Viewing profile — plastiquebeech

Interesting. One quirk of browsing sites with JS disabled is that the cookie banners rarely show up. Often, they are implemented as scripts loaded from a site like "cookielaw.org".…

Same. I tried to switch to iOS about a year ago, but I ended up returning the device after spending over $50 on highly-rated ad/script blockers for Safari, and finding that none of…

It's not feasible to do a real "Lord of the Flies" experiment on purpose; not even the notoriously sociopathic world of reality TV producers could get away with that. If you have a…

Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel. It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of pa…

Those are the same questions that people ask on SO, although the respondents aren't exclusively men with beards. OP bemoaned how people on StackOverflow would tell you not to do wh…

When I was young, we didn't have StackOverflow or Google. We had to hike through snow to access the internet at all, uphill both ways! In those days, we would usually read the manu…

We need to be very careful with brain implants designed to relieve pain, lest we repeat the mistakes which brought us the opioid crisis. I've seen videos at BCI conferences of deep…

Whenever I hear people describe a complex chain of events only to conclude that there was a single root cause, I'm reminded of the old proverb: >For want of a nail the shoe was los…

People might scoff at the petty vandalism, but how many of you over the age of 35 had a scrupulously clean adolescence? For the under-30 crowd, everything in their post-puberty liv…

Impossible to manufacture? Or financially impossible to build a factory for the purpose and larger infrastructure to accommodate transportation? I'm curious if there is something a…

The publishers usually can't publish their games' source code, because of various library and middleware dependencies which are not free or open-source. Same issue with cheap IoT g…

Developers will package browsers in their code as a way to spy on users with fewer restrictions, not because Safari is unusable. That being said, I returned my first and last iPhon…

Fair enough. I would still rather have a diverse ecosystem of power-tripping moderators than a few unavoidable ones, though. There would probably be more calm tidal pools like the …

The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.…

Same reason that people run community gardens, or set up trusts to maintain local trails. Because they care. Maybe some things, like human relationships and communication, are bett…

If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale? For example, a …

They were barely keeping their heads above water, but the interest payments on their new loans was like tying cinder blocks to their feet. It amazes me that the world's richest man…

What about a car? You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for proce…

I had to look up this story, and it's about as ridiculous as it sounds. This source places the event in 1835, but I believe it's the same incident: http://southernghoststories.com/…