In some less common scenarios you may need the ftdi or ch34x drivers. Support for these is usually already in the kernel but if not the ftdi comes with the arduino sdk and the ch34x drivers are available

You would generally only need this for older or super cheap printers, and even then you would generally only need this if you need to reflash the firmware for some reason or refuse to print from an sd/usb. but don’t refuse to do that, even back in the days before wireless printers it was a dumb idea to print via usb

that’s why the internet fucking sucks now. Everyone’s too afraid to make their own site and lazily relies on the conglomerates of social media, which has reduced the internet into like 5 websites that repost each others content

Also seeing isn’t converted to income, especially on instagram. The more hardcore comic fans may want to see your work in full, may want to follow the story if there’s a narrative to your comic, see your arts evolution, etc. and they’re probably the ones that are far more likely to drop cash on merch for a series they enjoy. That’s why you combine the approaches, post comics on instagram or whatever to get the word out, and have a site so your hardcore fans can easily browse your work (with the added bonus of letting people who don’t fuck with social media also see it)

Again, or don’t, I don’t care. Post everything to facebook and twitter, make the internet just 2 websites instead of 5, refuse to have control of the primary platform your work is shared on, whatever

If they don’t want their comics browsed that’s their choice of course but it seems pretty silly. What if instagram deleted/bans their account for nonsense? Goodbye audience and archive of everything you’ve ever done

Used to be you got a free webhosting account and posted comics to a gallery on a shitty handmade webpage until you built up an audience or gave up. If you got bigger you’d move to a better site with a custom domain and new readers could catch up if they were interested. Achewood, gunshow, dinosaur comics, questionable content, xkcd, penny arcade, nedroid, etc all started about this way and many of them continue to this day. Use social media for promotion, not for archival

My guess is they don’t want to bother with people who aren’t willing to fuck with facebook, twitter, pixiv, etc. or they don’t know how to make a free website. Whatever, just means they lose the audience of people who refuse to use facebooks bullshit

Hosting is cheap and there is free hosting available if you don’t care about having a custom domain and have a limited audience. If your audience is big enough to go past that bandwidth you can probably monetize somehow and cover server costs easily, even if it’s just selling a few pieces of merch. My website is $80 a year with a custom domain and I get unlimited transfer/bandwidth. It’s shared hosting so over about 1k visitors per day means it’ll get slow but if you’re getting that kind of traffic you can probably sell more merch and get a vps

Use twitter/pixiv/ig for promotion but if you don’t do the above your locking out anyone who refuses to make account. All of them won’t let you look at more than 1-5 images before locking you out entirely with account nag screens that can’t be bypassed. Or just stay on those platforms, I don’t care, I’ll just never read your comic

What’s with modern webcomics only posting to social media and nowhere else unless someone reposts it? I want an easy to browse gallery. If your comic is only available via instagram/twitter then I won’t read your comic

At 22 I was in an campus apartment which was basically a fancy dorm. I moved back home soon after because I graduated right around 2008 during the housing crisis bullshit and the only jobs I could find until 2010 were minimum wage and part time.

why?

It’s a perspective thing to a degree but it’s also your ability to avoid the crushing weight of reality.

Like approaching 40 I can appreciate that I finally have some money for the things I like, that I have more freedom and wisdom, that I still have the ability to start things, etc

But at the same time there’s the crushing reality. To get that money I trade time and if there’s one thing I miss about being young it’s the amount of free time I had. I just got a bass and I love playing it but I can only do like 20-30 minutes a day and have to skip many days because of life. When I was 16 or even 22 I could often practice drums or piano for hours per day. I could work less of course but that’s not usually an option for most people without changing jobs and also can lead to financial insecurity

Then the even less fun parts of recognizing your body just doesn’t work as effectively. The permanent neck injury I got from work when I was 25 that didn’t bother me as much then is significantly worse now despite physical therapy for years, cortisone, regular strength training, etc. what used to be a stiff neck is now genuine pain that impacts all the way to my shoulders. Knee injury from youth is similar. Then the just unfair bits like my vision deteriorating significantly. It’s not injury related, just lost the genetic lottery.

The cognitive decline as well. I’m still plenty sharp but I can recognize my math processing becoming slightly slower, tripping up my words more often, needing to read things more thoroughly than I did when I was 24 and in grad school, takes me longer to learn things like the bass, my reaction times in videogames are worse, etc. It’s nothing major of course, no family history of dementia thankfully, but it’s part of how the human body works. My job involves assessing people’s neurological state and somewhere in your mid to late 30s starts the slow decline. For some people this will just get to “pretty forgetful, senior moments” and then they die. For others not so lucky they get dementia and have a truly tragic end of days.

But at the same time I do think a sense of optimism is important. I just think it’s important to be rational and realistic about this. Radical acceptance helps here. I can’t get back youth or time lost or whatever, so no sense getting too distraught over it. This applies to youth as well, who may not deal with any of the above but often have their own problems that cloud the potential positives in their life. Anyone can lose their sense of joy and everyone has shit going on. Maybe for them it’s more existential dread, the crushing weight of finding direction, etc. The shift to optimism is that I remember despite the ugliness of reality there are still good times to be had, even if my neck hurts the whole time

This exists, kind of

There’s bonded connections in several senses

Bonded ports but this doesn’t increase throughput in the way you’re thinking. eg if I bond 2 1 gigabit Ethernet ports I can’t connect at 2 gigabits, I can connect 2 users at up to one gigabit each (or several users totaling 2 gigabits but no 1 user at more than 1 gigabit)

bonding routers can take two internet connections and combine them, which is closer to what you are probably imagining. They combine throughput, eg a 100mbit connection and a 100mbit connection become a 200mbit connection although realistically it’s not that perfect and you have to get the right services for it, not just any connection will work, it’s a rabbit hole and generally much slower and worse latency than if you just got a traditional connection. Think people using starlink and 5g internet in rural settings

There’s also something called speedify, which is software that claims to do the above in software alone, bonds two connections to combine throughput. Never tried it, reviews are mixed. Some say it works, some say it’s spotty, some say you only get the speed of the one connection, etc.

