind of cool.

 

shacklesburst:

Fair. Also that makes me want to finally visit Scandinavia and try out your hotel internet.

I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it

I’m not even business traveling that much and this rings extremely true to me and I’ve reached that point way faster than I’d ever have anticipated. I mean it’s probably different if you’re a high-class executive staying at really upscale hotels, but the usual buffet fare at 3-4 stars gets old pretty fast. Same with airport lounge food – I still eat there though, not least because it the hot buffet sure beats shelling out like €20 for a small sandwich.

 

rustingbridges:

So are y’all like, actually eating at the hotel? I can see the occasional convenience but isn’t there the option of just going down the street or whatever for something more interesting.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know about them, but why would I pay money to eat food from down the street when hotel food is free?

(Valid answers include “the meal the hotel was serving today was a food I find actively repulsive” and “they only serve dinner Monday – Thursday and it is dinnertime on Saturday”, but do not include “the hotel food was bland”. It’s not like I’d be able to enjoy paid food anyway, haunted by the knowledge that it was a waste of money. Plus I kind of like blandness, tbh.)

—

Context: I have not business-travelled *per se*, but when we do travel we tend to stay at hotels catering primarily to businesspeople. I am thinking of hotels mostly in Massachusetts, with occasional other states plus a couple in Ontario.

 

rustingbridges:

Possible answers:

A) it’s a business trip, I’m expensing dinner. It’s free either way. Also how common is free dinner anyway, don’t most hotel restaurants charge.

B) I regularly pay money for the purpose of eating food I like more, and regularly turn down free food.

C) I value the cluster of food novelty related goods. The associated opportunity cost of staying in is especially high if you’re traveling anywhere decent (although this goes down if you go the same places a lot, but in that case, haven’t you found anywhere you like?)

A-1: The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food *after* I made it, and the boss let me keep it”. (Although occasionally my brother will be rewarded with a free meal for training a newbie or agreeing to show up on a day he would normally have off.)

If the marginal increase in food quality is free, then absolutely maximise quality.

—

A-2: IME, free hot breakfast 7 days/week and free dinner Monday – Thursday is standard for business hotels. (Slightly lower-tier hotels offer cold breakfast and no dinner.) Many also keep cookies by the front desk, and some keep packets of hot-chocolate mix by the coffee machine.

I think I have been to one (1) hotel with a restaurant that even theoretically charged money, and that was at Disney World. (And in that case my mom had managed to wrangle some promotions into getting us a meal plan for free, so in practice even *that* hotel food didn’t actually cost anything.)

—

B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

—

C: I *can* enjoy food, but I seem to have a lower cap on how much pleasure I can experience from a meal than other people do, even when the cap *isn’t* further lowered by the meal’s distance from the financially-optimal meal. (If a meal cost more than about $7, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will get net-negative utility from it. Meals in the $3 – $7 range are increasingly iffy.)

(For anyone wondering “but if you’re that much of a miser, why do you even *know* what hotels above the bottom price tier are like?”: early on it was because Dad had a cushy programming job, in the middle it was because my parents were hiding the extent of the problem from their kids, and later it was because they–while not *oblivious* or anything–seem to be incapable of fully *grokking* the severity of the problem and occasionally drag me to sub-optimal places.)

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #food #disordered eating? #reply via reblog #I uh may be feeling guilty about acquiescing when my boss told me to go home after 8 hours on Saturday #when I’m pretty sure I could have talked him into 9.5 if I’d tried

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

I’ve been on Twitter lately since it’s part of my job (not in the sense anyone told me to do it, just in the sense lots of traffic comes from there and lots of conversations happen there which I need to stay on top of) and the ways it’s different than Tumblr are interesting.

I actually like Tumblr’s atmosphere a lot better. I super don’t know how much of this is who I choose to follow on each platform, and it’s plausible that this is 100% selection effects, but I feel like most of the people who are mad here are mad from personal experience about bad stuff that’s affecting them, even if they’ve picked a wildly unproductive or inappropriate paradigm to use to engage with it. People are upset that their community doesn’t have stuff they need, or upset that the words they use to describe their experiences are getting used differently by other people. And – even when I think they’re wrong, it’s really valuable to understand what things are hurting people. 

