CerebralHawks

Coke Zero is sweetened with sucralose, not HFCS or cane sugar. It’s a diabetic friendly alternative. It might taste closer to Coke made with cane sugar, but I’m not sure. I don’t drink soda anymore, but I do drink Gatorade Zero.

I recommend sucralose sweetened beverages over HFCS and cane sugar ones.

I don’t hate Windows, but it seems like every day Microsoft gives me reasons to be thankful I’m a Mac user.

Either go all in with Microsoft’s crap, pay for Microsoft 365, and enjoy the ride — or learn Linux. It’s easy, you can run it off a portable SSD. You don’t have to trash your Windows installation. You can do it virtually risk free. I recommend Ubuntu for new users, but Linux Mint is another good choice and it resembles Windows more, so it will be more familiar to you. Linux has never been better. It’s not just a free alternative to Windows; it is very much its own thing. Or, if you aren’t a gamer, and you need new hardware anyway… I’d grab a Mac mini. They’re $500 and they do everything you need. Gaming not so much (though we did just get Cyberpunk this year).

Animal Crossing.

I’ve only been playing the newest one for about a year (New Horizons, on the Switch), but since I’ve come to Lemmy a couple months ago, I’ve followed all of the AC communities I could find. None of them are active. Therefore, I can surmise that no one on Lemmy cares enough about AC to talk about it, so it’s a fair guess at least, that I know more about the game and its inner workings than the average Lemmy user.

I could say that about any number of fandoms I’ve been in that do not have a home on Lemmy. The band ONE OK ROCK for instance. Or the anime series Sword Art Online. Sure, there may be a few Lemmy users who know a thing or two, maybe more than I do, but people aren’t coming together to talk about these things. Their interests lie elsewhere.

It’s a good question. You probably know more about tea than the average Lemmy user and most Lemmy users. The fact that there may be one or two people who know more than you do does not disqualify either claim. But OP’s post description is basically about knowing more than any other Lemmy user — and that’s hard to say.

I don’t think you could be better than any one other person at most things on, say, Reddit, but Lemmy is much smaller, and much more focused on certain areas. If you fall outside those areas, you likely have a few advantages in expertise. Tea being one of them as social media in general leans more toward coffee.

35GB!!

I want to know what the games are. A lot of the games I played on the Amiga 1000 were licensed, so I doubt those are included. A lot of freeware, too, but the licensing would be murky, they’d have to contact each developer for quite diminishing returns on each.

Also, “Commodore OS”? What about AmigaDOS? What about Workbench? I’d love to see those get modern styling.

I hope people take the time to look up what Commodore means (it’s a naval rank BTW, above captain and below rear admiral — I knew it was naval, had to look up where the rank fell) because it looks like “common,” and worse, “commode.”

My hope is that I don’t get recognised, but in the past I was known for making long posts. So, maybe that?

We are here to discuss ideas, not people. That said, I do recognise a few accounts.

You covered all kinds of media but music, but Enya sings in a made-up language, but not exclusively. Just five songs are in Loxian, a language her songwriter made up for her after she did the song from Lord of the Rings (with some lyrics in Elvish or whatever the Tolkien language is). So she wanted a language that would suit her style and her songwriter made one for her.

The cool thing is, they wrote this whole sci-fi backstory for it about how the Irish go to space, to the moon, and they jump to a faraway galaxy. Also, Enya only sings the water dialect of Loxian — they have a dialect for each of the four natural elements.

The Enya songs in Loxian are:

• Less Than a Pearl
• The River Sings
• Water Shows the Hidden Heart
• The Forge of the Angels
• The Loxian Gate

The first three are on the album Amarantine; the last two are on Dark Sky Island. IMO Loxian Gate is the best of the lot, followed by The River Sings. If you listen on Apple Music or something that, you can watch the lyrics go by as she sings them, but it will not translate them. There are translations online, though.

There are tells but it’s getting harder and harder. One thing is, you have to look for the people.

Case in point, a few weeks ago I discovered some really good covers of the KPop Demon Hunter songs. So if you don’t know the scene, this Netflix musical has been making record breaking profits and numbers and everyone and their brother wants a piece. And the music is so good, and tons of people are doing covers.

