I do love weaponized autism.

Sadly phone scams are the 3rd most profitable bussinesses in the world. They aren’t going anywhere unless we give up having a phone or our phone carriers do their fucking job on actual scam prevention

what? actual human calling? sounds like something an ai would say.

I just yell at them in a bizarre mix of English, Latin, and random archaic Germanic words. I've been told I sound like a Icelander with issues when I do that.

For people who think they're winning by fucking with scammers, unless you are tying up hours of their time, you are doing the opposite by engaging with them. And even if you tie up hours, they aren't really losing.

Obviously, falling for the scam is their ideal outcome, but ANY engagement beyond silence, a generic VM, or a disconnected/fax line marks your number as 'active' which can then be sold to other scammers.

So they still get a profit, and your number winds up on more scamming lists.

We are also getting close to the point where it won't even be an actual human you're talking to, it'll just be some AI, making engagement even more useless.

If you get a call from an unknown number and you don't have call screening, answer and SAY NOTHING! Not hello, not "may I ask whose calling", mute your phone so they don't even get background noise. The only numbers they can't get anything out of are the ones that are brick walls.

When I was in graduate school, I used to call the 700 Club's prayer hotline and talk about my dissertation. To their credit, those people were remarkably patient and would only occasionally attempt to steer the conversation back in the direction of Jesus and his need to have some of my money. "Oh, I don't have any money. Anyway, it turns out that there's a perfect correlation between the giving of dowries and engagement in plow-based agriculture." Completely true but for some reason they didn't really care.

Nobody wants my info dump. I know way too much about networking and computers. The topics are massively deep, like iceberg levels of deep. One for each topic.

I could lecture for an entire day on the nuance and considerations of picking a Wi-Fi channel, or you can ignore me and just hit "auto" which may or may not take some, or all, of my considerations into account when selecting a channel.

If anyone is keen to hear some generally good advice about home networking, here's my elevator speech:

Wire when you can, wireless when you have to. Wi-Fi is shared and half duplex, every wired connection is exclusive to the device and full duplex. If you can't Ethernet, use MoCA, or powerline (depending on what internal power structures you have, this can be excellent or unusable, keep your receipts). Mesh is best with a dedicated backhaul, better with a wired backhaul. Demand it from any system you consider. The latest and greatest Wi-Fi technology probably won't fix whatever problem you're having, it will only temporarily reduce the symptoms and you won't notice it for a while. Be weary about upgrading and ask yourself why you require the upgrade. Newer wireless won't fix bad signal, or dropouts.

For everything else, Google. That's how I find most of the information I know.

Good luck.

I'll be around in case anyone has questions. No promises on when I'll be able to reply tho.

Retired moderator on Encyclopedia Titanica here. Whaddaya wanna know?

Is this the weaponized autism I keep hearing about?

I can only info dump when I'm prompted to start talking about something now. I have special interests, but I have no interest in talking about them with people that I can feel aren't really engaged. And the only people who ever engage eventually do get worn down after a while, or they're more knowledgeable than me about something and that makes me fall in infatuation with them.

So if anyone wants to talk about modding video games and get married, hmu. Modding specifically is my special interest, and the games I mod include:

Elder Scrolls series (primarily Oblivion/ Skyrim but I have played some modded morrowind within the last 5 years)

Fallout series (all of them! Ok, I haven't played 2 or the offshoots, but... shut up. New Vegas is my favorite :3)

Stardew Valley (I have 2700 hours in stardew :3 burnt out rn tho lowkey)

Dark Souls 1/3, Elden Ring

Baldurs Gate 3

Dragon Age (mostly origins, it continuously went downhill from there for me. I have done a couple modded replays of inquistion tho)

Minecraft

If you were to ask me what I could go on for the longest about? Probably New Vegas? Especially since I recently put in a fresh 200 hours. I finally got into TTW (a mod for new vegas that utilizes your copy of Fallout 3 goty to combine both games into a single experience) and installed it alongside some modernization modlists and HOLY SHIT.

I hadn't played since 2021, an era that seemed like New Vegas was dying. People had long moved onto Fallout 4, quest mods weren't coming out at the same frequency, etc

There was a total renaissance right after I left. If you haven't played new vegas in a while: consider coming back and finding a guide or using a program like wabbajack to mod your game.

I personally followed the Viva New Vegas guide, then after deciding to jump into TTW, I found that the VNV people have a guide for a TTW list called TBoT (The Best of Times). Both of these lists are,'in my experience, more stable than the base game. A lot of important performance and configuration mods came out.

Then, there's another list called WSG that I followed (wasteland survival guide), which added new content to the game and made it more hardcore.

If you made it this far and you really want to hear more, ask me a question. :3

The only good weaponization of science.

A drop of water falls in an endless, still lake. The ripple spreads out, leaving a circular wave spreading out endlessly. Tiny disturbances create their own ripples; one side travelling with the main ripple, causing wonderful interactions in the wavefront; but the main ripple grows faster than these disturbances spread across it.

The beings of the ripple look across the main ripple, seeing the disturbances as their interactions propagate across the main ripple. Looking back far enough to the earliest disturbances, one thing becomes clear; the entire ripple comes from one drop, and most of the ripple is moving away faster than a disturbance can propagate.

An expanding universe where every point of the universe started from the middle is pretty easy to conceptualize with the right analogy.

Answer the phone like you are a business receptionist.

"Hello, this is Fronz Frunickal with Yogurt O’ Try-it Froyo, how can I serve you?"

It's funny listening to them silently process what they just heard before hanging up.

Twice we got scammed. Well once for real, I caught the second one. I only realized the first one after my parents were already gone. My brother went on a solo psycho-journey when I was like 14, trans-Siberian railway through Russia and Mongolia, ended up in China. He was perhaps 19 at the time. A couple months in we got a call from China. Chinese embassy say my brother is in trouble. They read back his information, everything on the passport, is this him? Yes, it is. Keep in mind this was in the 90's when international calls to the other side of the planet cost actual money by the minute.

My parents spoke very broken English, and I was too young to speak properly to handle something like this, so there was a bunch of back and forth over several days, but it was clear to all of us that he was in trouble, and needed us to send money to get him out of whatever it was. China, ffs. I don't remember, shit I don't know even how much they ultimately sent, but it was likely by my estimates around $1500- a very solid chunk of change for our not necessarily struggling but not exactly thriving family either.

He came back a year later or so, and I don't know why but the whole debacle kind of never came up at the dinner table, until just like a year or so before my mom and dad both passed. We were all sitting after dinner, drinking and telling the usual family stories, and it came up, and we all laughed about how crazy that shit was to deal with back home when he was on his crazy first trip of his life and had to send money to China. He didn't laugh. He hadn't any clue what the fuck we were talking about, and nervously laughed it off.

At the time I just shook my head, of course he wouldn't remember when someone else bailed him out and saved his ass, narcissistic piece of shit as he is. Only after they passed did I realize, oh shit. There was no embassy, there was no emergency. Some entrepreneurial Chinese hostel manager just took down his info, somehow tracked down our parents (likely he had just straight up given them their contact information, just in case), and scammed us out of a decent amount of money.

My parents were hard working, we never wanted for anything, and they never let on we were actually not particularly well off and struggled at times. If they were alive, I still don't know if I would tell them. What was, was. What good is that heartbreak gonna do anybody thirty years after the fact? Anyway, that moment has passed either way, and well, we survived anyway, but damn it stings being the only one knowing this such a long time afterwards. My brother stayed a piece of shit and our remaining family have all gone no-contact with him, so even he doesn't know, it's just me.