MetaFilter

I really don't understand the market for this stuff. There's no way I'm taking advice on ANYTHING from a chat bot.
posted to MetaFilter by Silentgoldfish at 2:52 AM on April 11, 2024

Moonorail!
posted to MetaFilter by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:17 PM on March 21, 2024

If only Americans were able to build reliable high-speed trains here on Earth...
posted to MetaFilter by nikoniko at 5:43 PM on March 21, 2024

I got into an argument around age 9 or 10 at Catechism class when I refused to believe the Noah’s ark story as stated - I mean, there are some practical issues here. The priest kicked me out of class and made me stand in the hall until my mom came to pick me up. Thanks Father Blueballs you saved me a lot of time becoming an atheist.
posted to MetaFilter by whatevernot at 4:01 AM on February 7, 2024

Knights In Software Services
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 3:22 PM on December 3, 2023

it's a whole hell of a lot to learn for a job that probably pays minimum wage

You can spot the people in this thread who've never worked retail or food service.

Y'all, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. There is only undervalued and underappreciated labour. These jobs are hard and they take real skill to learn and do well.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 4:43 AM on November 11, 2023

Bankman-Fried convicted on seven charges, faces maximum sentence of 110 years.

def _get_sentence() -> decimal:
return f2d(numpy.random.normal(2, 110))
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 5:39 PM on November 2, 2023

This was such sad news to wake up to this morning.

About 10 years ago he visited the UK government department I work for to speak about his experience as patron of a drug court charity. By a curious coincidence everyone in the room was a (then) 30-something Friends fan… when he came in, the room silenced then there was an audible gasp as we realised Chandler Bing was among us. He gave us a withering look and said “you all need to calm down”. In retrospect I realise what... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by greycap at 1:17 PM on October 29, 2023

I have a mental disorder that places me at a high risk of suicide (I was even an inch away from jumping off one of Portland's bridges last year), and I still don't really understand why it's society's job to keep me from offing myself when I feel the time is right. Society is perfectly happy to let me starve to death, or freeze to death, but when it comes to actually taking my life in my own hands, then it's time to get involved? San Francisco should start taking care of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cmonkey at 11:39 AM on July 31, 2007

Surely some of the anger ought to be directed the ex-owners/founders who sold it to Epic Games in the first place. Once a business enters the world of acquisitions, there's no telling where it will end up, no way to assure its future for its users.
posted to MetaFilter by timdiggerm at 7:20 AM on September 29, 2023

Wait, there are people who solely use the bandcamp online streamer instead of downloading the files the second bandcamp provides a link? Weeeeeeird. Life's rich pageant, indeed.
posted to MetaFilter by Kyol at 6:37 AM on September 29, 2023

5 Fall On Me
4 Losing My Religion
3 Driver 8
2 You Are the Everything
1 Leave

Basically it’s Leave and then I had to go figure out what the other four would be.
posted to MetaFilter by Mister Moofoo at 6:23 AM on August 13, 2023

"Radioactive Drew" has seen Oppenheimer 17 times, with 78 more to go. He is a 70mm projectionist and takes us through the very physical and by no means hazard-free process of setting up the film (as per his name, he is also an expert on radiation - so his criticism of the movie, at the end, is worth a listen).
posted to MetaFilter by rongorongo at 10:47 PM on August 2, 2023

why are people going to Blue Sky over Mastadon?

From my understanding, each Mastodon server is run by its own sysadmins who are almost all volunteers, almost all footing the bill themselves or crowdsourcing money. That doesn't seem very stable to me. Not that Twitter is stable, but I've been on that platform for 14 years and leaving it for something less stable didn't appeal to me. Each Mastodon server can talk to each other, except if the sysadmin... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kimberussell at 1:57 PM on July 31, 2023

I don't know the source, but I saw a screengrab of an interview where she said: "'Oh, you fucked up your career' but they're talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance."

.
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 11:56 AM on July 26, 2023

What will replace 'Tweets'?

