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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s worse than that.

    Yes, you can pay for a streak freeze. If you don’t, you’ll probably find that you were given one for free anyhow. You’d have wasted your gems.

    Yes, you can pay to undo a streak loss. It’s more than paying for a freeze.

    It’ll give you multiple chances to pay for all that, too. If you’re out for days and then come back, you can pay to fix your streak.

    What is the point of a streak if you can just buy your way back to it?

    Also, I had paid for the last couple years, which (IIRC) includes free streak freezes. It still asked if I want to pay for them. I’d say no, and find I had one anyhow, or a friend had miraculously given me one.

    But during the last year (365 days) my streak was actually only at 190 or so because I’d used so many streak freezes that I got for free. I wasn’t even trying to keep my streak.

    When I finally let my streak die, the icon started trying to guilt trip me into coming back with horrible icons of Duo being sad, heartbroken, or even dead.

    The constant mental manipulation that was well beyond what gamification should ever be was what finally drove me to just quit playing altogether. I had already canceled my sub long ago, but I’m not even going to use the remainder of this year I’ve already paid for.






  • Small size means a smaller battery. If they make the phone’s processor too powerful, the battery will run out in less than a day, and then everyone will be mad about that. There’s also less surface to dissipate heat.

    Making things smaller is harder and more expensive, but people who want small phones don’t want to pay more than large phones.




  • Right, hence I said “greatly reduces the chances”. I know some people are still affected.

    I think with careful, controlled exposure, they could greatly lessen this feeling (or maybe even eliminate it), but it’d be a long road and I question how important it actually would be to them, so I don’t actually suggest it.

    Personally, I love VR. I’ve always been an avid fan of 3D TV/Games and VR, and I always will be. I long for the day that AR is properly implemented.

    But I also understand that others don’t share that love, for personal or even physiological reasons.




  • First off, I generally don’t worry about DRY until there are 3 instances, not 2. With only 2, it’s really easy to over-generalize or have a bad structure for the abstraction.

    But otherwise, I disagree with the article. If it’s complicated enough to bother abstracting the logic, the worst that can happen in the above situation is that you just duplicate that whole class once you discover that it’s not the same. And if that never happens, you only have 1 copy to maintain.

    The code in the article isn’t complicated enough that I’d bother. It even ends up with about the same number of lines of code, hinting that you probably haven’t simplified things much.






  • A couple years ago I signed up for an email provider so I could use my own domain and avoid Google being able to kill my email account. They’ve got a spam filter, but it’s ridiculously bad. I’ve been looking for better ways, but still haven’t found them.

    Ironically, I’m hoping a free locally-run LLM will soon be able to filter emails appropriately. I haven’t seen anyone trying yet, but I’m sure they’re out there.



  • They’ve been quietly preventing Firefox from becoming a threat for a long time. There are constant little things that just mysteriously don’t work as well on Firefox, for no reason. People have changed the user agent and found that it works just like on Chrome with Chrome’s agent. Youtube was doing it for a while, and reviews on the search are another instance. I was at the Dentist’s and they were asking for a Google review, but I couldn’t find the spot to leave it. I switched to Chrome and it was magically right where it was supposed to be.

    So they already think Firefox could be a threat, and preventing ad-block is going to make it a bigger threat.