So, there's this guy at work, right? And I've been working with him for probably a year or so by the time this story takes place. Same team and everything. Kindof elbow-to-elbow. Good guy.

The company would take us all out to lunch occasionally. And this one time, 15 or so of us are all sat down at the chain restaurant and shooting the shit about whatever.

And the music playing at the restaurant plays a song by Imagine Dragons. And then some other random song. And then another one by Imagine Dragons.

I don't remember specifically how many Imagine Dragons songs they played before we even got our food, but it was enough in a short enough period that someone commented "huh, they're playing a lot of Imagine Dragons today."

And this was in the period when it was in vogue to dunk on Imagine Dragons, right? And so I'm like "yeah, at least they're playing Imagine Dragons songs from back when Imagine Dragons was good."

And I expect folks to banter back at me and maybe some folks would defend Imagine Dragons, but probably more would agree, or even take the position that Imagine Dragons was never good. (Again, that was in vogue at the time.)

But everyone just kind of looks at me awkwardly.

And I have no idea what's going on until the guy next to me leans over and lets me in on it.

Apparently the guy directly across from me grew up with the Imagine Dragons band members and nearly ended up in the band at one point in his life.

And I worked with the guy for a year and never knew that. And I kindof looked like an asshole over it. What are the chances! I don't live anywhere near Las Vegas where Imagine Dragons came from or anything.

I appologised, of course. He kindof laughed it off, but I still felt bad about it.

In retrospect, a piece of me wonders if the boss hadn't called ahead and asked the restaurant to play a lot of Imagine Dragons just to make the guy across from me feel special or something. But then again, the vibe this chain restaurant gave off was that probably the restaurant didn't really control the playlist at all. Probably it was just some XM station or something. (It didn't have a DJ or any speaking between songs or anything. Just music. So maybe that gives some credence to the boss-called-ahead theory? Dunno. Dunno.)

Maybe some day I should call the restaurant and ask if they're able to take music requests or whatever just to get some closure. Lol.

Yesterday, I started watching a video on YouTube but closed out of my browser (Firefox) only a few minutes into the video.

I've got my Firefox set to delete all cookies, history, form data, etc on every close. (Pretty much everything but bookmarks.) The image on this post is a screenshot of my relevant settings.

Today, after having exited my browser and fully shut down my computer for a while, I remembered the video and decided to continue watching it.

In Firefox, I searched for the video (I used the search term "gnu taler" -- something worth looking into especially for folks interested in this particular Lemmy community by the way). In the search results, the video I was searching for showed the red bar at the bottom indicating I'd watched only the first few minutes of it.

Which seems weird given that I'd cleared all my browser data since I watched the first few minutes.

So I did some experimentation. I closed my browser completely again and opened it back up, searched in YouTube, and it still had the indicator. I updated to the latest version of Firefox in the Arch package repository. Same indicator. I tried the same in Chromium (which I've also got set to delete all browser data on close). Still the indicator. I installed Tor Browser Bundle (specifically torbrowser-launcher on Arch Linux), changed none of the default settings at all, and searched in YouTube. The indicator is present. In Tor Browser Bundle.

W

T

F

?

Anybody have any idea how that's possible?

My only guesses are:

• That search is so niche as to be literally unique (which if true makes me sad -- I really hope GNU Taler takes off and becomes widespread) and YouTube is using that to identify me.
• YouTube doesn't know where I left off at all. Not even my browser knows (because if it was my browser keeping track, it wouldn't persist between browsers). It's something else on my system that my browsers depend on or tap into.

The only other pieces of relevant info I can think to share:

• There's another video (also about GNU Taler) that I watched all the way through the same day that I started the video this post is about. It doesn't show any indicator.
• I tried searching on my phone's browser. No indicator. But then I'm not sure my phone ever shows indicators. I haven't tried this on any other devices on my network or anything.
• I still haven't watched the video in question. Heh.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

Edit: Sorry for neglecting to mention previously that at no point during any of the above did I log in to YouTube. And the "Sign in" button was visible at the top of the page indicating I wasn't logged in. Since multiple people asked, I figured I should edit my OP with that info.

