I only started eating spicy food regularly maybe 10 years ago (starting with spicy noodles, actually), and at first it was a harrowing experience. Now, I’m much more tolerant to it and things that were at first inedible don’t taste particularly hot at all anymore. My wife got me a variety of dried chili flakes for Christmas which include Trinidad scorpion and Carolina reaper and they’re certainly hot, but tolerable. I think they’d have about killed me 5-10 years ago.

We have a local wings place that has a wing sauce they simply call ‘Diablo’, and every time I order it I’m sitting here crying while I eat them thinking, “Why do I keep doing this to myself?”, but after they’re gone I just want more. It’s weirdly addictive.

Burnout Paradise had a really awesome soundtrack, too. Driving games always pay for the bangers, and it must be a lot of fun to write fake news and whatnot for interstitials.

Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?

Personally, I’d prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There’s plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.

I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I’d argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won’t associate those with lemmy as a whole, they’ll see it as all disparate things, and I’m not really sure how to solve that.

I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable

What do you even imagine that would look like, without degrading the experience for everyone else? Not throwing shade, just curious what you’re thinking of. Like, who is hypothetically paying in these scenarios, and where is the money coming from? I think everyone would agree that if it’s coming from ads or anything similar, nobody is interested.

The best feature of Lemmy is that it isn’t as big as e.g. Reddit. I much prefer the size we have now to some big mega-site. Yes, there’s less content. Who cares? None of us need a constant stream of new content 24/7. It’s OK if you’ve viewed everything on your feed. It’s more reminiscent of forums from the late 90s / early 2000s, especially in the more mid-sized communities. I like that.

Can’t tell if you’re trolling or if you need your sarcasm detector calibrated.

Oh, see, that’s your problem. You’re supposed to put beans, rice, meat, cheese, lettuce, guac and whatever else you prefer inside those the taco shells or tortillas, not tasteless mush. I’m glad we got to the root of the issue.

Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose, even if it’s wrong.

Honestly can’t tell if many of the comments here are serious or satire, and that bothers me a little bit.

You’re distributing copyrighted material so the short answer is “Yes”, but the longer answer is “Probably, but it really depends on a lot of factors that you haven’t disclosed, like your location. It could certainly get you in trouble with MEGA regardless; whether it will get you in trouble with the law comes in large part down to the laws governing wherever you live.”

The chances of anything coming of it are another matter entirely and you may consider it worth the risk if you feel that chance is low enough.

And yeah, you could build your own cheaper.

Notably, though, this is the case with any pre-built PC; the Steam Box isn’t an exception. We don’t know the final price or specs yet but presumably it’s no worse value than buying something from e.g. Dell. Probably better value purely based on it coming with Linux and without the bloatware.

In an unfortunate coincidence, the tables were sorted by the children’s parents’ annual income, so it was the poor kids whose data was lost. That’s why rich kids get more presents.

The cargo company should be prosecuted for littering. Unless they can convince some benevolent locals to go help them clean up the spill.

Pro tip: When pouring, hold your socks over the toilet. The water will spill through the socks, right back into the toilet - and you don’t have to pay anything!

when you actually look for food there are plenty of great places.

This is the key. In my experience, the larger, more obvious places are mediocre, but the small holes in the wall you could easily walk past and never realize they’re there have some fucking amazing food more often than not.

Tangential to the point of the article, but this:

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn’t explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

actually strikes me as the best / sanest form of prepping, as long as everyone does it. Imagine a scenario where the water chemist has a plan to save their town from a contaminated water supply, the electrical engineer has a plan to save their town from a wide-spread power grid failure, the EMT has a plan to save their town from the collapse of the emergency response system, etc., such that no matter what disaster befalls them, someone is there who’s ready to step in and apply their expertise for the betterment of the community as a whole.

Legitimately thought this was on NonCredible Defense until I read your comment and checked where I was.

I still count The Second Dream among the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I agree with you that the only reason it worked is because the game was so plotless until that point, but it’s not like the game wasn’t fun until then - it was just fun for reasons other than story. If the moment to moment gameplay hadn’t been engaging, having the big reveal be tens or hundreds of hours into the experience wouldn’t have worked at all.

The game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is another example of this sort of thing… There’s a moment near the end that hits really hard, and I feel like the whole design discussion for the game focused on that moment and the rest of the game was just a vessel to get the player to the point where it would hit hardest, and it does a great job of that. It’s only a 4 hour experience, though, not a 40+ hour one.

If someone calls up Bank of America’s customer service and asks if they should eat a mushroom they found in their back yard, and the rep confidently tells them “yes”, do you think the response should be “Well, it’s not the rep’s fault you listened to their advice, you should have known that Bank of America isn’t a good source for mycology information”, or “That rep should have said ‘I don’t know, ask someone qualified’”?

I’d argue that it’s at least 50% on the person who gave the advice.

While I understand what you’re trying to say, it should be on the owner of the software to ensure that the AI won’t confidently answer questions it isn’t qualified to answer, not on the end user to review the documentation and see if every question they want to ask is one they can trust the AI on.