Right when Fable is available again, and I can finally start writing my book.

What happened

I didn't pass enough subjects. To study there again, I'll have to go through regular admission procedure again, but it's too late to sign up for next year.

Passed subjects acceptance

Like other colleges, the one I went to accepts passed subjects from previous studies. So if you studied at a different college and passed the same subjects (within past x years), you don't have to re-do them.

However, unlike with the others I checked, our college will only accept subjects passed at A or B. This probably makes sense, as they might not trust other colleges to hold students up to the same standards.

This means that I'll have to retake the subjects I already passed.

Idea 1 - immediate transfer request (not possible)

Not wanting to wait a year, I hoped to go to different college of the same university, and ask for transfer right after registration. (If rejected, idea 2)

Unfortunately, the university's rules only permit transfers within the same field, and the same one is not available to sign up for anymore.

Idea 2 - Piggyback on different college for a year

There are 2 colleges on the same university that still accept students and offer housing on a dorm in the same city.
The university rules also permit students to change their study plans, with possibility of registering subjects on different colleges of the same university.

Thus my idea was to officially "attend" College of Mechanical Engineering (which is desperate enough to have no entrance exams), withdraw from all their subjects, and register relevant subjects on College of Informatics.

I asked the study department about my plan. They confirmed it should be possible, but the A/B grading requirement remains.

How does that make sense?

I could take their subjects at their own college, pass them by their own standards, yet they themselves wouldn't accept them.

Alternatively, I could attend an easier college with lower standards, spend less effort for A/B, and pass just the same.

Alternative ideas

Only idea 1 makes sense economically (if the request got accepted), as otherwise I'd pay for 2 extra years rather than just one.
That sucks, I wished to basically go "hey, I am still here like a cockroach".

So to stay here, it's best to just get a job for a year and try not to loose too many fingers (all I found in my location with provided training and no required education is "plastic press operator" or "metal machinist").

Or give up, and study a different field.

I see this often on Facebook. Lately, on posts about Taylor Swift's wedding. Every news story, people in the comments want to tell everyone how little they care

1. if you truly didn't care, you wouldn't expend the energy it takes to comment on it, you'd just scroll on by. You clearly care about the fact that it's being talked about

2. if it came up on your algorithm, you probably did something to give the impression you were interested in it

3. you're continuing to show the algorithm you're interested in it by leaving a comment. Since you reinforced that you want this type of content, it will continue to appear on your feed!

4. the pages posting these stories benefit from engagement even if it's negative. By leaving comments, you're reinforcing it and causing them to post more of it

On a similar note, why do people follow pages that solely post stuff they don't want? I used to follow this page called Geeky Memes that just posted content to troll the right wing. And, because right-wingers are stupid, a lot of them kept complaining about it and never seemed to catch on that they should just unfollow the page when literally all it posted was stuff to piss them off. This was back when Facebook only showed you posts from pages you were following too, not like now when just anything might pop up on your feed

I don't need 24oz of pasta sauce. Or 48. Or by the gallon. I need 8 ounces. And no I don't want to have this jar of pasta sauce hanging around my fridge till it goes bad and not dominant to have pasta 3 time in a row.

There should be no debate! It should be universally agreed that that cop fucked up! What is wrong with your head that you think opening fire in the vicinity of A BABY OVER A CASE OF ALLEGED SHOPLIFTING was somehow justified?

Do you think defending this makes the police look good? What would make the police look good would be universal condemnation of this act! Just fucking accept that sometimes people in power fuck up!

People are going well the mother shouldn't have taken the baby with her to commit crimes. Fuck you, she had a receipt, she didn't even commit a crime! What you mean to say is, she should have known better than to go shopping while black! They go well why did she flee? Well if I were black in America I'd be afraid to pull over for those trigger happy lunatic cops too! Even if she had been stealing, since when does the law execute the children of shoplifters?

Shouldn't this whole thing make you stop and think maybe police should stop dealing with minor crimes by opening fire? I live in Canada and have dealt with lots of police officers and I've never EVER seen them pull a gun. I'm pretty sure they save it for when it's absolutely necessary. In England, cops don't even usually carry guns! Why don't you Americans stop and think maybe lethal force isn't an appropriate way for cops to deal with minor issues? Maybe there are other options? If they were that concerned about stolen diapers, photograph her luscence plate and go get her later! But they weren't concerned about stolen diapers, were they? They were concerned she committed the crime of being black in public!

All it would have taken was minding their own business, and that money could have paid a couple CEO wages instead. Think of all the good that could have been done if that money went into Musk or Bezo's pockets instead.

I am not talking about the obviously cheap Temu items that are made for 1 use before disposal or burial in a hoarder's house.

Instead it's about electronics which seems nicely made until "oh, what the fuck is this".

