Can you use pyenv for the script?

Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.

I like to watch sports and, other than soccer, the ads are relentless and so repetitive. When there’s a tournament or playoff, companies will make one annoying ad and show it seemingly every commercial break. Currently, in the U.S. we have a major election so there’s the most vile political ads shown hundreds of times. Those are definitely the worst but online sports betting also recently became legal in many states and their ads are the 2nd worst after political ones in terms of being so dishonest, they should be illegal.

In terms of other type of ads, I hate 99% of outdoor ads. Billboards are literally made to distract you while driving and now they have electronic ones that change even at busy interchanges. If they didn’t already exist and you proposed the idea of putting distracting shit next to busy highways, people would think you were a sociopath.

I relentlessly avoid ads on the web and on streaming services. If I find a service useful, I don’t mind paying to get rid of them. But you can’t really avoid the ones during live TV events or on a road to where you have to drive. (A long time ago, I had a TiVo where the remote had a skip 30 seconds button. That was amazing. Internet wasn’t ubiquitous yet so I could record something live, start watching in the middle, and skip all the ads. I was like a kung fu master with that button. I learned exactly how many times to tap for each type of commercial break.)

I definitely did at a BBQ place near my old office. If you give me a bite of good BBQ, I’m buying what you’re selling.

It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.

For those curious, even the Wikipedia page for “perverse incentive” has a picture of a cobra and that story. It’s something most Econ professors and textbooks will use as the classic example. It’s not the same as the Bengal famine. I just mentioned it as something we learned about India besides “Gandhi was like their MLK” or whatever.

I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.

I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)

A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.

Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.

Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

I was in New Mexico recently and Google Maps gave me a route from Bandelier National Monument to Santa Fe that included a “shortcut” through the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus. I got to meet a security guard.

So, yes. I would say I have experienced this.

I had to move from a dorm to another dorm once and “borrowed” a grocery cart because I had like 12¢ in my checking account and had to just push all my shit in a grocery cart on a major city’s downtown sidewalks on a business day.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

We lived in a house where the previous owners had it exorcised and I’ve never slept better. I’d take living in a cursed/haunted house over a shitty roommate any day.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

In addition to the historic reasons mentioned in the other comments, there’s places facing famine right now that aren’t getting much help and several more countries where we should be preparing for mobilization and aren’t.

Source for that image is the World Food Program’s early warning report: https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000153539/download/

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.

Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.

And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)

My personal opinion (as a dispassionate atheist) is that religion isn’t the problem with human nature. In the U.S., for instance, we have some Christians who have strayed so far, I don’t get how they’ve even seen a Bible verse. But also, basically every major Civil Rights leader was a Christian preacher or woman of faith. There are similar situations everywhere. There’s Buddhists who are so non-violent they wouldn’t kill a fly and other “Buddhists” who commit genocide, which doesn’t even make fucking sense.

So, my view of religion is that it’s mostly not the thing to focus on. People can be organized for good or evil and there’s plenty of secular things where people define an identity. I suspect if religion never existed, we’d have all the same problems. I mean, we have soccer hooligans and it’s not because people object to 22 people getting some exercise on a lovely afternoon. (Or a miserable, rainy Wednesday night in England.)

I get what you’re saying but I like that Lemmy has a left wing bias (with a dash of libertarians). If it was the dominant media site, I’d agree about the echo chamber risk but so much media (in the English speaking world, anyway) is under right wing ownership now. Having a handful of sites that are a refuge from it all is a feature for me, not a bug. It’s an escape from the echo chamber.