On Twitter people are mostly mad about the news of the day. And it’s not that the news of the day doesn’t matter and doesn’t affect thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people, but the vast majority of the reactions are not about how the news affects people, by people affected. They’re broader and more narrativizing and more focused on who wins and who loses, and unless you have the pitch-perfect personal angle I think it’s regarded as a little self-centered to engage with the news by thinking about the things that are hurting you and why they’re hurting you. 

Also, most people on Tumblr are young and I see them grow and evolve a lot over time. Most people on Twitter are older and it’s kind of rare to see them change their minds. 

I think serious ideas from way outside your bubble are more likely to reach you on tumblr, since people have enough time and space to spell them out at enough length they seem interesting even to people who don’t already agree. 

And… I’m less sure about this one, but I think tumblr might have already built up some immunity to some of the pure-outrage conversations that I see on twitter a lot. Most people here are survivors of at least one fandom blowing itself up over disagreements that were deeply felt and deeply hurtful but, ultimately, didn’t make the world a safer place for a single person, and I feel like most people who I follow on here are pretty good at identifying those dynamics when they crop up. I do not think most people on Twitter has gotten good at this yet. And wow, I hope they do soon.

Tags:

#interesting #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #Twitter #discourse cw?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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serinemolecule:

(Omitting a huge reblog chain to reply to)

@brin-bellway:

What do you *use* a 5-hour laptop battery for, anyway? I mean, more battery life is always better all else equal, but when I need to computer for significant lengths of time off-grid that is what smartphones are for.

Computers are just better than phones for every single task. [1] Sure, you use phones for off-grid time now, but that’s just because your computer doesn’t last long enough for that. I have a MacBook Air with 13 hours of battery life and it’s nice being able to use it all.

It’s also nice when I’m at home, being able to use it in the kitchen, on the sofa, etc. I move around a lot and it’s nice not having to also lug around the charger and plug it in everywhere.

If I wanted to leave a computer plugged in all the time, I’d be using a desktop, not a laptop.

[1] With some exceptions: Phones are really only good for very specific things like “taking photos”, “using mobile apps of companies too lazy to provide a desktop/web version” (I’m calling you out, Google Assistant and Pleco).

I do agree that laptops are better than phones whenever possible, which means the entire point of smartphones is for the times that it’s *not* possible. Why are smartphones so ubiquitous, then? Why do high-end phones even exist at all, if that kind of money can get you a laptop with double-digit-hour battery life?

(I mean, there’s something to be said for the smaller size. But laptops can be made pretty small too if you need them to be, and as I understand it most people haven’t already stuffed their bag with as much gear as possible [link] and would have space for a small laptop.)

—

I use a laptop rather than a desktop for two reasons:

1. I can use a couch rather than needing, like, a dedicated desk and shit.

2. I can take it to hotel rooms. (This was more important when we were richer and spending a week or two a year in hotel rooms, but there’s still reason 1 to think of.)

—

I use my laptop battery under the following conditions:

1. When the living room is too noisy and I need to temporarily move to another room. (Even then, I can just bring the power cord with me and plug it in there, and I do if I expect to be there for more than an hour and a half or so.)

2. Power outages. The *only* time that I wish my laptop battery life was longer, since it *is* annoying having to rely on a smartphone in my own goddamn house.

Tags:

#Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw? #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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I am reluctant to reblog this, lest I be interpreted as wanting to restart the conversation (which I do not): https://web.archive.org/web/20190205011340/http://fierceawakening.tumblr.com/post/151161204270/brin-bellway-ilzolende-wirehead-wannabe

—

(I think there’s still a thing buried in my drafts where I tried to compose a response to this, but I never was able to phrase it well enough. Something about how I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the concept of [caring about political-type stuff for its own sake, rather than purely to appease people you think might hurt you], and so arguments that casually rely on this concept confuse me, and act as an unpleasant reminder of some of the parts of personhood I am missing.

…I suppose it’s fitting to come across this while my dash is experiencing a surge in voting discourse, which is very similar in that regard.)

—

Oh, interesting: I wrote this post just three weeks later. I guess my fumbling attempts to explain myself in this thread would have been a significant component of the stuff percolating at the time, then.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

The person who called me an anti-Semite and blocked me is now reblogging me on Israel/Palestine.

I am irrationally upset and very anxious, and this is dumb. Argh.

Last I heard, if you block them back they can’t reblog you.

But I kind of don’t want to, because it feels unvirtuous to block someone who isn’t doing anything to you. And then I would feel less like I have the moral high-ground when I think about that argument. (Although I so so do, because calling a Jew and anti-Semite for saying that gentiles are allowed to make mistakes about Hebrew is insane.)