Some examples:

Other electronics

RFID scanner with permanently half-pressed button

If testing for "does it work" was all they did, then yeah, it passed. But the plastic housing was too narrow for the button, causing it to be mostly pressed. Even just touching the housing elsewhere would make that register as button press.

Speakers/earphones that scream "low battery" at full volume

Not much to comment here. I bought some earbuds, and got a nice midnight shock when they did that.

Screwing into plastic

I've got a 5.25" drive enclosure. Taking it apart, I was pleased. For the outer metal sheets they put metal inserts into the inner plastic for the screws.
And then the thing that actually holds some weight is tapered holes in brittle plastic for mounting the drive.

Lack of insulation

I've got an IDE to SATA adapter. Sounds like a piece of electronics that needs some thought to design.
And... what the fuck, the power connector leads are only separated from touching metal by a thin piece of foam tape they will puncture soon.

Badly designed phone cases

At this point I just expect to need a knife to fix them.
2 phones back I had to cut a lager hole for the headphone jack.
With previous phone I had to cut down some of the silicone (?) to reach side-mounted fingerprint scanner.
With current phone I had to cut off the entire camera lens protector part as it was conducting light from flash back to the lens.

Smartphones

And now the main part.

There are a few brands that manufacture unique phones such as Doogee, Unihertz, Ulefone, etc.
There's also many devices with pretty powerful hardware for a great price.

But the software...
Seems to frequently be a very buggy experience. Also, previously I had a Poco which had ads throughout the UI.
Oh, and there's a chance for pre-installed malware.
Anyway, for the bugs, it's things like random restarts, partial system crashes, and it seems even a chance of bricking on update.
If you check reviews from people online, you'll figure out one thing quickly: if the software currently works at a usable level, DO NOT UPDATE EVER AGAIN.
Oh, one of the more important bugs was reversed L/R channels for microphones on the Poco.
Speaking of audio, my Ulefone has really crappy audio post-processing, so the only way to get usable audio is to use "Unprocessed" audio source in Open Camera, and then edit the audio appropriately in Audacity.
Anyway, the list of bugs would be quite long.

What really sucks, is the lack of custom ROMs since these devices tend to be MediaTek-based.
And I really hate that as there's so much interesting hardware with crappy software.
If you haven't seen them, they have really tiny devices, devices with huge batteries (like 25,000mAh large) that look like bricks, phones with keyboards, massive speaker, extra strong lights, even built-on projectors, etc.

This feels odd to explain, but there's 4 main scenarios:

1. There's too much stuff I have to do

I just get overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. What do I do first? I must start right away, but how?
If I pick one thing to do first, the knowledge of other ones keeps taking my focus, and I just end up doing nothing and panicking.

2. There's just something I have to do

Absolutely anything will suddenly seem interesting. I am supposed to study math?
How about getting back to Meteor LRPT reception? What about checking out the TETRA signal in your location? Installing Proxmox on a laptop, sure thing. Yes, now is the time to read datasheet of NTAG NFC tags and try out manually sending the commands in hexadecimal. What's math, let's start studying railroad regulations. Meshcore? Hell yeah, let's join the network.
etc...

3. There's nothing to do

Sounds like the time for my interests. But now, nothing comes to mind. Nothing sounds interesting. Absolutely nothing. I don't want to waste time, yet at the same time I don't want to... anything.
Even just getting dressed up feels like dragging my soul across sharp rocks.

4. Deadline is approaching FAAAAAAAST

Oddly, in some way the best scenario. I can finally get myself to be productive, and it even feels good. I see what I did, I see I spent the time well, I can focus.
One good example, an assignment I managed to do shortly before deadline. I put in 16 hours at once, only leaving to the toilet. I finished it at 4am before waking up at 7am, yet, I felt satisfied.
However, one "bad" thing that can happen here is "deadline extended by one week" if I cannot manage it. Suddenly, I loose that feeling of urgency, and slip back into scenario 2.

Bonus: Everything is a distraction.

I occasionally see people recommend putting your phone away, disabling notifications, etc...
Cool, cool.
However, I often get distracted by things like... the pen and paper. Look at that beautiful ink being transferred to the sheet of paper.
But hell, you can remove any physical objects, but you can't remove thoughts. I am listening, I am focused, and oh fuck, there goes a 10 minute imaginary conversation.
OK, I need to do better. Focus, listen, read, think, focus, listen, read,... great, I am focusing on focusing itself.

And lastly, ever heard of /dev/null? My brain pipes to it fairly often. Past 5 minutes? Never heard of them.
I can re-read something 3 times, and just immediately forget what the hell that was.
I can think of something, make the slightest physical movement, and it's gone.
I can listen to someone, process it, answer, immediately forget what I just answered to.

Sorry, I'm high, I don't know if this is going to make any sense

I have a board game called Disney villainous and most of its expansions. My aunt told me the only reason they make expansions is to make more money.

