Sam Bingner

I guess I’ll let people know I have a Patreon in case anybody feels like contributing to it. I never liked people asking for donations, so I’m not... but if anybody feels they would like to help support my work on Elucubratus etc, this is available for you patreon.com/sbingner?utm_m…

@bscholl How about “kill two stones with one bird”, and “more than one way to skin a person?”

We need alt phrases for “kill two birds with one stone” and “more than one way to skin a cat” that don’t involve being cruel to animals

@superjude81 @goldnpersephone Anybody who says “please and thank you” I don’t talk to if I can avoid it, it’s being presumptuous and rude.

@goldnpersephone I usually start with a pleasantry. How are you today? I would like... please and thanks😊

When you order at a restaurant or food place, do you say: Can I get [ food ]? Or do you say: I’d like to get [ food ]. I realized I order food differently that my kids and husband. Trying to see something here.

@shebringsjoy You should make it turn on at a time when you always want it to stop, otherwise if you forget to turn it on she will have it off until midnight

So…. The answer has been; I set her birthdate to 2020, meaning according to the iPad she is 5. It will be 8 years, when she is already in adulthood, before she has control of this iPad without my permission. Downtime is set to 12am to 11:59 pm, meaning I must manually toggle downtime off if she is to use it at any point during the day except for one minute before midnight. I left the calendar, camera, and books available when downtime is set, meaning she can use these three items at all times. Even these only have a 1 hour daily time limit. I was able to remove almost every app I didn’t want. For the items which I can’t remove, like Apple News, I just made them available for 0 seconds each day. This took a while, but only because I was unfamiliar with the process and had to keep going online to seek out answers. To someone who is familiar with an iPad it would have taken about 5 minutes.

@ThrillaRilla369 @greg16676935420 Hmm next time we should offer to allow them to round down and we will donate the difference to the normal price.

@greg16676935420 I am tired of grocery stores asking me if I want to round up to end world hunger. You're a $10 Billion dollar corporation. I'm out here using a coupon to save fifty cents on a bag of potatoes. Why don't YOU donate to end world hunger.

Why in the world would you tip after winning on a slot machine?

@Cryptavocato @ChrisPacia Whoever forced the horrible thing would be killing people.Red or blue button pushers are picking “maybe I live and maybe keep this evil org from killing a bunch of people, or maybe I die” and “I live” - neither choice results in the button pusher being culpable.

@ChrisPacia It sures takes a lot of words to rationalize red. Blue simply refuses to kill people.

One more attempt at articulating why the red button pushers view the blue button pushers as so irrational. Let's say your options are this: Red Button: Nothing happens to you. Blue Button: Kills you instantly. If everyone is confronted with that choice, why would anyone push the blue button? Would we not expect 100% of people to push the red button? Now if you change the terms and add a proviso that the blue button pushers will be spared if a majority of people push the blue button, wouldn't your reaction be: "Ok, well. We've already established that nobody's going to push to Blue Button so this shouldn't change anything for anyone". If your reaction suddenly becomes "Omg we need to organize a campaign to get everyone to push the blue button and you're Hitler if you push red" ... Its like.. um what?

Whoever came up with "instead of a password you can save, we will email you a 'magic link'" should be launched into the sun

@Queeneth01olx You didn’t learn to not run a loud generator at midnight after the second or third time? Perhaps she was exasperated from constantly having to ask you that then annoyed when you complained about noise in the middle of the day instead of at midnight like she had to do? 🤷

My neighbor knocked on my door at 12 midnight to complain that my generator was disturbing her sleep. I apologized and turned it off immediately. Not once. Not twice. Multiple times. Each time, I kept apologizing. Then last Saturday, her son played music from his new purchase JBL speaker so loud my walls were vibrating. So I went over and knocked. She opened the door smiling, like we were friends. I said, The music is too loud. Can you reduce it? Her face and mood changed instantly. She said I was being hostile. She said she's always been a good neighbor to me. I didn't argue. I just said, Okay and walked back inside. Since that day, she stopped greeting me. Four years of daily greetings. Gone. All because I asked for the same respect I gave her. That’s when it hit me: Some people only like you when you’re easy to control. The moment you set a boundary, you become the problem. And if asking for basic respect ruins the relationship, maybe it was never respect to begin with. Have you ever lost someone just because you stopped accepting the bare minimum?

@realteaemoji AI/ML

can tech people explain why autocorrect, grammar and spell check, and predictive text have gotten noticeably much worse on every one of my devices in the last ten years please

@PNW_working_mom I don’t understand why this is radical, this is just normal… except for the tipping at bus your own table places, why would you tip there?

I’ve started doing something radical. I no longer tip anything for drive thru restaurants or takeout. Zero dollars. Not even a SINGLE dollar out of guilt. Nothing. And I’m skimpy af at bus your own table places. Join me. It’s the only way.

@hkhayford @tanylake Still far too overpriced. I’d pay $50 or even $100 for a perpetual lightroom license but no more.

If you're not doing heavy retouching and editing professionally, I'd highly recommend premium Lightroom for mobile instead. It's only for your phone (I'm not sure if it would work on an iPad too, I can't recall), but it's more like $50 for a year, much easier to learn, but still allows for a great deal of selection and wide arrange of effects.

