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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Even if only 1% of people used adblock, then that’s 1% of millions of dollars of ad revenue. It’s easily enough to put several people on this as a full time job if they want to.

    I’m sure Google saw it as only a minor issue at first, but the number of people using adblockers is presumably going up all the time.

    The irony being of course that adblock usage is skyrocketing only because companies like Google have made the Internet so thoroughly ad-polluted it’s intolerable to go without one.


  • Things change.

    Ten years ago I joined a newly formed small company. They were all-in on the google suite for everything, and it was great. Gmail, docs, meet, all joined up really well and fully cloud so everyone could work just as easily from home as in the office, with no on-prem hardware or VPNs or anything. It made the work so productive.

    But of course enshittification happens, corps get evil, and everything goes down the toilet.

    These days I am degoogling as much as possible and would never choose g-suite again, either personally or for business, but 10 years ago for that small business it was a godsend.


  • The real dress is actually blue and black, yes, but the illustration tries to show how the exact same colours can look different depending on lighting and context.

    In the diagram, the dress on the left is strongly blue and black, while the dress on the right is strongly white and yellow.

    And yet the connected parts of the dresses with the “pipes” between them show the exact same colour on one dress can look like a different color on the other. The “pipe” is there so you can follow it with your own eyes from one side to the other and observe that it is indeed the same colour on both sides, despite looking very different when observed as part of the whole image.

    The point being, how our brains perceive colour is very situationally dependent, and some people assume a different situation than others, hence the differences in perception.

    People tend to believe that vision is absolute, that we all have the same eyes and see the same things, but that’s absolutely not true. The dress phenomenon occurred because It’s not about what your “eyes” see in absolute terms, it’s about what your “brain” does with that information.






  • 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.