A few months ago, “is it on Apple Music/Spotify” wouldn’t have been a tell, but now it is. So a lot of these covers are on paid streaming, because covers are perfectly acceptable legally. It’s fair use. However, recently AI generated music has started to come up, and the streaming services have recently put their feet down and said “no more.” So when you’re looking at such a cover on YouTube, it’s probably going to have streaming links. It’s more convenient to listen on one of those services than it is to watch YouTube, and Spotify pays more than YouTube, and Apple Music pays more than both of them. So that’s where they want you to listen. When people are all over the comments saying “put it on Spotify” and they say “nah we’re YouTube exclusive,” what they’re saying is, they aren’t allowed on Spotify (or Apple Music). They do want more money, but they won’t get any on platforms that ban generative AI. So they stick to YouTube, which is one platform that allows it.

With legitimate art, you can usually find the human behind it. With some art, the artist will want to remain anonymous. In anime, for example, a lot of these artists are underage, and they’re savvy, they’re not putting themselves out there on social media beyond the art and their anonymous comments. They’re still more human than AI, they just won’t show their face or say where they’re posting from. (And that’s just good OPSEC in general.)

There’s also the frequency. Art takes time. It takes weeks, months, depending on what it is. AI can do it in seconds. So if they’re posting whole new stuff every day, every other day, there’s a solid chance they’re using AI to make it.

Not all AI slop is completely made by AI. Sometimes they take stuff made by humans and use AI to enhance it somehow. That’s what the KPDH stuff was. They were using an AI tool to separate the stems (the individual instruments) and enhancing each one, changing some, altering others.

Anyway, in 2025 now, it’s much harder than it ever was before to spot AI slop. The time of six fingered hands is gone. Next year, year after, certainly the next decade, it’s gonna be next to impossible to tell.

What’s worse, these days, AI made stuff is still prompted by humans. All AI slop has a human behind them. But what happens when the AI starts doing this stuff on its own? Right now, AI is interacted with by humans. Soon, AI will initiate the interactions. It could be doing it already, we don’t know.

Always via letter.

I once gave a job three months notice. I knew I was moving and wanted them to know as soon as I did. It worked out well for me for two reasons. One, they uncapped my overtime, said I could work as much as I wanted to get ready for the move. Two, after I moved and jobs weren’t quite what I thought, they re-hired me at my new location and transferred my file, so I got to keep my previous time and training credit.

I once, and only once, walked out on a job without hardly any notice. It was just a temp job, we were working in a call center, and they had this alarm that blared in our department whenever someone was on hold in another department. That department didn’t have the siren, and they pretty much just fucked off all day, and we were punished for it, quite directly. So I went to the supervisor and told him that wasn’t going to work. He told me to deal with it, so I did — I left, and when I got home (this was before we had cell phones), I called the temp agency and told them what happened. They said they were already called and said I walked out. When I told them why, they asked me to come in to speak to them directly. I did so. They’d begun an internal investigation, and I had to make a statement for the record. Well, I wasn’t compelled to, but I damn sure wanted to. Ended up getting my pay for the whole week, and the agency pulled all their people out. They took the investigation to the call center people and asked them for a statement, and they basically confirmed what I said, and then tried to justify it. Apparently there was a clause in the contract the temp agency was able to invoke and it cost the call center a fair amount of money. Supposedly. I got a lot of this secondhand. It kind of snowballed from there because the call center itself was a contractor to a much larger company, and the company found out about the call center’s misdeeds and they may have lost that contract, too. I mean, no company really wants a reputation as having poor customer service, so the place was already being investigated from the other end.

The only other time I put in notice wasn’t for quitting, it was for vacation. My supervisor tried to deny me vacation, so I put it another way. I told her I was going regardless, and if my minimum wage fast food job wasn’t there when I got back, I’d just apply at the 2-3 others in the same area and one of them would pick me and my work ethic up, and I’d probably get a little more money out of it. Lo and behold, my job was waiting for me when I got back.

I use fre:ac. It is open source but I’m not savvy enough to see what the license is.

I don’t use MP3, I use AAC. Never liked Opus. I get it’s a free/open codec, but I’ve never liked the format. So I’m not sure what the licensing is for AAC. But I’m sure fre:ac can do Opus as well.

Nothing.

My daily driver is an iPhone. We’ve always had the problem of limiting sideloading (to be nonexistent for most people) and it’s never been a problem for me.

I also have a Galaxy S10, but all my apps on that come from the Play Store.

This won’t affect 99% of users, just like it doesn’t on iPhone.

I just hope now that they’re taking sideloading, and they’ve already taken memory card slots, headphone jacks… and they’re still taking a cut off the back end by selling your personal information… maybe the cost will come down. But I doubt it. Android makes sense when it’s cheaper than iPhone. I mean, iPhone makes sense to be expensive. It’s a pocket Mac, it’s made by a computer company. Sure, they have telemetry but it’s not an ad company like Google. So for a phone that’s less powerful and still has the same restrictions, and I’m paying with my personal data? I expect the phones to be cheaper. They really should be cheaper.

