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Why do people throw out old motors, bicycles, anything metal into rivers and lakes instead of a junk yard or the trash system?
  • Junk also tend to accumulate in rivers and lakes. Once it's in there it's out of sight, out of mind - and even if you know it's there it is often difficult to remove.

    When it finally gets cleaned up by bringing in the magnet or a barge to dredge it up or whatever, you're seeing years if not decades of stuff that's getting pulled out all at once.

  • Notes from a year of reading science fiction and fantasy [potentially minor spoilers]
  • With David Brin's Uplift books, I'd just start with Startide Rising. It's not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There's a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you're not really missing anything if you haven't read it going into Startide Rising.

    While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn't that good. It's not really bad per se, but it was David Brin's first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It's also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.

    I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I'll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.

    The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it's more of another standalone book that's set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn't as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you'd probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren't going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I'd say once is enough for books 4-6 too.

  • Why people are boycotting Asus all of a sudden? Asus outrage explained
  • That's my experience with Asus going back over 25 years now. To me, Asus has always been substandard products sold at premium prices. If I wanted a substandard motherboard, I'd buy ECS and save a bunch of money. And to be fair to ECS, I've had some of their boards that have worked just fine, which is more than I can say about the Asus stuff.

  • If it works, kill it.
  • The old Podcast app was simple, it did one thing, and it did it well. YouTube Music seems to be trying to do a dozen different things, and it does a shit job of all of them.

  • 12TB for $80 - serverpartdeals.com
  • It certainly could. That's the gamble you're taking.

    I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.

  • Any out there running Windows XP in 2024?
  • I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn't have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.

    That's all I use that computer for, so it's otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven't had to do any fixes or workarounds.

  • What are some good games with *zero* replayability?
  • For me, it wasn't just the story, but also just randomly going out and exploring, checking things out, and finding cool (and sometimes scary) things.

    It's one of those games that I'm hoping in like 10 years or something I'll have forgotten enough of it that if I go play it again it'll be mostly all new again.

  • What software you consider so bad it made you happy when you left your job?
  • We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren't too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.

    I'd say it's different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.

  • Has Google’s search results drastically declined for anyone else?
  • DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.

    And yes, I would say it's better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.

  • And I don't plan to switch back either. Everything is just better on Linux for me
  • I've never been a fan of dual booting myself. The computer just ends up spending all of its time in one OS or the other. Plus Microsoft doesn't seem to like to play nice with your bootloader.

    I just started using Linux on secondary computers. Once I had gotten things down so the experience was smooth on those machines, moving the main desktop from Windows to Linux was pretty seamless.

  • Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
  • It's not the nitrogen that kills you, it's the lack of oxygen.

    This method of suffocating someone would work just as well with a gas like helium or argon. It's just that nitrogen is cheap and plentiful for reasons even someone as dimwitted as you can probably figure out.

  • What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish?
  • That's one of the reasons I lost interest as a kid, as I really didn't know what to do and you could totally wander into an area you just weren't ready for yet. For that reason, I liked FF2 (FF4 everywhere else) as that one pretty much guided you along on rails.

  • What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish?
  • I was thinking about that game as I was scrolling this thread. That's one I should revisit myself. I played that game a lot when I was younger, but managed to never complete it as I always lost interest sometime during the World of Ruin.

  • You had to hold it up to a candle.
  • In 1993, computers were just starting to get CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs were pretty exotic technology. Being able to burn CD's really didn't really go mainstream until the very late 90's.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TO
    toddestan @lemmy.world
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