Hacker News: ridgered4

New comment by ridgered4 in "Vasectomies rose after the end of Roe"

ridgered4 — Wed, 31 May 2023 19:01:48 +0000

My vasectomy left me with life long pain and discomfort, particularly when sitting. This is after a long period of (essentially) torture that had me seriously considering how to commit suicide. The only treatment offered involves cutting holes in my abdomen to draw out and skeletonize the stalks connecting my testicles hopefully killing all nerves. It probably won't cause the testicle to die although there is a small chance the blood supply will fail. Just like there was a small chance of lightning bolts of pain shooting through to my back, warmth spreads and pins and needles down my legs and pain in my hips and lower abdomen so there was no need to impress these possibility onto me. Just the casual mention of the possibility of pain, which I figured would be occasional aching of the testicles.

It remains the worst decision I've made in my entire life.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Stop dumping your cast-offs on us, Ghanaian clothes traders tell EU"

ridgered4 — Wed, 31 May 2023 18:35:12 +0000

I was aware the reduce and renew had been reduced to a whisper and largely forgotten (they reduce consumption after all, recycling is the only acceptable one in are consumption driven world) but I didn't realize some one had actually tried to twist things so they could vilify them.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Systemshock: Shockolate – A minimalist and cross platform System Shock source p"

ridgered4 — Wed, 31 May 2023 18:26:50 +0000

I remember finding the transition from keyboard only duke3d (with ALT as a strafe toggle) to mouselook pretty painful initially. The flexibility was there but I had to relearn a skill which was kind of grating.

New comment by ridgered4 in "The XY Problem (2014)"

ridgered4 — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:36:12 +0000

Frylock: Have you seen my towel?

Master Shake: Just use a paper towel.

Frylock: I'm taking a bath.

Master Shake: They're right in the kitchen, just go get 'em!

New comment by ridgered4 in "Salt Lake 2002 – not enough memory/crashes to desktop after starting error"

ridgered4 — Tue, 23 May 2023 12:42:03 +0000

They also have a collection of old drivers that have become hard to find with time.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)"

ridgered4 — Tue, 23 May 2023 11:59:11 +0000

I remember Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals usually featured her pulling some ingredients she'd already chopped up or soaked in something the night before out from the fridge. Apparently the time spend yesterday didn't count against the clock.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Visa and Mastercard agree to lower average credit card interchange fee below 1%"

ridgered4 — Fri, 19 May 2023 12:42:48 +0000

Only places I've ever seen do this are gas stations. And I've calculated the discount, I've never seen it be more than the cashback I get on gas purchases from my card. Usually, it is way less. And that is without getting into losing the time saving/convenience of paying at the pump.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Windows XP Activation: Game Over"

ridgered4 — Fri, 19 May 2023 12:01:54 +0000

There was an update, Windows Genuine Advantage, that was not part of the original XP installers that did the nagging about you using a shady key IIRC. The trick was to not install it, which was easy enough since you had total control of updates back then.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Windows XP Activation: Game Over"

ridgered4 — Fri, 19 May 2023 11:56:49 +0000

Is it even possible to passthrough ISA to a VM? Legacy PCI is (well-ish) supported with its own quirks but I've never heard of ISA passthrough even mentioned before.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Here’s Why That Rivian R1T Repair Cost $42,000 After Just a Minor Fender-Bender"

ridgered4 — Thu, 18 May 2023 12:22:50 +0000

My experience with old cars and full insurance coverage is if the car repairs cost more than the value of the car they just total it and pay out the estimated sale value of the car. Which isn't great if you were happy with the car.

I remember my boss 15 years ago having an accident that totaled his old but reliable car because the trunk and read bumper were damaged. He bought the totaled car from the insurance company for $500 and just kept driving it. But it was a lot easier to get junker cars inspected back then.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Google will soon let Pixel phones double as dashcams"

ridgered4 — Wed, 17 May 2023 16:40:36 +0000

Seems like it would be pretty heavy data usage pushing all that video up over the mobile network.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Google will soon let Pixel phones double as dashcams"

ridgered4 — Wed, 17 May 2023 15:38:00 +0000

I'd prefer cars just add standardized mount points with power and maybe data lines. Then I could install different cheap products I selected, or none at all.

New comment by ridgered4 in "US Secret Service: “blockchain is an opportunity to track money”"

ridgered4 — Tue, 16 May 2023 19:20:06 +0000

Maybe I'm missing something but since bitcoin is a public ledger and exchanges all have KYC features it seems worse than buying visa gift cards with cash from a privacy perspective. I don't know that much about the crypto space honestly, but it didn't seem to make sense to me it was the go-to currency for criminal transactions.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP"

ridgered4 — Tue, 16 May 2023 18:15:15 +0000

Next lets use it to prevent crime or approve loans. Computer says no.

New comment by ridgered4 in "How much is a smidgen?"

ridgered4 — Fri, 12 May 2023 17:38:21 +0000

My physics text book had metric to imperial conversions and I was surprised to see "mouthful" as the smallest volume measurement.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Google Pixel Fold"

ridgered4 — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:42:17 +0000

True, but diagonal measurements were broadly comparable since for most of TVs existence non 4:3 aspect ratios were really uncommon. It wasn't until HDTV and the broad adoption of LCD monitors that this became really deceptive.

New comment by ridgered4 in "Pure: No more hard drives will be sold after 2028"

ridgered4 — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:37:04 +0000

It is also not at all clear what is needed to "top up" an offline SSD to assure the data is maintained. Some people say that merely connecting the drive to power for a few minutes to hours lets it restore the fading bits but others think nothing but a full rewrite of the data will. I haven't seen any official information or testing on this either so the conservative rewrite assumption seems the most reasonable.

New comment by ridgered4 in "YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers"

ridgered4 — Thu, 11 May 2023 12:07:06 +0000

You can still sell those users' more valuable usage data and they've even coughed up a bunch of personal information to setup payment and have signaled that they have money and are willing to pay for things. So in return for paying they get no ads on this particular platform while getting a target painted on their back.

And if you need more money later you can just convert youtube premium from a no ads platform to a less ads platform. You just have to do it slowly so not to many people bail at once because the pot got to hot to fast

New comment by ridgered4 in "Last Call to Migrate Mojang Accounts"

ridgered4 — Tue, 09 May 2023 12:56:31 +0000

It is almost like it isn't about suspicious behavior at all!

New comment by ridgered4 in "Last Call to Migrate Mojang Accounts"

ridgered4 — Tue, 09 May 2023 12:16:20 +0000

> All this took hours, while the kid impatiently nags "can we play, can we play, can we play"...!! And then it's the /insane/ launch times to start playing... At the very least, once you're in the game (java edition) it all works very well with LAN multiplayer.

I wish this was true for me. My experience was after Microsoft extorted my phone number out of me (for 'verification' of my 10 year old account that I converted) that it now demands a text message 2FA authentication any time I haven't played for awhile. Which since my kids are usually the ones playing means they're usually blocked from starting up again unless I'm home. Which means they kind of just don't play it anymore.

I never wanted a Microsoft account in the first place and I want one even less now.