'X increments' — Xcrements for short, of course — would seem to be appropriate as long as Musk owns it.
posted to MetaFilter by jamjam at 2:53 PM on July 23, 2023

The Enigma Machine: Communicate a critical defect via a cellphone photo of a computer screen showing, among other things, the application in question, a browser with 20+ tabs running, and an email client with its Inbox displayed, all pasted into a Powerpoint slide which is inexplicably embedded into a Word document, uploaded to Sharepoint, and then communicated via a link which requires a login to download.
posted to MetaFilter by Kadin2048 at 7:50 PM on July 6, 2023

Heh. Reading the ModCoord thread I can’t help but note that /r/Conservatives has been staying open to own the libs (ShockedPikachu.gif), yet /r/guns has opted to remain dark indefinitely.

Conservatives say they’ll never give up their guns, but Steve Huffman is so awful he got guns to give up on conservatives.
posted to MetaFilter by Ryvar at 8:58 PM on June 13, 2023

The company has apologized and said the ad was posted by a new hire at the company.

Unless accompanied by a "we're horrified and vehemently deny that our business would support such a policy" that seems more like "we're sorry our new HR person didn't read the part that said these were supposed to be secret hiring criteria and people got upset" than a genuine apology.
posted to MetaFilter by Nerd of the North at 1:20 PM on April 5, 2023

Oh hi, it’s me, MeFi’s own Roald Dahl expert. (That’s my website roalddahlfans.com linked up at the start of the thread.) I found out about the proposed changes last month with The Telegraph got me on a phone interview and were clearly hoping I’d take the bait and turn into this McSweeney’s caricature. I resisted the urge. Look, I’ve been running that website for 28 years. Dahl was a terrible person. Towards the end of his life his editors had a hell of a time toning down... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by web-goddess at 3:48 PM on March 12, 2023

just gonna leave this evergreen quote from rooya_boolya here:

→ I sometimes think that HIGNFY was a key element in the ascent of Boris Johnson to power by normalising him and allowing him to hone his rakish buffon persona.

posted to MetaFilter by scruss at 9:57 AM on March 8, 2023

Bandcamp's end-of-year lists are among the most thoughtful and interesting out there, and include the bonus of being able to listen to almost every album in its entirety for free. They gave up numbered ranking a couple of years ago and the lists are full of primo stuff:

The Best Albums of 2022: A – D
The Best Albums of 2022: E – L
The Best Albums of 2022: M – Q
The Best Albums of 2022: R- Z

The best-ofs by... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mediareport at 4:57 PM on January 1, 2023

I think, to a large extent, Ratzinger gets the hate he does because he was ugly and fit our shallow pop culture image of a villain.

And, also, simply because he was the Pope to follow JP2, who was for many people the only Pope who had ever existed and who had an undeserved reputation for being a nice person.

Which made it possible to start assigning blame to him for policies that have been Catholic policies since forever, and which many people... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sotonohito at 6:59 AM on December 31, 2022

From the guardian obit

Benedict was a theological conservative, holding uncompromising positions on homosexuality and contraception. He had strongly opposed liberation theology, a radical movement that began in South American in the 1960s and advocated clerical social activism among the poor and marginalised.
.....
In April 2019, two months after Francis convened a groundbreaking Vatican conference on sexual abuse, Benedict published a 6,000-word... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 5:25 AM on December 31, 2022

Assistive tech for a lot of people often is smartphones, and while yeah, it's not an awesome feeling for your show to get recorded, or just for someone to be using a phone during a performance, maybe it'd be a better idea for people working in theater to resist the urge for righteous indignation in the middle of a performance. Theater people of anyone ought to know that everyone has their own story.