Edit2: Two more things to mention. I think some folks are thinking I copied the link and pasted it between browsers during the above test or something? The only reason the timestamp is included in the link I posted above is because when I copied it into this post, I didn't think to remove the timestamp. But I didn't do anything like copying the link from the search results in one browser and then paste the link into TBB or anything. In each separate browser, immediately after opening the browser, I went to YouTube (by typing "youtube.com" into the address bar) and put "gnu taler" into the search bar and hit enter. And in each browser, YouTube somehow remembered where I'd left off in a whole different browser -- with a different IP address in the case of the switch from Chromium to TBB. And no urls were copied between browsers in any of the above.

The other thing to mention. Changing my search term to the full title of the video ("Building an Open Source Payment System - Sebastian Javier Marchano, Taler System" sans quotes) gives the relevant video as the top search result, but no "left off" indicator. And I'm in the Firefox in which I first noticed it had remembered.

Oh, actually, one more thing to mention. After posting this, I continued watching. I'm probably about 3/4 done with it now. But I closed my browser again before completing it, reopened my browser, and searched "gnu taler". It gives the indicator, but the position of the indicator is roughly (possibly exactly) where it was when I first noticed it had remembered. Not where I left off after watching to roughly the 3/4 mark.

Edit3: Wow! Ok. I'm 99% sure folks smarter than me have hit upon what's going on here. Thanks in particular to Tony N and Chozo for the right answer. It looks like YouTube has a feature where, depending on your search terms, it may automatically skip you a certain ways into the video. (Like "oh, you searched for 'gnu taler'? Well, in this video result, this bit in the middle is the part that's relevant to your search terms, so we'll just start you such-and-such-many seconds into the video.") The red bar doesn't mean "you've watched this" at all. And YouTube isn't "remembering me" between browsers. It's just consistently (as long as I use the specific search terms "gnu taler") suggesting that I start that video 273 seconds in rather than from the beginning. And anyone who searches that exact search term should get similar results... unless they're on mobile for some weird reason? That paired with the coincidence that I'm pretty sure I just happened to have stopped the video yesterday right about at the same place where YouTube recommends you start had me very confused. Whatever the case, I'm satisfied this must be the right answer. Thanks again, ya'll!

This post really isn't the usual faire of this community. Sorry about that. If there's a better place for me to put this, definitely feel free to point me there.

But, to the point of my post, before Bitcoin became a widespread cult, back when all Bitcoin was was a couple of posts on Slashdot, back when mining it was comparatively extremely easy/quick/"profitable", I mined some Bitcoin. About 1/20 of a Bitcoin. Just by, like, leaving my computer on for a month or so. And I still have access to it.

And Bitcoin ~~is worth~~ can be sold for $62,000 USD per bitcoin right now which makes my little 1/20 of a Bitcoin tradeable for about $3,100 of real money.

Now I know that blockchain is just straight up a scam. But I've still got this Bitcoin in a wallet on a hard drive in my posession. (I know, the wallet doesn't actually "contain" the Bitcoin. Leave me alone.)

The obvious thing to do with it would be to sell it now, but that would leave some poor chap(s) holding a $3,100 bag in a way that I wouldn't feel great about.

I could just sit on it forever. I suppose I could sell it and donate the proceeds to some cause I thought to be worthy or anti-crypto. If there were enough crypto-skeptics had cryptocurrencies and wanted cryptocurrency to die in a fire, they(/we?) could coordinate to use our collective cryptocurrency in a way that most damages the market and hopefully hastens a crash-to-zero. (But the likelihood that there'd be enough cryptocurrency in the hands of crypto-skeptics to pull that off seems low.) Or I could print out my private keys, delete them from my hard drive, and ceremonially burn the papers while chanting "web3 is going great".

And maybe this post is just me asking like-minded folks to give me permission to just sell it and leave someone holding a bag so I can buy myself a new OLED TV. Heh.

Whatever the case, I wanted to hear you folks' takes.

Edit: Thanks for the input, everyone. I'm gonna sell it.

I linked to MSN because (at least for me) it wasn't paywalled. The original source for the article can be found on the Washington Post's website here but is paywalled.

If I had a nickel for every one I've seen, I'd have two nickels, which isn't much, but it's strange it happened twice.

