We use VPNs at work a lot for protecting traffic as it passes over the public internet between distant sites. From a security perspective, it’s better not to give devices direct access to the internet if they don’t actually need it. That’s stuff we’re running ourselves though; not a commercial VPN service we’re paying for.

I liked the UI when I first encountered it, but it being invite-only killed what interest I had in it pretty quick during the 2023 reddit exodus. Seems to still be invite only in 2026.

I wonder how they’d take to being called “morbidly rich”? 🤔️

Sounds like we’ve followed similar paths in cooking. :p

Did you ever try Isaac Toups’s chicken and sausage gumbo recipe? That’s another good, hearty cold weather dish. I think this was the video on YouTube that I learned it from. (I usually prefer to do it with just chicken though personally.)

Mmmm chili…

The best I’ve made at home was a variation on one of Kenji’s recipes – this one, I think?

I talk to my Dad about once a week or so for maybe 20 or 30 mins. Usually just “How’s it going?” kind of small talk. Work. Health issues. Sometimes about food or hobbies. Commiserating about politics. Updates about relatives moving/getting jobs/etc. Things like that. Helps us both stay sane in this crazy world.

Once a month or so, I talk to my uncle. He’s more chatty, so those calls go on for longer. He likes to tell me bits of family lore, about his interests in detail, about food and his pet and what’s going on with his friends and neighbors – like trips he’s taken with them to go out shopping and such.

My other relatives don’t talk to me very often, so those are more of life catch-up talks every couple months/years or conversations about specific things that I have skills in that they’d like help learning.

Maybe try asking your mom what’s on her mind lately – other than you – and take it from there? Most people love to talk about themselves if given a chance. Ask questions about what she says and try to find a topic of mutual interest.

No, we are communicating. People can coordinate their actions to achieve things that are impossible for an individual. We obviously don’t have perfect shared understanding, and miscommunications are not uncommon (as others have already pointed out) but we can exchange enough information to do useful things.

Also, we can make jokes. The fact that it’s possible to craft a joke and make someone laugh by setting up and intentionally subverting expectations through language is pretty good evidence that we have shared understanding and similar processing.

Should be trivial to set up something like that if you’ve got parts you want to work with. Any desktop with an automatic background switcher should be able to cycle through images in a directory you specify on a timer. Set up your favorite remote access software (SSH, Samba, NFS …) and you’re done. If you want more control over the behavior, you could script up something custom with a little more effort – but it’s still not particularly hard to implement something like that.

Watch out for burn in on the screen if you’re leaving it on all the time.

Yeah; I think so. When I got this file originally, I think it was from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neptune_Voyager2_color_calibrated.png

which says:

Neptune on 1989-08-17, taken by NASA’s Voyager 2 probe. This color image was composed of three frames, orange, green, and blue, taken by Voyager 2’s imaging system. This color image has been calibrated to best represent Neptune’s true color and appearance. Based on: (in English) Irwin, Patrick G J (2023-12-23). “Modelling the seasonal cycle of Uranus’s colour and magnitude, and comparison with Neptune”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 527 (4): 11521–11538. DOI:10.1093/mnras/stad3761. ISSN 0035-8711

It looks like I re-compressed the version I posted with webp to reduce the file size for quicker viewing on lemmy – so the colors in that are a little off from the PNG on Wikipedia, but are still closer than the classic enhanced color image.

darkblue

It’s also light blue; pictures of it were just always published with exaggerated colors for a long time. It’s actually more like this if you do better color calibration, apparently:

Demons Roots is probably the best RPG Maker game I’ve played that was actually playable as an RPG. (So, not counting things like To The Moon which other people have already mentioned.)

I wasn’t a fan of most of the sexual content in Demons Roots, but taking the whole thing as basically a giant love letter to fucked up doujinshi stories – i.e. to unpolished indie writing with wild genre bending plot twists in addition to the hentai stuff – I can accept it for what it is. The game has that RPGMaker wabi-sabi; it’s not especially well-crafted software… but the combat was OK (unlike a lot of indie RPGs), the music was good – a mix of original and mostly well chosen asset packs (I still listen to some of it occasionally!), and, without getting into spoilers, it did a couple of very memorable things…

Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing.

Those are basically just publicly accessible analytics for how far people typically get in a game.

Computer Science is basically just a Frankenstein amalgamation of interconnected subjects related to computers that have been useful for universities to lump together for teaching and/or funding purposes. I have a Bachelor’s degree in it. Most of the courses were split between either more “theoretical” / math-y courses on discrete math, probability, “Theory of Computation”, etc. (where we were mostly solving math problems/writing proofs) or practical programming courses on things like “Intro to Java”, “Debugging”, and “Software Engineering Best Practices”, etc. (where we were mostly writing programs). Some met in the middle – e.g. Algorithms, which got into things like graph theory and complexity classes while also requiring us to write programs. The traditional “hard” courses also included compilers and operating systems where we were supposed to learn enough to build at least toy versions of both. I also had digital logic courses that got into to the boundary between programming and electrical engineering (but without going too deeply into how electronics physically works or is manufactured) – e.g. covering logic gates, state machines, the design (but not physical implementation) of CPUs, Verilog, etc.

Basically a “computer scientist” is someone who does something academically interesting about/with computers – either on the mathematics of what can be computed, or on the practical applications of computer technology. Most people who study it go on to become professional programmers rather than academics though.

Bee-kake

My guess was that it was probably due to Hollywood, but some form of mass communication, almost certainly.

I had a roommate from Manchester (UK) for a couple months back in college. I’m American (US). He seemed to have no trouble understanding me, but I usually couldn’t understand what he said without him repeating it multiple times.

[email protected]

(probably – if anything)