Follow up quietly if you must, but please, people... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Aleyn at 11:41 AM on October 17, 2022

I've been interviewing candidates from India lately over remote calls. We've encountered:
a) People ending the call as soon as we ask them to turn on their camera,
b) People quickly googling answers for every technical question we ask,
b) People being fed answers by someone off-screen,
c) People flapping their mouth while someone off-screen actually talks. This last one has happened twice! The first time we only caught it because the person who was... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Eddie Mars at 12:53 PM on October 12, 2022

If we taxed the churches and used the proceeds to fund universal healthcare, perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone...
posted to MetaFilter by schyler523 at 12:01 PM on October 7, 2022

I'm sure Samantha's taking it hard.

.
posted to MetaFilter by daveje at 1:20 AM on January 28, 2022

Software Freedom Conservancy: Trump's Group has 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminated Finally, it's worth noting that we could find no evidence that someone illegally broke into the website. All the evidence available on the Internet (as of 22:00 US/Eastern on Thursday 2021-10-21) indicates that the site was simply deployed live early as a test, and without proper configuration (such as pre-reserving some account names). Once discovered,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by the antecedent of that pronoun at 12:08 PM on October 22, 2021

I know someone who for a while was doing great with Instacart. They could work without abusive bosses (they used to be a chef before their restaurant closed at the beginning of the pandemic) and make their own schedule, etc. Then they made a mistake and accidentally accepted an order they had to drop—they didn't notice it would have taken them halfway across the city—and it was one time too many. They were dropped from the platform without recourse. It was a crushing blow for them. That was just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by limeonaire at 3:23 PM on September 23, 2021

Why the hell does Instacart even exist? It's highly inefficient, exploitative by design, and just a dumb waste of resources to send people into a store with a shopping list to purchase items that may or may not be available and pay for them using the normal checkout line.

The local grocery chain just opened up a ghost store that's entirely devoted to online orders and delivery. They have control of the inventory, they can optimize the fulfillment, they don't have to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 3:04 PM on September 23, 2021

Getting tested weekly is a pain in the ass, and for your employer, even if the test is free, is a pain to track and enforce. Having you get your shots takes a lot less effort.

And it puts a clear penalty on being That Guy who causes extra problems at work. You can't hide in the crowd of people who may or may not be vaccinated.
posted to MetaFilter by emjaybee at 8:14 AM on September 10, 2021

Always enjoyed ZZ Top's music. But I will always think of them in connection with Simpsons episode "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" where the opening of Legs is used for a parody Super Bowl ad for the Catholic Church that was removed from repeat airings of the episode.



.
posted to MetaFilter by nubs at 8:59 AM on July 29, 2021

This section of the article absolutely nails it:

...“We’re actively trying to sign bands,” he says. “I’m desperate to find a really young band that I can help develop.”

The problem is, he says, there aren’t that many around. “It’s more likely now that a kid will make music in isolation because of technology. When I first met the 1975, they were all friends meeting in a room to make noise. So much is done in bedrooms these days, so you’re... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by deadaluspark at 12:31 PM on March 21, 2021

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.
posted to MetaFilter by signal at 4:42 PM on March 5, 2021

I wonder how many other classic Simpsons moments are in the block of episodes that get referred to as Zombie Simpsons?

I would say that as with empires, the fall of The Simpsons can't be localized to a single moment in time, and importantly as with empires the decline was not gradual and inexorable but rather stochastic. Stupid Sexy Flanders, Pinchy the lobster, President Lisa, and Skinner's lesson on invasive species management... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by saturday_morning at 7:34 AM on December 10, 2020

If you login (linking your Twitter account)...

I miss when you could have a self-contained account on a website. A hundred different usernames and passwords is better than the tracking horror we have now.
posted to MetaFilter by Dysk at 9:49 PM on December 8, 2020

Big breath. Here we go
posted to MetaFilter by wheelieman at 7:26 AM on November 3, 2020

When I first arrived in the US my then girlfriend, now wife, took zonked me to breakfast. I just wanted some bacon and toast. Then I got the bacon and it was US bacon by which they took the good part of the loin off and left me with the fat. But the toast. I asked for white bread, just wanting something simple. I took one bite and thought that they mistakenly put syrup on the bread.

