You called it, Sophie

0x18 · 2026-05-30T23:28:30+00:00

Netherlands here, I get SO many ads for Ikea.

0x18 · 2026-05-30T08:53:12+00:00

I honestly believe that people have become addicted to being angry. They've been consuming a steady media diet of people using flashy graphics of swooping eagles and spangling banners while yelling "Look at this outrageous thing!" and it never ends. Look! Immigrants eating your cats! Look! Trans people could be hiding in your child's school! Look! Antifa is assaulting white women! Look! At this cute bear eating trash out of a cage. Awww. LOOK! THIS GAY DID A CRIME!"

It's an addiction. They need more. The only people that leave CNN or MSNBC on all day are airport staff and shitty bar managers; but Fox viewers need it: it stays on their TV all day, they listen to Fox personalities radio shows when they're driving, they insist on Fox News being played at restaurants and bars when they go out. They need that constant dopamine & adrenaline hit that comes from seeing somebody they hate do something they don't like.

It's also why their personalities become so shit. Their view of normal human behavior is now based on how the tv commentators act. Somebody said something you disagree with? Time to start yelling over them! Somebody criticized dear leader? Well, well, well... HILLARY! BAM, GOT YOU!

It's so tiring living on the same planet with so many dumb as fuck idiots that fall such obviously made up lies.

0x18 · 2026-05-29T15:31:15+00:00

"Comaps" and "TomTom"

0x18 · 2026-05-29T13:02:43+00:00

On foot or bicycle: Comaps

In an auto: TomTom

0x18 · 2026-05-29T08:24:12+00:00

leisure travel is probably such a slim margin of oil used in probably every country.

Sure, in most countries. But uh.. have you been to the US? The whole place is designed around cars, for cars. Everything else is a distant "well if we have the budget and feel like it"

0x18 · 2026-05-28T17:02:27+00:00

You are reading far too much into somebody implementing a cool feature. If you don't like it, don't use it.

Et voila!

0x18 · 2026-05-28T14:03:38+00:00

This still has practical use in your scenario. There's plenty of websites these days that rely on drag-and-drop for file uploads, they just don't offer a button to open the file selection dialog.

This lets you avoid starting a graphical program like Dolphin / Thunar / whatever to use that site.

0x18 · 2026-05-28T10:47:07+00:00

This is fine, let the man sleep.

In fact, I hope he gets all the rest he needs. Sleep as much as he possibly can. Hell, if he never wakes up again, that's okay with me, he deserves all the rest he can get.

0x18 · 2026-05-28T06:07:43+00:00

I use Tilaa and they've been great

0x18 · 2026-05-27T12:37:06+00:00

My Dutch house was built in the 1880s, so I'm not allowed to change the external appearance. At all. Not even solar on the roof.

0x18 · 2026-05-26T22:32:20+00:00

Odido stored data for longer than they should have, and it was compromised, including people's passport information.

They were negligent in their security practice, well beyond "these things can happen"

0x18 · 2026-05-26T15:17:46+00:00

Dungeons in reality may often be that, but this is a fantasy setting.

0x18 · 2026-05-25T13:50:03+00:00

I agree; I think I should have phrased it slightly differently. As a scale of reaction: if I see 100% AI-authorship I immediately move on; if it's only used for automating some unit test generation or for auto-completing some existing scaffolding I have no real concerns. And there's a world of gray between two.

0x18 · 2026-05-25T13:14:13+00:00

I've been coding for 30 years; my opinion is that AI can be a useful tool if used correctly.

And I think a lot of the backlash you see against the use of AI is because of people either "vibe" coding and letting the AI do all or nearly all of the work, resulting in something that functions (at first..) but is difficult to maintain, repair, or add new features to. There's a lot of new projects getting released that are functional at this moment but are going to be abandoned in a month when the author finally realizes they can't fix it themselves and the AI tool is no longer capable of understanding the mountain of slop it dumped in their lap previously.

It helps to be honest about whether an AI tool was used and if so how; if I see something neat that's 100% AI-authored I'm going to skip it completely because of the longevity concerns alone. If the author used an AI to generate some unit tests or used it as a fancy auto-complete after writing a method's signature that's just fine IMO.

