[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 26 points 5 days ago

So many people are ragging on this guy, but they don't understand what it's like to have 131 middle managers sing you happy birthday before they go splurge their per diem on two mai tai's and try to get the waitress, who's actually your daughter's age, to drink one.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 149 points 3 weeks ago

My mom taught high school English for decades and she used to tell her students that JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but a terrible author. She dreamed up a really cool world that really resonated with people, but her execution in that world is awful. The biggest place you see this is to lift the curtain on anything, and it crumbles instantly. Time Turners? Unnecessary plot device with massive implications. American wand? Kills Voldemort immediately. Sex ed at Hogwarts? No sex, only snog?

JK Rowling hasn't helped herself with this either, by continuously editorializing. Hermione was always black. Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler. Wizards didn't need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book. When she was starting out, she didn't have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn't need one. It shows. She shat gold once, and in her eyes, it's now gold every time.

Avada Kedavra is dumb. Wizard duels essentially have to follow the be first, best, or cheat rule. The definite death spell makes being best pointless and cheating too slow. You have to go nuclear first and fastest. Also, the defining characteristic is the green flash and no marks on the dead body. In the world of Harry Potter, if nobody sees the flash, and nobody finds the murder wand, every heart attach and brain aneurysm is indistinguishable from the universes ultimate crime.

But, I think things like this are a reason why people love Harry Potter. It's why I did. When you're presented with a world so incredible with an execution that's lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over. I love reading cheap, bad, free-on-Kindle sci-fi and fantasy, because oftentimes the central idea can be really unique, cool, and interesting. The execution can be awful, or sometimes not, but the core idea is usually a diamond. I get to be an archeologist, uncover it, and re-imagine it as I see fit. That's why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive. It resonated so strongly because people had to invest their own imaginations so deeply to make sense of a story that fundamentally doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 95 points 6 months ago

“I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Charlie Kirk sat under a tent that said "Prove Me Wrong" and got shot dead with a bullet in the neck. So either he's right and his death is a prudent deal, or he's a dumbass. The whole situation is so riddled with irony it has to be a joke.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 121 points 7 months ago

I am, of course, disgusted with this choice of Super Bowl halftime performer.

The obvious choice was to have Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get married during the Super Bowl halftime, during which Taylor will not take the Kelce name, killing everyone watching over the age of 65.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 77 points 7 months ago

It's middle school biology!

Okay, but when you get to high school...

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 177 points 1 year ago

Do you think there's a 13 year old girl in Gaza who is writing a diary that will be widely read by children across the world 40-50 years from now?

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 195 points 2 years ago

I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn't mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.

Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 91 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Seems like there's a lack of understanding in this thread.

Someone who owns a duplex and rents half is not a problem. My barber, who moved to be closer to sick, aging parents, but did not sell their house in Asheville, because they want to retire there and won't be able to afford that if they sell now, is not a problem.

Corporations are the problem. They're buying up hundreds of thousands of properties, and why not? To a greedy corporation that only cares about money, it makes sense. If you sell a house, you make money once. If you rent a house, you have a subscription model and a revenue stream. Adobe did it with Photoshop. HP wants to do it with printers. Greedy Bastard Inc. wants to do it with housing.

Legislate big business out of housing. It's the only way to fix it.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 142 points 2 years ago

One of Trump's defense arguments for presidential immunity for any action was that if presidents didn't have it, Bush could be prosecuted for misleading Congress about WMDs, and Obama could be prosecuted for drone strikes against civilians.

Yes please.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 125 points 2 years ago

Just some advice to anyone who finds themselves in this specific situation, since I found myself in almost the exact same situation:

If you really, really want to keep the data, and you can afford to spend the money (big if), move it to AWS. I had to move almost 4.5PB of data around Christmas of last year out of Google Drive. I spun up 60 EC2 instances, set up rclone on each one, and created a Google account for each instance. Google caps downloads per account to 10TB per day, but the EC2 instances I used were rate limited to 60MBps, so I didn't bump the cap. I gave each EC2 instance a segment of the data, separating on file size. After transferring to AWS, verifying the data synced properly, and building a database to find files, I dropped it all to Glacier Deep Archive. I averaged just over 3.62GB/s for 14 days straight to move everything. Using a similar method, this poor guy's data could be moved in a few hours, but it costs, a couple thousand dollars at least.

Bad practice is bad practice, but you can get away with it for a while, just not forever. If you're in this situation, because you made it, or because you're cleaning up someone else's mess, you're going to have to spend money to fix it. If you're not in this situation, be kind, but thank god you don't have to deal with it.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 165 points 2 years ago

It's not homeschooling, it's unschooling.

My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there'd always be a new couple of kids who's parents couldn't quite hack it anymore, so they'd send them to school. But couldn't bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they'd send them to my school instead.

Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don't. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn't do math, and had no social skills. It's how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can't read Dr. Seuss.

I know teachers aren't paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don't, and it shows.

[-] pachrist@lemmy.world 252 points 2 years ago

You can literally fit the entire text on your phone

But not the photos, video, or audio. And I can't serve it to hundreds of millions of people from my phone. This truly one of the stupidest things a tech CEO has ever said.

Building a Plex server with every TV show and movie on Netflix is easy. Distributing that data to 300 million of your friends daily is where the cost is.

Using his ass-stupid logic, Xitter is worth a small box of USB drives I can pick up at Dollar General because the text from every Xeet fits on them? Might actually be true.

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pachrist

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