valentineblacker

[valentineblacker]

i think it's important to acknowledge that the reason why mastercard/visa has such a stranglehold on american society is because cash is not the main form of payment in the usa. the predominance of card has effectively privatized currency

in japan, one of the reasons why dlsite and other similar websites are able to just remove visa as a payment option instead of changing any of their merchandise (aside from the fact that visa doesn't have a monopoly here) is because cash payments for online transactions remain an option. even if you don't have a jcb credit card or paypay or whatever, you can still pay for your online purchases using cash by taking your barcode to a convenience store, and you can do this for essentially every online vendor, meaning credit card companies can't just impose their moral judgments on your purchases with much repercussion

[valentineblacker]

Can’t believe they’re gonna make me upgrade to windows 11 soon. I don’t wanna.

[valentineblacker]

Like to charge, reblog to cast

[valentineblacker]

I swear every day I’m reading novel sentences heretofore not encountered by humans and I’m not enjoying it

[valentineblacker]

kinda weird that we didn't domesticate deer besides caribou...i guess it's because they have young who stay put rather than following the mother

[valentineblacker]

oh my god if you want to help the birds PUT OUT A BIRDBATH

[valentineblacker]

There's an old programmer proverb, "Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in."

So yeah, you probably do want a separate production and test environment. And the test environment should be realistic, so your tests tell you something about production. But it shouldn't be too realistic. For instance, you don't want to accidentally charge people's credit cards for real during tests.

So yeah, you probably don't want the actual payments to go through in your test site. And real products shouldn't ship when orders are made on the test site. But you still have to be careful about the separation. For instance, you don't want to accidentally leave the test site accessible to the public.

And you really don't want to accidentally paste links to your test environment into a google ad campaign, thereby paying money to trick willing customers into making fake orders with real confirmation emails, that redirect them to paypal and all that jazz but nonetheless fail to charge them or send them orders.

All this is to say, I have recently been doing some uncompensated labor helping a company to debug how exactly they fucked up my wife's birthday present.

[valentineblacker]

You have to admit it's funny

[valentineblacker]

Oppose book worship. Write on that book.

[valentineblacker]

This is INSANE!

[valentineblacker]

WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN HOBBY LOBBY

[valentineblacker]

It’s crazy that an app like GoodRx exists to get your prescription medicine cheaper, and this doesn’t make ppl ask the question “so why is this medicine so expensive in the first place?” The app shows you the cheapest price available for the medicine, meaning that the price isn’t some fixed thing that has to be that high. On a side note, I think the executives of pharmaceutical companies that prize profits over ppl should be shoved into an active wood chipper

[valentineblacker]

Solomon Island Prehensile-tailed Skink (Corucia zebrata), family Scincidae, endemic to the Solomon Islands archipelago

Arboreal, herbivorous, crepuscular.

The largest known species of skink, they can grow to a total length of 32 inches (81 cm).

Live-bearing, they provide parental care for the young, after birth, as well. Females are known to be fiercely protective of the young.

They are actually social, and live in extended family groups.

This has been scientifically proven to be one of the best lizards, and I love them.

photograph by Tara Biron

[valentineblacker]

i think everyone should program at least once just so you realise just how fucking stupid computers are. because theyre so fucking stupid. a computer wants to be told what to do and exactly that and if you make one typo or forget one detail it starts crying uncontrollably

[valentineblacker]

This wonderful 1805 book exposes the reality behind various tricks and illusions of the day, beginning with arguably the most enigmatic of the tricks listed, that of the “Learned Pig”, or as the excellent frontispiece refers to it “The Pig of Knowledge”: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-expositor-or-many-mysteries-unravelled-including-that-of-the-learned-pig-1805