Mastodon link contains gibberish supposedly as an anti-bot measure

Looks fine to me. What are you seeing?

Beware NSFW: redirects to private instances that redirect to porn for monetization

Edit: disable JS to prevent click-jacking

Interesting, I've never seen it do that.

I don't get it, how hard is it to drop a sentence into Google Translate.

Translation is atrocious, and sometimes incorrect, in the part where they showcase their 35-language pronunciations of "hello, I'm happy to help you with that".

And a nit, the "Non-standard phoneme hint" example is flipped for German.

You forgot the /s

> received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340

Sounds like you got scammed. The refund should be for the same or similar value today, not 60% of that. Basically they made 40% profit off of selling your replacement drive instead of giving it to you.

Greece is a tough one for sure

I thought VMAF was a bad metric for perceived video quality.

CVVDP is best and SSIMULACRA2 and Butteraugli pretty good.

They leave the door open for future, maybe novel, uses of your data... horrors beyond their (current) comprehension, I always assume.

This is spiking my cortisol

Are you saying servers keep 90% of what you pay? Tip and otherwise? What country? How do you know? How could a business possibly operate in this reality?

Not necessarily servers, just not into the register as a tracked transaction.

Tax fraud, essentially.

E.g. you go to the Minnesota State Fair, merchants may offer to not charge sales tax if you pay cash. It is shockingly brazen sometimes.

> How could a business possibly operate in this reality?

Extremely lax enforcement on the part of the specific US state's department of revenue

The country of Europe. /s

I hand the cash to the cashier and they respond with "thank you, have a nice evening", while eventually handing me a printout of my order from their tables organiser software, instead of the legally required fiscal receipt.