And I have no idea what it means.

A couple of examples:

One and two.

This was on the Netflix login page until pretty recently. I can't be the only one who thought it was unintentionally... suggestive, right?

Please tell me I'm not the only one still obsessed with these things.

Edit: Woah. I am the only one still obsessed with Animutations, aren't I? They're mine! All mine!

It bugs me when people say "the thing is is that" (if you listen for it, you'll start hearing it... or maybe that's something that people only do in my area.) ("What the thing is is that..." is fine. But "the thing is is that..." bugs me.)

Also, "just because doesn't mean ." That sentence structure invites one to take "just because " as a noun phrase which my brain really doesn't want to do. Just doesn't seem right. But that sentence structure is very common.

And I'm not saying there's anything objectively wrong with either of these. Language is weird and complex and beautiful. It's just fascinating that some commonly-used linguistic constructions just hit some people wrong sometimes.

Edit: I thought of another one. "As best as I can." "The best I can" is fine, "as well as I can" is good, and "as best I can" is even fine. But "as best as" hurts.

And if you disagree with any of my answers, you're just wrong.

Apparently I'm banned from !imageai@sh.itjust.works now. That's a community for posting AI-generated images.

My feed is set to "all"/"new". So I see every post that comes into the Lemmy servers that lemmy.world federates with. Or at least those that come in while I'm on and browsing.

I downvote what I don't like. And I don't like AI-generated images. I downvote any that come across my feed. I don't seek out AI-generated images to downvite. (That feels too much like brigading.) So, I wouldn't, say, go to !imageai@sh.itjust.works and downvote every post there. Just the ones that "organically" come across my feed.

Today, I clicked "downvote" on a post from !imageai@sh.itjust.works and the down-arrow wouldn't change color to register my downvote. Lemmy's error messaging is lacking, so I had to go to my developer tools to find out for sure, but the server clearly indicated the reason why it wouldn't accept my downvote was because I was banned from !imageai@sh.itjust.works . (I can downvote posts on other sh.itjust.works communities.)

So, apparently one of the mods of !imageai@sh.itjust.works noticed I downvoted some posts from !imageai@sh.itjust.works and had never upvoted any posts in that community and decided to ban me.

I'm honestly not really sure whether I or they (or both or neither) am/are in the wrong here. But I was interested to see that just downvoting could get me banned from a community.

Anyone else been banned from any communities for similar behavior?

Over-the-counter diphenhydramine, for instance, at least in my country, says adults can take "1 to 2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours."

If you decide "my symptoms aren't so bad; I'll just take one" and then two hours later your symptoms are still bad (or worse), is it safe to take a second tab then? And if you do, should you wait until "4 to 6 hours" after taking the first tablet or the second to take an additional tablet? Does it depend on the drug? (Maybe it's fine for diphenhydramine but not for ibuprophen?)

I'd imagine blood levels of any particular drug tend to quickly spike and then exponentially decay back to undetectable levels. If you take two tabs, I'd imagine that graph is just twice as tall. If you wait a couple of hours between tabs, it's got two spikes and the second is a little higher than the first (but not as high as the two-tabs-at-the-same-time spike.)

If the concern is total concentration of drug in the bloodstream at any one point, a second tab a couple hours later is less of a concern than two tabs at the same time. If the concern is total area under the curve, then probably there's no difference between two tabs at the same time and a couple of hours between. If the concern is total time spent with a blood concentration of such-and-such, I could see there being more concern with taking a second tab just a couple of hours after the first.

And maybe there are other effects that I'm not aware of. Maybe if the blood concentration kicks up to two-tabs-at-once levels, the liver kicks into high gear, clearing the drug out quicker, but if you go a couple of hours between tabs, the liver neve kicks into high gear or some such.

And maybe this question hasn't even been well studied and maybe there's not really any good answer. But if there is, I'm curious.

This guy's one of the few and the brave actually saying publicly that AI is a bubble. I think most other public figures are scared to be proven wrong and made to look foolish. Doctorow's not committing to the idea that AI will never have any use, but at least he's countering a lot of the ridiculous claims the "AI Industry" is making lately.