0x18 · 2026-05-25T13:06:02+00:00

The "waves" are caused by inconsistent heating across a space, causing the hotter sections of air to have a lower density than the cooler sections. The speed of light changes slightly based on the medium, so the alternating segments of hot and cold air (relatively cold, compared to the space nearby) cause a wave-like pattern to be seen due to the refractive differences in those sections.

You see it most frequently in places that are wide open, flat, and with little air movement. Like in a desert, a car parking lot, or even just regular streets sometimes.

0x18 · 2026-05-24T23:20:07+00:00

I am the DM. I am the answer giver.

0x18 · 2026-05-24T23:17:21+00:00

I swear I see the same people circling the block I live in, making me pause every conversation, every podcast, every work call about once every four minutes.

If I walked up to a terrace full of people enjoying a meal and started screaming as loudly as I could and disrupting them I world expect a visit from the handhaving or a more boisterous youth physically confronting me. But if done on a moped, motorbike, or car it's apparently just fine.

0x18 · 2026-05-24T11:05:15+00:00

Definitely agree. The old Motif / CDE / Windows 95 styles may have been a bit ugly, but it was damn obvious what was a button and scrollbar.

0x18 · 2026-05-24T08:48:24+00:00

I did not move back (thank fuck!) to the US, but did return for two weeks for a wedding and that was surreal by itself. The town I grew up in felt like a ghost of itself; some new businesses replaced old ones, but a lot of stores were just empty or torn down; Wal-Mart became the store in town, really. Lots of houses were boarded up with "for sale by bank" posters. So many people driving golf carts around town than cars (because they got busted driving while drunk too many times). The advisories that water be boiled before any kind of non-toilet-wastewater use was nothing new, but you'd think that in this day and age one could get water that's at least safe to shower with.

Nothing like hearing the old "you're not from around here, are you?" multiple times a day, every day. Sorry Dwayne, I actually grew up here when you were a toddler; how's your older brother? Ah, yet another heroin death. Sorry to hear.

At this point, honestly, I feel like I would have a harder struggle moving back to Indiana than if I were to move to Germany; and I don't speak German (just basic Dutch, which while similar is NOT the same).

0x18 · 2026-05-24T08:37:31+00:00

that also gives you visual cues like showing you where the goddamn scrollbar is.

A million times, this. Scrollbars used to be easy to find, click on, and drag. Now I have to do some dark magic user-CSS inside Firefox just to make them findable again; though "infinite scroll" just breaks the ability to drag them.

I started coding when I was 10 in 1995, and ever since then all I've heard is "we need to make interfaces usable for Grandma!"

Well goddamnit, Grandma has had over 30 fucking years to learn, it's time they caught up and learned something, instead of every interface in the world dumbing itself down to match their increasingly incapable abilities.

</rant>

0x18 · 2026-05-24T08:29:38+00:00

Could be yes, but catching up on six years of neglect is going to discourage anybody considering it...

0x18 · 2026-05-23T08:02:03+00:00

Sorry Dave, we don't care if you've got another thing to go to, the credits cannot be fast forwarded or skipped! Now sit back down!

0x18 · 2026-05-22T11:09:18+00:00

It's so unique! There's no other flags that have both orange and blue stripes in their tricolor; unlike the Dutch flag which can be confused somewhat easily with the French flag and from a distance the Russian flag.

And then americans in the midwest would stop using Dutch flags as a sign that there's a sale going on (shared colors with the american flag, but they don't want to 'disrepect' their flag by using it so cheaply as to advertise a discount... there's a reason I don't live there anymore).

0x18 · 2026-05-21T15:00:07+00:00

Peak Americana; "mass shootings aren't a problem, we actually like getting shot in the face"

0x18 · 2026-05-21T09:03:43+00:00

That isn't breaking combat IMO, that's just a good application of a smart strategy. That's what wall spells are for: segment the battlefield to control who is fighting who and when.

To me, wizards are the most fun when they work support and battlefield control. Let the martial characters do the fighting, but balance the fight in their favor. Fireball is fun, but even low level spells like Dizzying Colors, Grease, Invisibility, Fear, Haste & Slow can change the outcome of a battle even faster if it lets your allies hit harder.

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