IAEA audits their fuel & waste chain & takes a dim view of nations outside of a very small group using power reactors to create weapons-grade material. Also it's hard & expensive & they have more immediate things to do with their resources.
Readers of a certain age may remember a fun but flawed vertically scrolling progressive shoot ‘em up game from the mid 80s called Slap Fight. I played it loads on the C64.
I today found out it was called something entirely different in the US, and I feel like part of my childhood was a lie.
Yes, there is still some development in "the brain" up to the age of 25, but it's mostly to do with the areas of the brain that deal with impulse decision making. The areas of the brain that deal with considered decision making are more or less fully developed at 15.
And despite how things look in transphobic fantasy-land, nobody is transitioning on a whim.
@Catriona If people under the age of 25 shouldn't be making choices because their brains haven't fully developed, then those over 35 shouldn't be making choices either, because their cognitive faculties will have started to decline.
Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.
The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.
This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.
If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.
We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.
@crocket2001 I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:
1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.
2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.
The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.
The public don''t need to "come round".
People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.
After watching Oppenheimer the other week, I just rewatched Dr Strangelove.
For the love of god, will one of the nuclear powers announce it’s destroying its hydrogen bombs? These things are psychotically evil. Just get rid of them. Now, before the kill us all.
“one” of them doing it just ensures the other (big one) “wins”. The MAD doctrine actually worked and continues to do so. Putin knows full well that if he launches nukes at anyone he himself and much of Russia will disappear in a glowing radioactive cloud. There would be no winner on either side so he doesn’t dare launch.
@rachel AIUI, the South African ones were constructed but were (probably) never tested. But then the Hiroshima bomb, a similar gun type, was not tested before use either.
Apropos of a conversation elsewhere c, I’ve always been given the creeps by “Jonathan Pie”. It’s always struck me as “manufactured outrage click bait culture for left wing people who think they’re too clever to fall for that.”
The sceptics in the pub crowd had the same sort of attitude and it made them really really easy marks for the alt right to use as useful idiots in their culture war.
Do Americans realise just how much it looks like they’re trying to speedrun “imperial power collapsing into failed state” to the rest of the world right now?
@Paul SomeoneElse @Ghost of Hope If you realistically only have two choices in an election, and one has the platform of “We masturbate to The Handmaid’s Tale”, it’s kinda mandatory to vote for the other as damage control.
@Ghost of Hope I think that’s a stress timed/syllable timed distinction more than anything else (stress timed languages tend to swallow syllables to make them fit, so if you don’t know to listen for the tonic syllables it’s really hard to get the words).
Curiously Brazilian Portuguese is syllable timed, which is the biggest difference. That I wouldn’t mind. What made my ears bleed was rendering all the consonants as “tch”.
Dental implant post crown fitting 2 week review: totally excellent. Absolutely worth the months of bullshit. Would do again if I lost another tooth. Expensive but worth it.
@Sarah Brown @Mark vW Wow, this is a whole world of dental care I was not aware of! (And actually relevant to my interests because I can never get interdental brushes in the tiny gaps between my teefs.)
my dentist's advice was (paraphrased) that my gums and jaw are crap, and I'd lose implants like the several teeth I've lost. (Teeth themselves are good, no fillings ever, but that doesn't really help.) The remaining ones seem more secure though, gums have improved a lot.
@Alan Braggins there are things they can do about the bone. I needed bone regeneration because it was 4 years since the tooth was pulled. My surgeon specialises in it, and the X-rays when he put the implant in (covered over with gum) and then 4 months later, were quite different. The first showed an implant protruding into the soft tissue between the jaw and sinus, barely held in place. The second showed the same implant utterly surrounded by brand new bone.
It might be worth talking to someone who specialises in it. We get a lot of dental tourism here in the Algarve because it’s cheaper but you’re still getting top notch EU trained doctors and surgeons (mine studied in London and spent the start of his career doing surgery for the NHS before returning home to Portugal and a decent climate).