Nope. Plain white bread. But it was sweet for some god forsaken reason.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:22 PM on October 1, 2020

emulsified high-fat offal tube

I'll thank you to stop quoting my business cards.
posted to MetaFilter by Mr. Bad Example at 12:14 PM on August 5, 2020

turns out the conservatives talking about needing guns to protect themselves against jackbooted government thugs was just them projecting again
posted to MetaFilter by entropicamericana at 12:24 PM on July 17, 2020

In around 1997, I worked at an ISP in the 24/7 helpdesk center. Brand new building, pretty heavy security systems on the entrances (because people get PISSED when their dial-up doesn't work, but also because there were people there around the clock in a pretty new office park with nobody else around at night). I worked second shift 3-midnight, still the best work schedule I've ever had, and we were a pretty small crew, but day shift was clearly way bloated.

One of my... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Lyn Never at 8:46 AM on June 30, 2020

I’ve had to fire a number of employees over Zoom in the last two months (myself and a HR person on with each person individually for 30 mins - though I’d drop at some point to allow the person to ask confidential questions on medical benefits etc and get their individual severance package communicated to them). It sucks - even more so then firing someone in person. We had a company direction it needed to be done over Zoom for (insert vague reasons) but we made it absolutely clear that the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by inflatablekiwi at 7:58 AM on June 30, 2020

“We really wanted people to go metric,” Dennis says, “but that's a different kind of battle.”

Ah yes, brings up a bit of nostalgia for another time when Americans chose making farting noises with their armpits over joining the rest of the world and streamlining things.
posted to MetaFilter by RobotVoodooPower at 9:59 PM on July 3, 2020

There's an old Soviet joke:

Q: What's the difference between a capitalist fairy tale and a Marxist fairy tale?
A: A capitalist fairy tale begins, "Once upon a time, there was....". A Marxist fairy tale begins, "Some day, there will be...."

I think you just swap them round now.
posted to MetaFilter by fearfulsymmetry at 8:24 AM on July 6, 2018

The Guardian interviewed him just a few months ago. Good to know he was still active right till the end. Here he is as Yorick in Branagh's film of Hamlet (briefly seen in flashback round about the 1:31 mark). 'A fellow of infinite jest' indeed.

I went to the Ken Dodd Happiness Show at the Futurist Theatre in Scarborough (now sadly about to be demolished) nearly twenty years ago, in the company of a group of family members including my father-in-law, a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by verstegan at 6:47 AM on March 12, 2018

Maybe the best critique of Justin Timberlake is to note that Prince is two years dead and still more interesting.
posted to MetaFilter by ardgedee at 7:48 AM on February 7, 2018

In later life, Prince returned to (became?) being a Jehovah's Witness and seems to have been, yes, kinda anti-gay, per the linked essay in The Root. People don't like to talk about this. I mean, I don't think he was at all evangelical about his beliefs, you have to give him that; if you're going to be kinda anti-gay, keeping that to yourself is the best way to go.

My own feeling is that I'm not thrilled about this fact, and not... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 7:16 AM on February 7, 2018

I’m sorry, while I get the argument that Strava’s users should be smarter and not sync their data (or mark it public) if they’re concerned about this - I still think that Strava has a responsibility not just to adhere to the minimum requirements of its terms and conditions, but to help people protect themselves. It’s possible to identify the start and end of individual runs on this map, since presumably - like me - they rarely change up their routes. I just don’t think Strava should have done... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adrianhon at 3:28 PM on January 28, 2018

Exhibit A: the Tesco Just Ham Sandwich comprising bread, ham, and nothing else, yet supposedly "developed with care by dedicated sandwich chefs". 'Nothing terribly fancy' is still very much an option.

The "dedicated sandwhich chefs" must be the people who put together the ham (sorry, the reformed ham) sandwich from this impressive list of ingredients:

Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 1:51 AM on November 24, 2017