But I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Smartphone performance plateaued a long time ago. All these new phones are kind of a scam. Okay, so the Pixel 10 has the benchmark performance of an iPhone 11. The Galaxy S25 is like 40% faster than the iPhone 16 Pro until it hits load (like the top 1% of games, maybe) then the iPhone is like 10% faster… Who Cares? My 2019 Galaxy S10 is still a viable daily driver in 2025. So, I think I’m done chasing the latest model for a while. If Apple Health comes to iPad (I’m not sure if it’s there or not), I’d even consider replacing my Android phone with a newer phone next, like a gently used Galaxy S24 or S25 (I mean in a few years). These new phones talk about performance numbers, but for most people, they don’t really mean shit. Phones don’t slow down like they used to. They got a lot better and it wasn’t even that recently.

Even if you don’t like the guy, I think it’s worth reading what he has to say. And you can agree with what he says and go on not liking him.

Honestly, even as a privacy guy, this makes sense. SkyDrive was unique in giving people 30GB, plus 5GB if you turned on photo upload (even if you turned it right back off). So even without paying, my OneDrive is still 35GB. That’s plenty for documents.

What Windows 10+ does with backing stuff up to OneDrive and sharing it across builds is smart, if not the best execution. I kind of have that between my Macs and iPhone with Safari bookmarks and passwords.

I would be asking how safe OneDrive is and if it had any major breaches, if I were a Windows user. I’m actually using iWork and iCloud though, and I trust that a little more, but OneDrive doesn’t seem that problematic to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about Microsoft, but OneDrive doesn’t earn any ire from me. Should it? (Probably not since I’m a Mac user and it’s all abstract anyway.)

Just like the middle class learning the uber rich lump them in with the poor

It’s sugar.

And yes, it might be vanilla. Tons of things have vanilla in them that aren’t “vanilla.” Like chocolate chip cookies. Like frosting. It’s not enough to give it a “vanilla” flavour, just enough to give it something. That’s why vanilla is considered boring/default, because in baking, it is.

Now if you’re talking roasted marshmallows, you’re applying heat to sugar — you’re caramelising it. Before you say “I know what fucking caramel tastes like,” I’m just describing the process for what is happening to the sugar, and yes, that is actually how caramel is made. It’s also how a lot of hard candy is made, too, like those little white and red peppermint discs. Those just use mint extract rather than vanilla. Same concept. Heated more (hard ball stage rather than soft ball).

Look at the ingredients though. If vanilla is listed, it’s vanilla. If it’s not, you’re just tasting sugar. If you’re roasting them, you’re tasting caramlised sugar (possibly with some vanilla).

It’s not a secret ingredient. They have to disclose all ingredients. There are no true mystery flavours out there. White/clear Lifesavers? Those are pineapple. Same with white jellybeans. It’s only a mystery to kids, and to those who don’t research.

And their flagship costs more than the iPhone 17 Pro but has performance closer to the iPhone 11 and they still sell your data off the back end.

Android was a fine alternative to iOS for a minute… like in 2012 with the Galaxy S3 and Jellybean. Now? I don’t get it. You pay more, you get less, all because — what? Gmail was once cool?

They took your headphone jack. They took your memory card slot. They took your back button. (Anyone remember the menu button?) Now they’re taking sideloading.

What is even the point of Android? It isn’t freedom. I see it as capitulation to Big Data.

I recognise it as being used by Pink Floyd, but I don’t recognise it as a symbol of Pink Floyd fandom — that’s more commonly the prism, or any of the album covers.

Could just be a symbol they thought looked cool without any real meaning behind it. Something like that, I’d just ask. And play dumb in case they’re dangerous. Like “isn’t that from Pink Floyd or something?” If they shy away from the question or say something like “nah it means something else” it’s probably exactly what you think it is. Then again, if it is Pink Floyd, expect a lecture. Just tell them A Momentary Lapse of Reason was better than Dark Side of the Moon and see if they write you off as crazy rather than try to correct you. (I do personally think Momentary Lapse was the better album, but I’m not about to tell a Pink Floyd fan that. The hot take I will share with one is that the one with the stupidly long title on Ummagumma (they’ll tell you the whole name) is one of their most ambitious tracks. That, I think, might at least get some respect. (The title is something like “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Grooving With a Pict.” But I think there’s more to it.)