#Tech Hacks

[mandareeboo]

Since I've somehow become known as the "tech guru" in my family despite not knowing a lick electronics, I'm realizing that a lot of people just. Don't realize you can clean your fucking electronics?

Guys. Rubbing alcohol is perfectly safe on most electronics (check first) in small amounts (don't. Dip. your tech.) because it dries so fast. A screwdriver and a q-tip will fix goddamn near most problems the average person will have over time.

Gunky keys? Unplug the thing and get some rubbing alcohol up in there. Console not starting? Give it a quick clean. Take pictures while you're doing it so you know exactly where everything goes.

Don't pry anything up! If it's stuck together with anything, it's meant to be that way, and opening it will likely do some fuckshit. I've learned by force. Leave that to the people who get paid to do it. Don't reef on anything electronic in general. Unscrew what opens and clean what you can. That's it. No more.

It's not a cure-all! But it should be a first option before you pay someone to fix your machine.

[disease]

a seamless integration of playlists, artists & albums from platform to platform. switching from Spotify has been one of the best decisions i’ve made all year. your turn!

[vinzotech-blog]

90% of SaaS Startups Fail. Here’s How to Pick a Niche in the 10% That Survive.

"Raise your hand if you’ve ever: ▸ Spent hours brainstorming SaaS ideas… only to realize the market’s already saturated. ▸ Panic-googled ‘how to validate a business idea’ at 2 AM. ▸ Wondered why your ‘brilliant’ SaaS idea isn’t getting traction.

Here’s the tea: Finding profitable SaaS niches isn’t about creativity—it’s about strategy.

I just dropped a blog post breaking down: ✅ The weirdly effective way to spot pain points in overlooked industries (think: niche forums, Reddit rants, and angry Twitter threads). ✅ How to validate demand for free (no coding or $$$ required). ✅ 3 red flags that your ‘perfect’ niche is a sinking ship.

Real example: How a founder tapped into a boring industry (pet insurance analytics??) and hit $50k/mo.

 Read the full guide here from the link below

[virtualgirladvance]

Friend reminded me my duct tape fix for her wireless card is still working.

Had to mask out a pin that the drivers would send a kill Sig to the Bluetooth line on boot but then never wake it up again.

Seriously this bug had been in the firmware for ages at this point and stopped anyone from using wifi and Bluetooth at the same time on a 90+$ wireless card. Like wtf

[kaptainsolo]

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A post shared by Ana Cristina | Digital Marketing Coach & Creator Hacks (@moonlightdigitaldreams)

[squaredtechco]

New PC? Install these 5 free apps first! 🚀 Remove bloatware, search faster, browse privately, and play any media—no more Windows frustration. 💻✨

[1trilliongrams]

Chrome users:

1. Type chrome://flags in your address bar

2. Search for “download bubble”

3. Set “enable download bubble” to “disabled”

You’re welcome.

[catgirlbulge]

Hey y'all, there's been a zero-day vulnerability found in WinRAR, so you gotta update it if you're on an older version (anything below 6.24/6.23). It doesn't auto update so you need to do it manually. It's been around for a few months and has been fixed, but if you don't update your shit then your computer will still be vulnerable.

please reblog this so that people learn about it or whatever (10/19/23)

[stealingyourbones]

Danny’s ghost form was harder to hold together the farther away he was from the ghost portal. A solution found by Danny & Tucker was to create a robot body that Danny could possess that stabilized his form. The ectoplasm molding itself into the machine and possession causing Danny to become one with the tech, letting him not only use his ghost powers but also unique weaponry and gadgets built into his robot body.

An added bonus is that no one thinks he’s a ghost or even a human.

[lokirme]

Macbook Battery Stats in Your ZSH Terminal Prompt

As a power user of my Macbook, I’ve found that I often overlook the small battery icon on my menu bar, especially when I’m immersed in a fun project. This minor inconvenience sparked a thought: why not incorporate the battery status directly into my terminal prompt? Thus, I embarked on a fun exploration into ZSH scripting. With a bit of coding magic, I was able to enhance my terminal prompt to…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.

Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html

This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.

But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending!

I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.

AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).

In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[podcastwizard]

how i feel at work when i'm the only one who knows what a hyperlink is

[scipunk]

TZXDuino to TZX-Cassette (2020) YOUTUBE LINK

[endeavorance]

Are the tech bros just mad at trans people because trans women are better at hacking and netsec than cis men?