She's right, Disney's primary goal in making board games is to make money. But my question is so what? Seriously, as opposed to what? What would be the non-cynical reason they would make more board games? Each expansion does add new elements, creativity and fun are also goals of the makers. But yeah, the primary goal is money. I just don't get why my aunt felt a need to point that out. Yes, they're doing it for money. What is the alternative reason you're suggesting they should be doing it? I think it was that she thought they were claiming the expansions were necessary when they're really optional.

More and more stores are putting in those stupid turnstyles or electronic gates so you can't just go back the way you came. Leaving the only way out via the tills, that are closed and gated so you have to push through the self checkout, lord help you if you stuck a coin in the trolley, they don't have what you came in for and now you got to get through a till with an empty trolley so you can get it back.

It's even worse with the shops that have an opticians or chemist in them that you can't get to thanks to the one way exit gates.

Aarrgghhh.

and now I can't, thanks to to PEELON HUSK

I was checking out some groceries today, and the person next to me was clearly doing something the machine didn't like.

"Please scan the item before putting it in the bagging area".

Over and over again. I started thinking about what an entirely bogus thing "self-checkout" is. It seems to have exactly zero benefits to the consumer. No bagger, no help if you're missing a price sticker, not even ample room to put your groceries while you scan. You're left with exactly one square foot of space to do this job.

Is it making groceries cheaper? After all now they don't have to staff as many cashiers now. Nope! Groceries are higher than they've ever been! All that delicious margin gets sent straight to our benefactors at the Kroger corporation. Where would we be without them!

Not to mention the thing is calling you a thief every five seconds. The ones by me even film you and if they feel you're swiping something, it will show a slow motion video of you in the act and it tells you to correct your mistake.

So it's work that I have to do. That nobody is getting paid for. And that is taking videos of your face and your behaviors. And it's constantly announcing that you're a bread thief to everyone in the store.

And for what? To increase unemployment of course! It's one of those things I can't believe collective society has taken sitting down. It's one of the most egregious examples of pure corporate greed at the expense of the consumer experience, all the while cutting swaths of entry level jobs.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44631447

For the record, @Lalla@slrpnk.net entered my thread to spout some finger-wagging threadcrap:

“Could we at least not use her deadname? I get that the article is old, but please don’t.”

I actually agree with using the proper new names of people in the present to address them in the present. But it’s stupid and disrespectful to drag someone’s new name through their history before they changed their identity. I believe my response to the threadcrap was civil. This is what @CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net was surreptitiously censored:

“We are talking about Manning’s history. It is proper to use the name of the time of the events. People don’t create new identities for the hell of it. New identities are generally created for a new life going forward, to be disconnected from a past life.

Europe recognises the right to be forgotten which is enshrined in GDPR art.17. Guatamala respects people’s wishes to establish a new identity to the extent of allowing name changes with no public record in a closed-door session with a judge.

Tying someone’s new name to their prior history is disrespectful. Some may want their legacy to follow them despite a name change and we might guess Manning is proud of their accomplishment, but it’s not for you to decide what people with new identities carry forward from their past.

Please respect people’s privacy. I know Manning’s privacy is toast anyway, but it’s still off to be part of the intrusion and then to ask others to also drag new identities through their prior history.

You also advocate historic inaccuracy. Exxon (a dead name) discovered climate change. Not ExxonMobil. You cause confusion by insisting on refencing new identities in past events. If you say ExxonMobil discovered climate change in the 1960s, you falsely imply that ExxonMobil existed at that time. But in fact the merger (and thus new identity) came after that.

The modlog vaguely states “breaks rules” without citing a specific rule. This was coupled with the cowardess of not DMing me about the action. The power abuse occurs alongside the decision to allow the rule-breaking threadcrap I defended from to persist.

UPDATE: it was not the mod

Due to a defect in the Lemmy server software, it looked as if the moderator of enshitification did the censorship. But in fact it was the admin of an outside host (sopuli) who did the censorship, which yielded a modlog on slrpnk.net.

I'm actually saying there's mentally ill people on lemmy to push them to get help from the rest of the lemmy community. Shaming people in hopes of improving them doesn't work in my opinion.

I'm mostly making this in response of other users expressing their fantasies of me receiving violence and death just because I considered borrowing a bike that I did intend to return without asking permission. Yes wishing death and violence on other people is a mentally ill thing to do. The users reactionary to any context I gave even when they asked for the context. fun part is they refused to explain any details I asked for.

The mentally healthy thing is to try your best to act in good faith, and just stop talking to a person that's acting in bad faith. I legitimately don't care about bad faith actors because I'll assert my opinions about what I believe and how they're acting.

Its gonna be a long fucking day, sorry if I don't drop in every 20 minutes to update or answer questions, we're still scatterbrained right now.