Tags:

#(October 2015) #conversational aglets #Judaism #discourse cw?

Windows 7 is going away, please get used to Windows 10

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

ms-demeanor:

The sale of non-Professional OEM licences was stopped on October 31, 2014. Mainstream support for 7 ended on January 13, 2015. Extended support will end on January 14, 2020. On September 7, 2018, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will get three more years of support after January 14, 2020 if users pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) service, however this only applies to users of the Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.

NO.

NO I CANNOT.

I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.

Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).

Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.

Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.

Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.

PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.

 

discoursedrome:

Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.

But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.

 

discoursedrome:

we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional

 

collapsedsquid:

How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses?  They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money.  What the hell is going on with them?

 

ms-demeanor:

IT’S FUCKING AWFUL.

And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks. 

They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility” 

And here’s the deal: I GET IT. 

But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!

But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.

A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP. 

And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop. 

Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer. 

The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years. 

 

ms-demeanor:

#nah i cant use windows 10  #im just going to switch entirely to linux  #at least that doesnt have inherent migraine features                                                             

If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.

God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is. 

 

discoursedrome:

god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices

so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck

 

rustingbridges:

Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so

>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<

…

*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*

?!

(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)

—

>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<

Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)

(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)

Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post #Windows #discourse cw?

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

serinemolecule:

unpretty:

i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use

(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)

i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work

A General Rule

on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this

that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’

Tumblr

just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags

i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss

now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest

Dreamwidth

use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss 

i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss

WordPress

if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url

if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url

i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed

ArtStation

use username.artstation.com/rss

i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss

Mastodon

just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url

i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss

deviantART

use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername 

i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis

YouTube

this one’s a goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first

in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit

you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit

i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w

Tapas

this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.

the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed

LINE Webtoons

ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button

the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed

Twitter & Instagram

these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason

twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.

right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username

i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne

… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg

This is extremely overkill. Every RSS reader I know of is capable of finding an RSS link from a regular URL.

So, like, if you wanted to follow someone on YouTube, you could put in the feed URL:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCq6aw03lNILzV96UvEAASfQ

Or you could just put in their regular profile/channel URL:

https://www.youtube.com/user/billwurtz

And your RSS reader will give you a list of what feeds it has:

(pictured: Feedly, the RSS reader recommended by the OP, subscribing to a YouTube feed)

This also works for any other RSS reader and any other service (Tumblr, Dreamwidth, Twitter, anything):

(pictured: Inoreader, subscribing to a Tumblr feed)

Here’s Feedly, the RSS reader recommended by the OP, working on YouTube:

So yeah, there’s never any reason to dig up a channel ID and manually construct an RSS feed URL.

I’ve definitely had issues with the automatic finders in the past, mostly things like giving you the feed for an entire site when you asked for a particular subdomain. Though it’s been a while since I had such troubles: I’d figured it was just because I haven’t followed a lot of new RSS feeds lately, but possibly they’ve improved over the past 3 – 5 years.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #discourse cw? #long post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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serinemolecule:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

somnilogical:

brin-bellway:

@somnilogical, I wanted to thank you for your efforts in being a Tumblr Purge News Network. I’ve found it very helpful.

i like to do lots of meta when thinking of changes. im kind of using my tumblr to pinboard possibility-space of where humans could go

im also downloading every app and signing up for every website someone mentions and poking around in them to see what theyre like

Yeah, it’s bedtime for me now but tomorrow I’ll be doing some poking around too.

And researching backup methods for all the potential sites, because fuck having a mere single copy of anything.

(If I parsed the jargon correctly, this Mastodon backup program [link] is compatible with Pleroma? *If*. I’ll test it soon, probably tomorrow.)

If you self host Mastodon you could just back up straight from the database on your server.

Even if I get a handle on how to do that on a technical level, I’d need to rent a URL for it, right?

If I decide to settle down in the Fediverse I will seriously consider self-hosting, but I’m not ready to drop money on it yet.

Renting a domain for a URL is around $10/year.

Renting the shittiest server possible is already around $60/year, and I’d be surprised if the shittiest server possible would be enough to handle Mastodon. And the effect on your electric bill of using your own computer as a server is around $200/year

There also exist free domains, but like in no universe is $10/year not a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price of hosting a server.