I mean we know this to be a documented medical fact, but I didn’t think it’d have such a long tail of effects

[s0fter-sin]

one of my favourite aspects of supernatural that you very rarely see in paranormal shows is that sam and dean are already versed in the world they live in. there’s no sudden discovery of ghosts and demons and now they have to learn about them along with the audience; they are born into it and already know all about it. it allows the audience to follow their personal story instead of also trying to figure out this new world and its rules

the first season is full of knowledge we never see them learn; “w*ndigoes are in the minnesota woods or- or northern michigan. i’ve never even heard of one this far west.” […] “great. well then this [his gun] is useless.” (1x02), “you don’t break a curse. you get the hell out of its way.” (1x08), d: “it’s a god. a pagan god, anyway.” […] “the annual cycle of its killings? and the fact that the victims are always a man and a woman. like some kind of fertility right.” […] s: “the last meal. given to sacrificial victims. d: “yeah, i’m thinking a ritual sacrifice to appease some pagan god.” (1x11)

almost every episode in the first season is a monster they’ve faced before that they then explain to the audience in a way that should feel patronising; like it’s the same speech given over and over again but instead, the audience almost feels included in the knowledge. it’s stated with such an innate confidence and comfort in said knowledge that it feels like we already knew it too; “spirits and demons don't have to unlock doors. if they want inside, they just go through the walls.” […] “the claws, the speed that it moves; could be a skinwalker, maybe a black dog.” (1x02), “it's biblical numerology. you know noah's ark, it rained for forty days. the number means death.” (1x04), “no no no, not the reaper, a reaper. there's reaper lore in pretty much every culture on earth, it goes by 100 different names.” […] “you said it yourself that the clock stopped, right? reapers stop time. and you can only see 'em when they're coming at you which is why i could see it and you couldn't.” (1x12)

they already know and, at least in the first season, already have what they need to kill whatever they’re hunting; already know to salt and burn bones for spirits, fire for a w*ndigo, exorcisms for demons, a silver bullet to the heart for shapeshifters. there’s only three times in the entire first season that they run into something new to them; 1x14 when sam gets his first vision that leads him to another psychic, 1x16 when dean calls caleb for help on the sigil he put together and he tells him about daevas, and 1x20 when they find out vampires are real- and they only don’t know that bc john thought they were hunted to extinction and not worth mentioning

(there’s also technically two half instances if you count one of them knowing something the other doesn’t - sam figuring out the tulpa in 1x17 and dean already knowing about the shtriga in 1x18 - but those still rely on sam and dean having prior knowledge)

even when they’re uncertain about facing something, it’s not bc they don’t know what it is; it’s precisely bc they know what it is and acknowledge that it’ll be a difficult hunt (“i don't know, man. this isn't our normal gig. i mean, demons, they don't want anything, just death and destruction for its own sake. this is big. and i wish dad was here.” 1x04)

so much of the tension in paranormal shows typically comes from the main character(s) not knowing what is happening to them/the people around them and having to find out how to resolve it. supernatural is unique in that it operates more like a police procedural. the tension comes from solving the clues and identifying patterns to figure out who (what) the killer is and intercepting before they can take another victim

it’s such a different tone to go for when compared to other shows that came both before, during, and after its run. it sets sam and dean on even footing with each other since they both have the same knowledge going in, and it puts them in a place of authority usually reserved for an outside character

the shows i compare spn to most is charmed, buffy and teen wolf; every main character in those shows are brought into the paranormal world knowing nothing, putting them on the same level as the audience, and they have their mc interact with others already knowledgeable about that world in order to overcome their problem/monster of the week. the audience organically learns about this new world as the characters learn about it. it’s a sound writing strategy that prevents “as we already know”-style exposition but something that complicates it is if your world building isn’t unique or intriguing enough, this slow introduction can become boring

we’ve seen shows like these before; sitting through the same tropes of characters learning to use their powers, struggling with no longer feeling normal/relating to the regular world around them, and not knowing how much they can trust the people already involved in this new world gets repetitive. all three shows eventually reach the same level of comfort with their new world that spn starts with but if the characters aren’t enough to draw you in, you can end up dropping it before they reach that point (and often, before the overarching plot can really kick in and evolve the show beyond the villain of the week format)

it’s the superhero origin movie in tv format; dragged out and overplayed. dropping the audience into an established world of course comes with its own problems but you also have the benefit of pre-existing established character dynamics that let the audience slot in like they’ve always been there instead of just getting to know all the characters while the characters also get to know each other

sam and dean already knowing about the supernatural lets the audience immediately get to the core of the story; the conflict between sam and dean, the search for their father, and the mystery of what killed their mother

[kaptainsolo]

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