Flagstaff

It is fascinating that the search engine changes domains every single time you use it. While I'm big into privacy, I don't understand all these intricate details, but it seems cool and has yielded pinpoint results so far.

I just learned about the vast network of https://trom.tf/ through... hmm, I can't remember any more, haha! But it was either somewhere in the Lemmyverse or on Reddit, perhaps in a comment on a post in /r/privacy.

This TROM endeavor looks incredibly ambitious, so while FOSS is always welcome, I'm not sure about how long they'll be able to last running so many different projects. It feels like it's trying to be an immediate Google replacement and I fear that those who run it may be biting off more than they can chew... so I'm just trying the search engine for now.

Is it possible? I wanna be able to read walls of text straight from there, Reddit-style, and not have to tap each single one to see the full thing. Old Reddit also has a one-touch context button that can display your original comment (if the inbox content is a child comment) right there without leaving the inbox.

I'm leaning towards Amwater, but am not sure.

I thrived on daily reading of a few multireddits, which are specific clusters of the same subreddits, as my default view; I only went to the general feed for all of my subscribed communities every once in a while.

For example: https://old.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow+LifeProTips+dataisbeautiful

Is this possible on Lemmy?

I got a free month of Game Pass and am digging into whatever's interesting as a result, and man, I'm really glad I finally tried Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, even though it did not actually look like my kind of game; I just let myself be influenced by Steam's overwhelmingly positive reviews—and they're all correct!

~~What really threw me for a loop (since I only watched the trailer and didn't otherwise read much on it) is that you do not stay in the coliseum! Without spoiling much, it is just hilarious and unexpected how far the game actually goes beyond the trailer~~ (and the difficulty becomes as easy or as hard as you want it to be, in case skill is a concern among any readers here). Edit: Huh, apparently I entirely missed one of the trailers which already reveals this. Never mind, but the shock value was great, so if any of this interests you, try to not watch the first trailer lol.

But even in the arena, you truly feel like a sci-fi gladiator (bonus points if you watched Gladiator—the first one, of course), facing level after level of interesting different enemies with the commentators comedically going at it. You can upgrade your bot with different skills, weapons, or clones to keep going; if you pick cloning (buying extra lives, basically), they say things like, "Upgrade bot is not pleased" (since it would rather have spent that turn giving you an upgrade instead), or "This human fears death. Typical."

It is just so amusing and well-done as you hack and snipe enemies to bits, causing them to hop on one leg, or taking out an arm, or even having these situations happen to own robot body. The AI dodging of your bow's energy slices is also well-done and tricky, and it's crazy fighting giant spiders when they dynamically adjust their movement based on which legs they've lost. Giant alien spiders are no joke.

I actually didn't realize that it has a free demo on Steam, so go check it out!

Someone had asked this elsewhere but then deleted their own post and I don't know why! I was meaning to come back to it and read it, so rest assured that I won't delete this one as there were some really interesting stories of unconventional ways people landed their work.

TL;DR: I got headhunted after directly emailing dozens of people and pitching myself as an available, on-call substitute in my line of work, instead of submitting job applications traditionally.

As for me, I cold-pitched myself via Google Maps and other searches as an available substitute to those in my skilled trade (upon moving to a different region) in basically a 50-mile radius, and eventually word of my availability reached a large, overarching institution that connected me with an organization that had a full-time opening. It took me probably 4-5 months from the move to the job offer.

Edit: My story is actually a little more complicated than that, now that I recall the details from years ago; there wasn't actually a full-time opening at my now-workplace at the time, haha. What happened was that I was briefly interviewed and quickly hired as an assistant to an overwhelmed director who ended up getting massively sick and nearly died from COVID, so I subbed as the director. They had been having interpersonal problems with her and I rapidly noticed them in the weeks before she got sick and warned them of her. While I wasn't trying to take her place, the higher-ups said they were aware of her shortcomings (she had basically said "Shut up" to another director higher than her rank, to give you one of many examples of how bad it was, and she must have been in her 50s if not 60s).

Nearly everyone at the org apparently loved my work while I subbed for her for nearly a full month, and they eventually fired her and made me her replacement after another interview. It was definitely unusual...

This link was a really intriguing post entitled, "How did you get your job?" I was planning to read through some more of the comments (it got really popular quickly), but the author deleted the post for some reason!

IrfanView has an extremely niche feature that literally no other image editor I've found, not even Photoshop, can do, called Remove/Insert strip. I literally use this regularly for work and have donated to the dev because of it, but would like to try to find something open-source that does this if possible.

Let's say you have an image which is comprised of 3 rows: ABC (there aren't literal rows with lines, but we could just say the top 33% of the image is A, the middle 33% is B, and the remainder is C).

IrfanView can crop out just B (or any similar interior portion) and have A and C touch each other, in a single menu click after you've selected the portion-to-delete. It can also do this as columns, if ABC were treated as vertical columns instead.

It can also inject X amount of pixels in either height or width at any specified location in the middle of the image of whatever color you specify. This is also powerful, as I sometimes have to replicate part of an image elsewhere in the image (they're sheet music), so being able to generate that placeholder and the immediately putting actual contents in the injected space is really helpful.

These are insanely creative features that I literally can't find any other program capable of doing, open- or closed-source. Any guidance towards an alternative would be great!

Thunder has been making me feel right at home relative to Reddit, personally! !thunder_app@lemmy.world