ryan

ryan , 7 months ago to Star Trek in Are Romulans just Vulcans with emotions?

You bring up a good point. It feels like Romulans have also learned to control their violent emotions, but rather than suppress them entirely that energy is just focused all into tactics and smarter ways to be ruthless.

ryan , 8 months ago to Politics in [Analysis] ‘I would do it all over again:’ State Rep. Armando Walle of Houston defends profanity-laced tirade about proposed immigration laws

Walle said his outburst was in response not just to House Bill 4 and two other proposed state laws aimed at curbing migration at the Mexico border, but to a years-long trend in the Republican-controlled legislature of passing anti-immigration laws and allocating billions of dollars toward border security, which is the responsibility and jurisdiction of the federal government.

The Texas House early Thursday passed House Bill 4, which would make it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from Mexico while authorizing police to arrest offenders, drop them off at ports of entry and order them to return to their countries of origin; along with House Bill 6, which would allocate $1.5 billion in funding to build more physical barriers along the border; and Senate Bill 4, which would impose a minimum 10-year jail sentence for smuggling immigrants.

Regarding Senate Bill 4, Walle expressed concern about scenarios in which Americans could be driving a vehicle with undocumented friends or relatives who might be traveling to or from the same gathering, such as a church service or birthday party. Under the proposed law, Walle said, such Americans could be considered human smugglers and susceptible to a 10-year prison sentence.

So after Republicans voted Wednesday night to prevent new amendments to the bill and halt debate about it on the House floor, Walle said Thursday that the "Holy Ghost came over me." He approached his friend and fellow state representative, Republican Cody Harris of Tyler, who had made the motion to cut off debate, and gave him a profanity-laced tongue-lashing that was captured on video and shared widely on social media.

"Y'all don't understand the (expletive) that y'all do hurts our community. It hurts us personally, bro. It hurts us to our f—— core," said Walle, a Latino who represents the north part of Houston. "Y'all don't understand that. Y'all don't live in our f—— skin, and that's what pisses me off.

Go Walle. It's not even like he swore AT Harris. There was just emphatic swearing involved. And I want to see gloves off fighting from Democrats. I want to see this shit get into the media. If emphatic swearing is what gets this stuff noticed, go for it.

ryan , 8 months ago to Personal Finance in Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US

lmao cries in San Jose

I mean, the thing is, it's not even that great a city. Like, sure the tech jobs are here, and the bay area overall is nice and has temperate weather, but San Jose itself is a giant sprawling suburb. Downtown is "okay" and we do have public transit in the form of the light rail but it's pretty slow.

I'm paying $3.4k to rent a 2x2.5 townhome with my partner currently. It's very nice, and my landlords are just a very nice couple rather than a company, but dang is it expensive just to live here.

And before anyone asks, I live here 1) because I work in tech and the jobs are here, and 2) because my family all lives in the Bay Area and they're very important to me.

Anyway, my formal recommendation to any of you looking to move to San Jose is to basically not do that. Find a remote job and work in tech that way, or hybrid so you can live further out and commute only a couple times a week.

ryan , 9 months ago to Personal Finance in (US) Introducing Comingle: An opt-in UBI (Universal Basic Income) to provide a stable weekly income based upon users contributing 7% of their income

I like the concept. I'm highly concerned by the fact that they only seem to have gotten to the "we can move around monopoly money" stage and are asking $75,000 via Indiegogo to do all the "user verification and fraud detection" stuff. Do I trust this startup to have all my bank and credit report info? (And sure, they say they "may" need a soft credit pull, but let's be realistic - to prevent people from connecting just one dummy checking account and pretending they have no income, Comingle's gonna have to pull everyone's credit and link all the bank accounts.)

ryan , 9 months ago to Firefox in Can I get firefox to act as two separate browsers?

You can have two separate profiles, and two different task bar shortcuts that open up the different profiles. They'd essentially store different user data like history and bookmarks and previously opened tabs, and you could have a music profile and work profile. I did this for work at one point in my life. One helpful thing was making sure they each had different theming to be visually distinct so I could keep track of where to open things.

ryan , 10 months ago to /kbin in The Kbin Experience. The Best Worst Way to Interact with the Fediverse.

Unfortunately I don't know. It could very well have been that their own instances were being flooded by traffic from kbin.social and this was their solution. However, to my understanding this was added to the source code itself so all lemmy instances upgrading suddenly become an issue for kbin instances. I had to change the user agent in my own kbin instance to stop the flood of errors as it was absolutely messing up the.coolest.zone and I basically couldn't troubleshoot any legitimate failed messages.