@Nikkileah book n beer group looked at me like I was a Martian when I said I started the 300 pager on Sunday for the Thursday group... it's only 5 hours reading!
German classes in Germany don't have any of the latter three items, either, it's just spelling and grammar, grammar, grammar. So much grammar. On top of that, once you're required to write essays, you aren't actually taught how to do it or given any examples of one looks like (IIRC) which probably explains why I've always been bad at them.
@karohemd Can second the latter point as someone who's had to teach German & Austrian students at university level, the idea school gives them of what constitutes an "essay" ends up requiring some remedial teaching.
@James Baillie @Ozzy The OU is my first academic institution to attempt to teach me how to write an essay. School seemed concerned that it had five paragraphs but didn’t care much beyond that. And Cambridge just assumed you either already had every academic skill required or would figure it out.
When I was at school English language lessons were firmly separated from English Literature, and it wasn’t until English language A Level (which I didn’t do) that you got the really interesting linguistics stuff. It was always a running joke at the time that in 11–16 education one learned most of one’s proper English grammar from doing foreign languages.
Running via Docker behind nginx proxy manager. Got the three containers shown.
The UI is a bit sluggish. In particular, it takes forever for the notifications to show up after doing pretty much anything.
So my question is, is there anything stopping me spinning up another UI or cron container on another machine and trying to parallelise things a bit? Is there anything special I have to do to enable that?
I guess that the best would be to use the daemon instead of cron. How do you store the contact avatars? And how do you store photos? Depending on this,you would need to synchronize some folders as well.
Yeah, sounds fine for this purpose. I guess that with the daemon it should be possible to have one docker for the db,one docker for the daemon and multiple ones for the frontend. But this is never tested.
@Michael Vogel But if I span up another frontend on another machine, coping the friendica data volume in the process, and pointed it at the database, it should just work?
I guess so. But of course updates are more demanding, since you had to keep all machines totally in sync. Possibly it would be the best, if daemon and the front end systems would share a single data drive.
@Michael Vogel Should note in case it's not clear, the container called "friendica-cron" is actually running the daemon, starting with this script:
#!/bin/sh
trap "break;exit" HUP INT TERM
while [ ! -f /var/www/html/bin/daemon.php ]; do
sleep 1
done
echo "Waiting for MySQL $MYSQL_HOST initialization..."
if php /var/www/html/bin/wait-for-connection "$MYSQL_HOST" "${MYSQL_PORT:-3306}" 300; then
sh /setup_msmtp.sh
exec gosu www-data:www-data tini -- php /var/www/html/bin/daemon.php -f start
else
echo "[ERROR] Waited 300 seconds, no response" >&2
fi
One of these devices is 24 years old and still mostly operational, so I guess not. It helps that two of them have a rotary dial used to set the clock. The third (which happens to be the oven) has that stupid short capacitive tap to adjust by a minute, medium hold to start racing through many 10-minute increments per second kind of scheme. On the other hand, the cooktop that’s part of the same physical device goes through its 17 regular power levels at only 2 per second.
How are these interfaces rarely any good? Extreme nonlinearity. Extreme debouncing so you can’t just tap through, and a solid tap is coming up on the acceleration threshold. I feel like strangling the people making these, or making them use their own creations if that isn’t too cruel.
Same here. It doesn’t take much moisture to make it unresponsive. At least a quick wipe tends to suffice. Why is everything dying to be a smartphone in the rain?
@Gen X-Wing @Zoë O'Connell It’s the same tune. The SID version is slightly richer IMO (C64 is my canonical version too. Spent so long playing 2 player with my friend from school).
Had to look it up to be sure (I mean I have C64s and I have a MiSTer, but YouTube had to suffice for now:)). That title music on the C64 is fantastic, and the main theme is so much better to me.