That shit goes back way before reddit. It was a problem on digg, on 4chan, somethingawful and other vbulletin forums, Usenet, etc. it will be a problem here and every place that comes after

It’s easier to just agree with the group than do critical thinking. It’s easier to just repost the same stupid tired joke someone else just made than to be clever. etc

They retired, though

I used my old ones a ton. I had the original nook and had been using it for 13 years. I finally upgraded to a newer one with a color e ink screen and I like it a lot. It’s a boox ultra tab c. It was pricey so I wouldn’t get it unless you really read a lot and like e ink

I use it for reading almost exclusively. I read 1-2 books a week and a few volumes of graphic novels/manga per week as well. I have poor vision and the e ink is much easier on my eyes than lcd/oled screens. I can read on this for hours but reading on a traditional phone/tablet/laptop gives me eye strain/headache after a few hours. It’s nice to have a screen you can read with no back or front light. I do use the front light at times but I usually have it off

It’s handy for taking notes and annotations. I’ve read it’s good for drawing as well but I am terrible at drawing so I don’t know. The stylus seems comparable to my friends Apple Pencil except you can use the back as an eraser like an actual pencil

battery life is much better to a traditional tablet - a charge lasts 2-3 days usually, can last longer if I keep the front light off and all the wireless radio stuff off. I’ve gotten it to last a week. It’s a bit heavy bc of the battery though

Wrt color it’s a mixed bag. It’s a very handy feature for manga and graphic novels. But the color panels are new tech so they come with issues; primarily ghosting/image retention. After some time I’ve found an ideal mix of settings to minimize the issue and make the color look as good as possible. The boox os also has a little nav ball that can quickly force a full refresh the screen at any point to remove any retained image. But the color is still not comparable to an lcd/oled by any means

Mine is based on a kaleido3 panel. There’s a newer gallery3 panel that has more vibrant color but with a trade off of noticeably slower refresh rates. It’s not actually an eink panel but something called acep; it was more meant for advertisements/billboards so quick refresh rates weren’t a priority. There’s also no real options for a device with it at the moment aside from one that has real mixed reviews and one that has an open preorder with no eta on delivery as far as I know.

It’s also a somewhat capable android tablet but I don’t really get this part. Like you can run YouTube and games and stuff. But i don’t know why you would bother? It’s workable but not nearly as good. The exception to this is web browsing depending on the site. Heavy text based sites work well in Firefox.

The weather will probably be a lot worse

And maybe PlayStation 6

Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America

Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.

So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.

But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.

Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.

Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.

I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources

But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).

Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem

Comparison of excellent quality vanilla vs excellent quality chocolate should leave you with the takeaway that both are excellent. you may have a preference for one over the other but that’s hardly objective

My personal preference shifts based on mood and (more so) based on quality. Excellent chocolate bar vs budget ice cream that uses vanillin instead of actual vanilla beans? Probably the chocolate unless I’m searching for that nostalgic artificial vanilla flavor. A shitty chocolate snack cake with like 2% actual chocolate and 98% palm oil vs a well made panna cotta? Going vanilla.

Almost any cash only retail business in 2023 is highly suspect outside of some outlier situations like rural markets

Palliative just means relieving symptoms without dealing with the cause of the condition. In this example they might administer medication to lower a spiking heart rate without dealing with the obvious causal factor of the unfinished surgery bc they are not qualified to do so. This would be palliative in nature.

That said “palliative care” is a sub speciality in its own right as you describe

I would imagine there is a contingency plan for if the surgeon becomes incapacitated, eg has an aneurysm/heart attack, so they’d probably do whatever that is

Probably something like palliative care until an on call surgeon can come in and finish out whatever was going on

There were a few professional psychology related subreddits that had moderation that verified licensure to allow posting only by actually professionals and that was pretty nice

There was also askatherapist which was interesting to get unfiltered client perspectives and offer clinician feedback

Morbidquestions was an interesting sub sometimes. 80% of the time it was stupid edgelord bullshit but sometimes someone would ask a really interesting dark question

Creepywikipedia was a good one and is explained by the name

Thank god! I got this one years ago but good to know. It’s built like a fucking tank. I’m pretty sure it will last forever based on that. what I’ve read online seems to confirm it but good to know there’s a backup. Plus anything I can do to avoid Amazon is always excellent

Been to a few psychiatrists and work with a lot as a clinician. For a first meeting you should expect to give a lot of history including familial history, treatment history, substance use history, medication history, diagnosis history, trauma history, developmental history, etc. Skip any that aren’t relevant to you and if you can’t give tons of info that’s okay (eg if you don’t have tons of info on your early development just give what you can, you can skip substance use if you’ve never had issues with it, etc). description of presenting problems including what you’re coming in for but also cooccurring physical issues that may be relevant (eg chronic ailments like diabetes/gerd/migraines) as well as sleep quality.

You may not touch on all of this, it may include other stuff, depends on the doctor. Each practitioner has their own personal approach but those are the broad strokes. Assuming you’re in the USA remember your rights as a consumer: you have the right to know why you are being prescribed a medication, you have the right to know it’s side effects, and you have the right to know alternatives to it. But at the same time remember side effects aren’t always experienced and for some people being aware of them makes them more likely to occur (I am one of those people fwiw)