Whatever the case is, I'm very glad it's resolved now.

ryan , 10 months ago to Fediverse in Scientists are pulling back from Twitter and looking for alternatives

Of these [alternative platforms researchers have moved to], Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll.

It's great to see wider adoption of the Fediverse. Mastodon is a great and stable Twitter alternative.

ryan , 10 months ago to Star Trek in Inside the ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season Finale: Evil Gorn! Shocking Ending! And Introducing [SPOILER]!

While I really am not a huge fan of the Gorn, I do like the little sprinkling of "maybe we can communicate with them" (especially with the territory map sent) and I hope that's expanded on a little more. Star Trek is really an idealistic show about exploring and finding common ground with others unlike oneself, and if the writers execute this well with the Gorn going from "terrifying lizardlike unknown" to "we may not like each other and we may have territory lines but at least we can communicate" then I'll be pleased.

ryan , 10 months ago to Star Trek in Inside the ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season Finale: Evil Gorn! Shocking Ending! And Introducing [SPOILER]!

On one hand I agree with you, and on the other hand it tickles my nostalgia bone for season finale cliffhangers.

I have really liked how SNW has harkened back to the broadcast era. I like only having one episode a week to watch and be able to discuss and be on the same page with everyone, and I like how they have been individual satisfying stories. Because not everything is a cliffhanger, it's made the season finale cliffhanger feel more impactful and exciting.

ryan , 10 months ago to Personal Finance in Are you satisfied with your current pay?

I make about $150k but I also live in the San Francisco Bay Area so, while I'm comfortable renting an apartment and being able to save for retirement, I know I am far from being able to afford property. (I could move away but all my family is here.) So I'd say I'm currently satisfied only because I've come to terms with never having that complete housing security.

ryan , 10 months ago to /kbin in The Kbin Experience. The Best Worst Way to Interact with the Fediverse.

TLDR: It’s broken, but It’s still a fun and enjoyable platform!

Very true. It's a lot more stable than it was even a couple months back - I used to upgrade my instance and run into constant problems, and now I can happily git pull without destroying everything.

From a user perspective, a lot of the issues you encountered early on were due to a couple factors - kbin.social was dealing with more traffic than it could handle, and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.

I would say that, aside from platform stability, the biggest looming threat on the horizon is spam. Think about email (the original federated message system) - nobody even thought about the possibility of spam when developing email, spam exploded in the 90s, and currently spam control is managed by whichever email platform you're on rather than by the protocol itself, as well as a sort of trust system where newly registered domains are more likely to be seen as spammers. The Fediverse needs to take lessons from email and start implementing the same sort of controls before the issue becomes unmanageable.

ryan , 10 months ago to Personal Finance in ProjectionLab - Build Financial Plans You Love

It's pretty slick looking. Unfortunately, looks like no option to link to accounts for auto-import of transactions.

I did the whole manual accounting of finances thing for a while, got absolutely sick of it, and now Intuit has all my data because Mint may be trash but it's trash that does the work for me.

ryan , 10 months ago to Star Trek in Kirk sticking around?

I'd say Kirk being here for multiple episodes was necessary to resolve La'an's growth as a person. Whether it needed to be Kirk himself, obviously not, but since they started that thread they had to complete it. I do hope he doesn't just continue hanging around next season, though. He has a post on the Farragut to attend to.

ryan , 10 months ago to Star Trek in Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 "Subspace Rhapsody"

I agree. As a fellow musical lover (I'm posting from the intermission of a touring Broadway show) the writers clearly understand what the music in musicals is meant to represent. La'an's and Uhura's solo numbers definitely gave some emotional insight into both characters that I feel benefited the show beyond just being decent musical numbers.

The autotune was painful in a few moments for certain actors but hey, they're not professional singers, and I would have loved a bigger dance number, but I know that's pushing it.

ryan , 10 months ago to RedditMigration in does anyone regret deleting their Reddit accounts during the failed protest?

I don't have any regrets here. I vastly prefer the vibe of the fediverse. I feel like I can actually contribute and have people respond to me meaningfully.

I do think it was a "reality check", as you say, for some people that the exodus wouldn't completely bring reddit to its knees. It'll be a slow decline into irrelevancy that will take a longer amount of time as new mods become overwhelmed and give up, people slowly realize the content creators and commenters have moved on, etc. It could take years.