I often wonder what would have happened if the SID hadn’t been crippled and would have been the 16 voices that was intended. Would have been bonkers 😀
When UR reading Sci Fi written by a yank and they’re like, “I need to remind people this is in the future” so they’re all “meters” and “centigrade” and then they suddenly forget and go to “he was about 5 feet and likes his room at 99 degrees”.
The other thing that really marks this out as coming from a US perspective is the nature of the class system on display in this dystopia. There are basically 3 classes: CEO oligarch gods, middle management corporate drones in indentured servitude desperately trying to afford medical care from the company store, and the proles, who basically sell their bodies for medical research.
@Sarah Brown as somebody who grew up christian in a non-English speaking country, the name “Good Friday” also perplexes me.
We call it (a literal translation of) Holy Friday, and it's definitely set aside with specific rites and observances, but not celebrated as a joyous occasion, it's the exact opposite.
And I can get that the sound theological reasons may also apply to the name, but really, the good bit of the whole cleansing humanity from the original sin and stuff is the result, not the process, isn't it?
@valhalla It’s the bizarre obsession with the suffering that puzzles me, as if this suffering was uniquely awful and therefore redemptive *because* it went beyond what anyone else has experienced… but it didn’t. Crucifixions were common - they had two other guys to hang beside him. Rome once lined a road with people on crosses. This kind of horror plays out every day, now too, an example of what people do to other people at their worst.
I take the day to remind myself what the alternative to a kind and compassionate society is; that once we accept violence and fear and dehumanization as tools the end result is crucifixions, and immolations, and hangings, and beheadings, and gas chambers, and machetes, and bombs, and disemboweling, and
I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.
And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.
It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.
And then they came for the rest of you.
They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.
I wasn't very online then, so GG missed me entirely. I had to learn about it after the fact. And it was actually really hard to learn about it for a while? One person likened it to cliques at a highschool lunch table which sounds insane, but for a while that was the only video around. Wasn't until I watched Innuendo Studios's videos on it that I actually got some concrete understanding of the events.
I think some of that contributes to this happening over and over again.
@Jesse Cohn I wrote about it a bit on LJ at the time. I think it's probably gone now. There's a 6 month gap in my memory from the nervous breakdown it caused, so documenting it wasn't high on my list of priorities.
I've since managed to get a modicum of revenge on some of the people involved. Not willing to go into further details.
Thanks -- I'll have to look further into them (a cursory googling isn't very helpful). I seem to have missed a really important chapter in the cultural-political history of our times.
Trying to imagine the culture shock immigrants to the UK get when, for the first time, they encounter someone like an accountant asking for their electricity bill.
Because, fellow Brits, I have to inform you that that's a bit weird.
@sparrowsion Nothing, but mainly companies aren't actually trying to ascertain your address, they're trying to ascertain your identity and using your address as a proxy for that.
@sparrowsion You have by law here to tell the council when you move in or out of an address, so presumably some categories of businesses can get your registered primary address from the relevant database.
Yeah, there's a lot to be said for the lack of bureaucracy in the UK but the lack of common ID cards is questionable. They'd sure be convenient but, OTOH, the whole “papers please” attitude is not one we'd like many, including this, government to take too far.
Meanwhile, in the US you get a “secret” password assigned at birth which you can't change [¹] and which you have to use with lots of different enterprises. And, somehow, people there don't think that's bonkers.
[¹] Except under limited circumstances.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, March 27, 2024, 7:27 PM)
@Ed Davies I mean, you don't NEED an ID card to solve this. In Portugal you can download a "here is this person and their details" certificate from the government's tax website.
The #USPS won't deliver anywhere near my house. To get a PO Box address a half-hour from here, I have to bring them the legal deed to my house and a certificate of insurance on it. Along with my fancy gov ID. (An electric bill might work, but I'm 100% solar...)
@sparrowsion I can't speak for Portugal but in Germany it's a legal requirement to notify the local council you have moved there and they will modify your ID card or issue a new one.
