Oh, snap, bringing me the magic I need, but didn’t know to look for.

I’ve been refusing to update because of video station. Looks like I’m saving your comment for later.

Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.

And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.

The advice I needed and have not been able to find. I could kiss you. Or at least give you a fond nod.

But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”

I’ve never been a UMH customer, but about 7 months after the breach happened (November), I got a letter from the company handling customer complaints for Change Healthcare, telling me an unbeknown amount of my medical and or financial information was leaked to unknown parties via some unknown method. If I had questions, I could call the company handling customer complaints.
When I called to ask how Change came to be in possession of my medical data, that they then lost, and subsequently failed to inform me of the situation within my state’s statutory notification window for having your data hacked, the representative told me they didn’t know, and would not be able to find out what company had entrusted them with my data.

Ooh. Yeah. Possible exposure. Definitely grounds for testing.

If I’m honest, I think your dad’s logic is sound:
Whether or not your brother has COVID is immaterial to the fact that he has an illness that is likely contagious and is still planning to visit your compromised aunt.
If she’s ill enough that any illness could tip the scales for her, then it doesn’t matter which illness. The real question is why the hell is your brother considering visiting at all.

Not that you’re wrong for asking that, it’s just that your question is superseded by a question that it seems your dad forgot to think about while contradicting you.

Edit: Scratch that. I can’t do words good sometimes.
I re-read your comment. I misunderstood part of your comment. I thought you were saying your brother is visiting your aunt sick, who has cancer. But your aunt is sick with cancer. My whole comment is predicated on a scenario that isn’t happening.

It’s just doing a compatibility check.

You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?

Well, I just realized I completely goofed, because I went with .arpa instead of .home.arpa, due to what was surely not my own failings.

So I guess I’m going to be changing my home’s domain anyway.

I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?

That’s the reason I killed IPv6 on my network.

I think it’s a 737 Max from below, and the engines are pitched forward. Plus if you look close, you can see the plane’s cloaca.

Only when it’s traumatizing.

Things that seem to go well and then later need intervention are the worst.
Suddenly I’m Gandalf: “I have no memory of this place.”

Ooh. I made a New/Classic/Diet/Zero joke with my colleagues last week.
I wish I’d thought of Halo, rather than soda. Your version is much better.

A hairy network issue!

Switch, wig out

The switch (that I’m returning today, after it failed completely yesterday evening) is a bit fancier than your average switch. It kept reverting to default settings, including its default IP address - which meant it was not using the same set of networking instructions as my router, preventing everything it was connected to from accessing the internet.

I had a switch wig out today and whatever it was doing poisoned all the dhcp leases on the network as they came up for renewal (assigned IPs on the wrong subnet - even though it wasn’t supposed to assign IPs at all). It took me a very long time to figure out, because not everything failed at once. Plus, even after I’d swapped the switch, some devices just started working, and others needed their leases reset manually. An hour in, my wife was in the fetal position clutching a squishmallow.

That’s fair. I meant that more in terms of using market dominance to shape the browser market, and not in entirely good ways.

I’ll rue the day that every website insists it only works with Chrome because of some user-privacy degrading feature that Google insists is a core web technology.

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

Shh! We’re supposed to ignore that nearly all power is granted by fiat, and the government hardly enforces its duties to the common citizenry. It’s merely the threat of enforcement that keeps people in line.