☹️

Why is it that when it comes to bathrooms and sports, transphobes seem to think that transgender women are indistinguishable from cisgender men, they think a transgender woman is just a man claiming to be a woman while physically male, completely ignoring transgender women who have physically changed through hormones and/or surgery, making the situation very much not black and white, they see no nuance whatsoever, they believe transgender women are physically indistinguishable from men

And yet simultaneously, they're afraid that children are forcibly having their bodies irreversibly changed

I feel like the online ridicule and bullying has gone on long enough. If you wanna pick a bone with the guy on his values and sensibilities, that seems perfectly fine. But let's leave the kink and fetish shaming out of it.

I love herbsluftwm. I've used it for years and years, with zero complaint. I wanted to try wayland and after digging around, I heard sway was gonna give me the closest experience. It does not. I find the hotkeys, frame controls, and decorations to be rudimentary in comparison. There have compounded enough deal breakers in the last 2-3 months of use, that I'm thinking about going back x11 so I can be reunited with my beloved hlwm.

I don't think the guy should be ridiculed or kink-shamed for his fetish, which at a surface level seems fairly non-harmful. I think he should be ridiculed and shamed for standing by Kristi Noem.

The usa is a brutal imperialist empire... fascist are the useful idiots of empire...fascism is capitalism in crisis and imperialism is its highest form. The usa financed hitler during ww2... nato is filled with nazis... the usa and the catholic church trafficed nazi into the usa rocket program and around the world... doll baby it is like the first day on earth for you but yes USA = Bad ..... we are the baddies... we are a nazi nation. No political party will save you... you will wish you were never born. Every social movement that recieved a victory was merely a pause, a form of pacification. We are not a democracy but the head of the snake of the trans-international security state put it bluntly... the yankkkeee cartel. Abandon hope all who enter. Capitalism will end all human life... The goal is to turn you into a slave with techno chains. STOP HAVING CHILDREN... You are not safe in the imperial core... You are a product of your enviroment.... We are a empty vessel of lesser things.... a pit of despair.

Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

I'm not going to advocate for crypto, more out of ignorance, but maybe it's possible to make a coin that's worth 0 USD but can be exchanged like USD.

Everyone is talking about boycotting services that work with government agencies they don't like, such as cop city or ICE, but the ultimate control the government has is USD. The dollar has effectively "blended into the wallpaper of society" and people don't realize that they can cut it out of their lives, in a theoretical sense. It's hard to get a round the convenience of USD since so many markets that it gives you Access to and without USD you can't even buy coffee at gas station.

The reason to boycott USD is that it would decouple government control over your life. If government printed money and inflated the currency and you had none then you're immune from devaluing. If you didn't use USD for but something else (currency or other forms of battering) then it would make other people give up their USD. Also the government does use USD to empower corporations via loans, bailouts, and subsidized (whatever the federal reserve comes up with) to essentially give them a lot of buying power so they can suck up GPUs, ram, and land.

To wrap it up. Using USD gives legitimacy to the federal government and everything they do. Selling your labor for USD means that the government can buy your labor for USD

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44625171

Wowzers! You get banned for posting sources not sanctioned by the empire apparently. I thought dbzer0 was supposed to be a leftist instance, but they ban just like the lib and zio instances like .world and ShitJustFash?!

I see lib rags spammed all over the feed....

🙄

In imperialist pig dog Yankee land lays the path of the pleb, our whole society is a grooming session by the pdfile capitalist trans-international elite. Socialism for the rich, unions for the dogs and scraps for the rest. Every pop culture reference is a distraction from our problems and a catharsis for the gaping wound that is the void of any real way of life, as we occupy and claw for our meaningless positions in the hierarchy of obfuscated barbarity. It is an inversion, where the leader is a follower and the follower is a leader that is dead, if there is a hell, it is inside your head. In the web of lies they flood the zone that's why no one knows what's going on, plebs join their tribe and that's where they'll hide in their prideful ignorance as the Minotaur chases them through the superstructure of tyranny and then they cry victim. There is a reason why bad things happen and it is a business model. Can’t have winners without losers. In the dog pile only one idiot comes out with the ball. This is a land that is a empty vessel. This is a land of unimportant things.

They're just so corpo, it's so soulless and i hate it. Square pfp with a golden check said "Trains." oh, haha so funny and relatable !!

It's just so weird to me. these are people being paid to just post things that people will like, it's so soulless and again,, just WEIRD.

Seeing these square pfps with golden checks post stuff trying to be funny is agin... just SOO SOO SOO... SOO.. WEIRD. they're being paid for all of that, that removes all of the fun and soul.

WE'RE SO RELATABLE, PLEASE BUY OUR PRODUCT !

except the ones that are being like a brand and are just tweeting updates, news, ads and other stuff related to the brand and aren't trying to be a human. Then i really don't care at all, that feels NORMAL.