Pleroma boasts that one can run an instance on a Raspberry Pi [link], but again this is really not my area and I would be unsurprised to learn that this is far less impressive than they are trying to make it sound.

Probably the figures I’ve encountered over the years about domain costs were actually varying levels of package deal.

I had some further details here about cost estimates, but honestly I think they’re beside the point. There exist *some* financial costs to self-hosting, and I could tell that much even without having any experience in such matters, and that was enough to dissuade me from jumping straight into the deep end. When and if (*big* if) I decide that I am willing to pay money for a server, *then* I’ll research exactly how much it would cost me and compare that figure to the amount I am willing to pay (not to mention the amount of effort involved in determining which knowledge and skills I would even need, and then acquiring them).

Tags:

#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Fediverse #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

argumate:

flakmaniak:

@argumate the Racist Wizard is back, the same evil wizard from before.

There is a switch in front of you. If you pull it, the next person you date will become Your Soulmate; that is, the perfect partner for you, you’ll fall in love, blah blah. You know the routine. However, this person will ALSO become super racist. Extreme contempt for minorities. BUT. They will never show it. They will never express these viewpoints, not to you, not to anyone, and they will never discriminate based on these; they are, in fact, so good at counteracting their biases that they will not accidentally discriminate more than the average person. Also, your memory will be wiped about the fact that they will be super racist, so you won’t know. (The Wizard will cast a spell to do this because he loves racism.)

If you DON’T pull the switch, then every sexual relationship not involving you will involve lots of a kink that you have no good reason to morally condemn, but that you are personally really squicked out by. You will know, for the rest of your life, that everyone else’s sex lives involve a lot of that thing. Also, the Racist Wizard will occasionally come by to tell you, in graphic detail, about people doing this thing. However, it will make these other people very happy; they will love engaging in this kink and it will enrich their lives meaningfully. (Again, the Wizard will cast a spell that causes this; he likes racism, but he likes dilemmas even more.)

Bonus question: The Racist Wizard is at it again. If you pull the switch, basically every person in society except for you gets significantly More Racist, in the type of Stealth Racism described above. (This lasts forever and affects all future generations, if it matters. You will be the last Non-Racist Person. Or the last Not Particularly Racist Person. Whatever.) If you don’t pull the switch, then in some major European country people will be discriminated against solely because of the color of their skin, with no regard to race, ethnicity, or anything that is not pigmentation. This will last one year, and the discrimination will be widespread and reinforced by the government.

(You THINK you know what the last question entails, but I never said in which direction the discrimination would go; it’s actually done at random, changing every month.)

And yeah, the Racist Wizard is a dick. But hey, at least he’s not tying people to trolley tracks! He just uses a switch because it’s iconic of moral dilemmas at this point.

yer a racist wizard, Harry.

A racism that is impossible to detect, results in no discrimination ever, and is perfectly counteracted as a bias by every human who possesses it does not count as racism. It’s more like the common intrusive thought about jumping off cliffs.

In fact, the *only* bad outcome here is the yearlong, government-backed pigment discrimination.

If only every Moral Dilemma Genie could be as easy to work with.

I’m amused that this seems to be OP’s attempt at crafting a highly inconvenient philosophical dilemma, but they’ve really just produced a situation where ¾ actions that the omnipotent asshole might take are mildly annoying at worst. The choices in the first dilemma differ only in how *much* net good they produce.

>>It’s more like the common intrusive thought about jumping off cliffs.

In fact, the *only* bad outcome here is the yearlong, government-backed pigment discrimination.<<

…making humanity permanently more prone to intrusive thoughts–including altering every other currently existing person to be such–doesn’t count as a bad outcome?

(the new versions of them are stipulated not to be distressed about being the way they are [link], but there’s still the *current* versions to consider)

I’m not especially confident in my stance, but my first thought is to pull the first switch and not pull the second, on the grounds that those are the options that don’t involve mind-editing the entire planet.

(I considered not pulling the first switch and attempting to convince the wizard that no edits need be made because it’s already true, but while there are many very common kinks I am squicked by, there is no *single* kink that *all* non-me sexual relationships involve, so I don’t think I would win that argument.)

Tags:

#racism cw #reply via reblog #discourse cw? #(I don’t like the way my response equivocates between ”human”‚ ”person”‚ and ”Terran”) #(but the other phrasings I tried don’t seem to get across as well how big a deal this would be)