It’s hard to imagine that someone has deeper pockets than the richest man in the world

the newer, nicer suburbs in austin have extra large driveways and i’ve always suspected it was for something like this pic. lol

how could you tell it was a 10/100… or even a cisco switch?

it looks more like an old small plane dell powerconnect to me.

i do something like this on firefox and the container tabs feature.

i create a set of container tabs for websites that do tracking with cookies and only visit that website using its dedicated container so that it looks like i ONLY use my browser to go to ONLY go to that one website from the trackers perspective.

i also started using privacy badger and ghostery to give the tracker junk information to make all the data harvesting useless; but i don’t know if it works yet.

if he were smart; he would sell that switch and buy several switches. lol

… libertarians locally so I am interestingly enough working with ML’s.

for a moment there i couldn’t tell if ml stood for marxist/leninist like it in for lemmy.ml or if it mean machine learning. lol

and absolutely stay away FAR away from conversations about politics. my experience has taught me that highly placed/status-ed software engineers tend to be conservative (probably because of the money) and are perpetually on the hunt for dissident views to “protect” their “people” from “threats” and they will use their position to put you on a leash if they think you don’t fit in.

i’m reminded of it each time i see the duct tape covering the camera of my work laptop. lol

its likely possible since you’re a human being and i image that it would take a lot of work given the manner in which you’ve shared this information.

there’s a song out there by sublime that speaks to me and has enabled me to seek out the help that i needed from professionals and maybe it can help you too in some way:

Daddy he once told me,

“Son, you be hard workin’ man”

And momma she once told me,

“Son, you do the best you can”

Then one day I meet a man,

He came to me and said,

"Hard work good and hard work fine,

but first take care of head"

they were referring to weed as a coping strategy in the song; which i also do; but i’ve used it also convince myself to seek out help because no one can take care of the shit that goes on their head if they don’t know what they’re doing.

most people have answered your questions so i want to chime in with the information that i wish someone had told me when i first joined:

a lot of people came to lemmy from reddit like you and i both did and also mostly for the same reasons. most of them went to lemmy.world because it was the first search result on the big search engines like google & bing. those people have turned lemmy.world into a mini reddit and ended up recreating the same problems that reddit has plus more; hence the bot check that you ran into when you signed up.

the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent; i think of it like if r/politics; r/anarchy/; r/communism; r/socialism; etc. went off and created another social media platform and then started discussing everything like reddit does, but from this perspective. instances is the name given to individual servers and all those servers combined is nicknamed the lemmyverse, or lemmy, for short.

the fediverse is the nickname given to the pubg protocol that’s shared between all the platforms that use it like lemmy, mastadon, kbin, threads, bluesky, etc and that means that the conversations from all of those platforms are shared amongst each other so it’s possible to be on lemmy and have a conversation with someone on kbin, for example. i stick with lemmy because it’s doesn’t have any venture capital investors pushing the admins to enshitify it to maximize profits like has been happening to reddit and bluesky; i’ve been moving from one social media platform to another because of enshitification like reddit’s since the 1990s (before it was called social media) so this last part matters to me a lot.

i started off on lemmy.world like most ex-redditors did and discovered that they’ve duplicated the censorship thing that reddit likes to do with defederations so i switched to lemmy.ml since it doesn’t defederate with anybody due to fact they’re the primary instance where lemmy development takes place. the federation is what makes lemmy decentralized and when you defederate; you cut yourself off from the rest of the lemmyverse, but lemmy.world and some of the other instances that got most of the ex-redditors like the star trek instance use it to try cut off content and people from the instances that they don’t like and that’s their right since it’s their instance. lemmy is decentralized so trying to cut out people & content only serves to cut yourself off and that’s intention behind the fediverse; to make it so that no power tripping mod or ban happy admin can stop the conversation like they do on reddit.

everything is done by volunteers and donations and, if you don’t like one instance; you can move onto any other one and still get a similar experience. i don’t like letting other people decide what i can & can’t see and who i can & can’t talk to so i mostly stick to the instances that don’t defederate with anybody like lemmy.ml and i use the block-people and block-communities features when i feel like i need them for myself.

i had the same thought since i sometimes wonder “why bother” when i know that things like prism gave them everything they wanted 15 years ago.

that sounds like a recipe for a recession in my corner of the word; hopefully i’ll still be working at my new job at a non-profit during that time.

did it have some sort of error or failure? if it did, are you able to copy/paste several lines before and afterwards?

i’ll never cease to be amazed at how much the old ways still work.

first trump is a war dove and now greene wants government transparency; i must have fallen asleep and now i’m stuck in a bizarre dream. lol

i think i’m going to switch to the nightly build to get that address bar update.

this feels like the same thing that the japanese had to do to get access to the american market in the 70’s; but it feels like a trap somehow this time around.

why am i more disquieted by the fact that trump has a good quality in ending the war than the prospect of it escalating into nuclear war?

what are lists in this context?

my social butterfly mother taught me about a “fake-ness” that’s worked well for me in situations like this: when you talk to them, follow every opportunity that reveals something about themselves (eg “you mentioned that you liked the color blue, i kinda like it too because of X, why do you like it?”) and do it even if it bores you and you grasp at straw to keep the conversation going. people love talking about themselves and love it even more with an audience that seems into it and, at the end, either your crush will be dispelled or now your crush is aware of you.

if they act odd after that; then they don’t feel the same way about you that you feel about them and move on. if they do feel the same way about you OR if they don’t, but they still like you; they’ll likewise look for an excuse to tell you more about themselves.

i think it’s crazy high salaries; it insulates them from the problems that the rest of us have have to deal with in our lives.

i first noticed it around the tail end of the earlier “IT half” of my career when my payrate started to push up against six figures; now at over 20 years as a software engineering that’s solidly past that boundary (like most well connected software engineers are); the opinions/outlooks/expectations of my colleagues have become so toxic to me that i’ve decided to go back to IT permanently.

also: the work seemed to get more and more evil as i progressed in the software engineering half of my career. i’m convinced my current gig is a net detriment to humanity and society like all my software engineering gigs were and i’ll be taking a 56% pay cut to avoid the that profit-seeking-evil in a non-profit organization that teaches people who can’t afford to dedicate their lives to a college degree like a 19 year old from the suburbs can do.

a big part of me is sad that i will never become rich like my current colleagues; but i think that my psychological well being matters more and it’s a union job so there are other perks that help compensate for it.