This is what's happening to YouTube. This is one of my most popular videos. It's how to fix a UEFI bootloader. As you can see the traffic has been cut in half over the last 6 months. But if you Google how to fix a UEFI bootloader, Gemini will give you my exact step by step process. Even the commands it cites are copied directly from my video. I got no royalty payments and don't even get a link to the original video. I simply lost the traffic and Google is able to provide more value from stolen content. AI is going to destroy the content industry on the internet and when it's gone, there will be nothing left to train the AI. Since AI can't come up with anything original it relies on stolen content and it can't steal what doesn't exist if it puts creators out of business.

@BScottAnderson @CedraCrenshaw I think he said homeschool when he mean private school? Makes no sense otherwise.

@CedraCrenshaw How would it drive up cost to homeschool for those who already buy very little in homeschooling? New demand for education service offerings simply encourages new entrants to provide more offerings, leading to a vibrant market. The existence of these offerings do not hurt you.

Politician: I'll give you the $14,000 that would have been spent on your child in public school Homeschooler: It doesn't cost $14,000 to homeschool a child. Many families spend less than $1,000. Politician: But don't you want the money? Homeschooler: No Politician: Why don't you want the money? Homeschooler: First, it's government money. Second, strings are attached. Third, it's bloated with waste that drives up prices. Politician: Then what do you want? Homeschooler: I want you to stop stealing my income in the form of property taxes for public schools that I don't use and just leave me alone. Politician: But if I did that, I wouldn't be able to make you a dependent, controllable part of my voter base. Homeschooler: exactly chooseeducationindependence.com/resources/

@adxtyahq Ok what about the big problem here…. 43c per api call? Seriously?

A USER SET A $10 BUDGET ALERT, WOKE UP TO A $25,672 GOOGLE CLOUD BILL. • Around 60,000 unauthorized API requests happened overnight • Requests came from a key not found in the project • Support advised disabling billing, which wiped the logs • The user was then asked to prove the account was hacked • Account tier was silently upgraded, bypassing the spend cap • Charges were later waived, but no clear explanation was given

@tomfgoodwin Can’t fake the log book, to validate it you can check with the notary that validated it to make sure they did it.

In the USA we have a thing called a Notary. You take very important documents to be signed, show ID, make an oath, it's very significant as fraud prevention Except that all they do is stamp it with ink, like it's the 1300's. Could anything BE easier to fake? The world is wild

@om_patel5 Of course running photorec would have done the same thing 20 years ago

THIS PERSON USED CLAUDE CODE TO RECOVER 20 YEARS OF LOST DATA after losing files on crashed drives for 2 decades, she bought a 16TB NAS (home server for storing files) loaded claude code onto it and pointed it at 5 corrupted hard drives claude actually reviewed the files, and there were hundreds of thousands of loose unfoldered files scattered across dead drives then it reconstructed the original folder structures by inference. figured out what went where just by reading the contents consolidated everything into one clean master library with built in backup she said it herself, "i couldn't pay a human being to do this amount of work" 20 years of lost photos, videos, documents, and projects rebuilt in one run data recovery companies charge $5000+ for this and still miss half of it when Claude Code can do it in an hour

@HealthRanger mogas, or if you want it short “gas”

Here in America we really have to stop calling gasoline "gas." It's not a gas. It's a liquid (as we typically encounter it). And it's not natural gas, which is actually called "gas" globally. Plus, when we say "gas" it confuses all the Europeans, but that's only a bonus. On top of all that, we say people "have gas" which actually does mean something gaseous, but has no resemblance to the "gas" we put in our cars. And then finally, to really confuse everybody else, we have "gas" stations and food convenience stores coupled together so that you can literally, "Eat here and get gas" which is often true but confusing. What's a better name for gasoline in the USA? (Please don't say "petrol" because that just sounds too faggoty...)

@Ric_RTP I wish any of this was news, they literally list this in amazon’s listing requirements… 😞

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more. Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged. Here's what happened: Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it." And the exact emails are now PUBLIC. Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem. The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately." Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call. Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price. Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed. Same playbook with Hanes: Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased." Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins. But it gets even worse... Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site. Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing. They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS. The mechanism is simple but terrifying: If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers. Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings." Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products. Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform. So turns out, you were never comparison shopping. You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors. "Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable." 3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on. This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat. And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE. "Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

Crazy story out of Qatar: A British couple honeymooned in Doha, where the wife was harassed at the Ritz-Carlton pool by two men who told her she'd "fall in love" after he slept with her. The hotel gaslit her, with management denying the CCTV backed her story despite their own WhatsApp messages saying the opposite. Her husband posted a TripAdvisor review calling the hotel "unsafe for women." The hotel got it pulled, then a hotel employee filed a defamation complaint against him under Qatar's cybercrime laws. Nearly a year later, when he returned to Qatar for work, he was detained, informed he'd been tried in absentia and fined, and then held for four nights in a deportation centre. The deportation order lasts five years, which severely hurts his career as a Middle East healthcare consultant. In other words, Marriott International, an American company, used Qatari law to silence a complaint about a woman being sexually harassed at their property.

@eternallydxmned What do you have against water conservation?

hot take. i dont think public restrooms need urinals at all. men use a regular toilet perfectly fine at home they dont need a urinal

@saraaa7447 Hard pass

having it on the website is too hard or what?