So many culture shocks, especially with financial stuff. I arrived in '96 and the first thing my bank did after opening an account was to issue me a cheque book. The last time I'd seen a cheque in Germany was at least 10 years prior... Later that year I wanted to transfer money to someone (I can't remember the reason) so went to my bank and they told me that was only possible if they had an account with the same bank... Bank transfers had been the standard in Germany since the 60s.
@Ozzy My UK bank keeps asking me, “what’s online banking like in Portugal compared to ours?”, presumably expecting effusive praise about their app, and their face falls when I say, “it’s at least a decade ahead of anything you have”.
So many Brits think they’re living in high tech utopia, when actually it’s backwards as hell in so many ways.
Geese cheat code: they’re bullshitting. Make it clear that you know this and they will fuck off. Run at them screaming “Dinner!” and flap your arms. They fuck off incredibly quickly.
If that doesn’t work, grab the squawky cunt by the neck and practice Olympic hammer throwing. It’s funny, and it won’t give you shit again.
They're kinda funny and cute when you just leave them be. Had to teach this to one of the kids who _always_ did _exactly_ what you described upon seeing any gathering of birds. Except for the "Dinner" part, unless "AAAAHH" is some language for that.
Even got hired by a dairy farmer to protect the grass. I shit you not.
I hate these customer service feedback things. The car dealership where I bought my Leaf was, a year or so ago, taken over by a national chain. They had a recall for a software upgrade last week. They were short staffed and busy. It took longer than it should. Whatever.
Today I got a call, from Lisboa. How would you rate your experience … blah blah.
Now this things are just used to punish employees, and I not enabling that, so even though it was a bit inconvenient … 5 stars across the board.
Then, “We also want to email you a survey”
And I just got the email. 5 stars.
Not good enouogh. Fill in this text box about your experience. “Everything went well” (in Portuguese). “Opinion not strong enough” - they using LLMs to grade these things now?
WHAT FRESH LATE STAGE CAPITALIST DYSTOPIAN HELL IS THIS?
“Everything went very well”.
Leave me alone and stop trying to make me complicit in screwing your employees over. FFS.
... Show more...
I hate these customer service feedback things. The car dealership where I bought my Leaf was, a year or so ago, taken over by a national chain. They had a recall for a software upgrade last week. They were short staffed and busy. It took longer than it should. Whatever.
Today I got a call, from Lisboa. How would you rate your experience … blah blah.
Now this things are just used to punish employees, and I not enabling that, so even though it was a bit inconvenient … 5 stars across the board.
Then, “We also want to email you a survey”
And I just got the email. 5 stars.
Not good enouogh. Fill in this text box about your experience. “Everything went well” (in Portuguese). “Opinion not strong enough” - they using LLMs to grade these things now?
WHAT FRESH LATE STAGE CAPITALIST DYSTOPIAN HELL IS THIS?
“Everything went very well”.
Leave me alone and stop trying to make me complicit in screwing your employees over. FFS.
@Alaric Snell-Pym Yeah. I see the shadowy hand of “AI”. Like humans can’t invent ANYTHING without some cunt of a middle manager gleefully using it to torment people just trying to pay their bloody bills.
@Brad Rubenstein “:verified:” problem is that the ones they get back are disproportionally karen-tastic and the poor buggers at the coal face get penalised by a low average score.
My strategy has been to ignore such messages unless I can honestly say things were good — and then I give their highest rating. But I can see your point about responding to counter all the karen-tastic ones.
@Nemo @Brad Rubenstein “:verified:” That's not how these things work. "Performance feedbacks" when rated out of 5 mean, "anything less than a 5 is grounds for a disciplinary".
Despite popular belief, turbo cancer actually grows more slowly. Some manufacturers have made turbo cancers that do make it grow faster, though, which adds to the confusion.
Ha! A bit of sciencing reveals that my new dental implant crown, while colour matched perfectly under visible light, is a completely different colour to its neighbouring teeth under UV.
No reason why it wouldn't be, I guess. It's designed to look real to human vision, which it does, apart from the little blob of epoxy filling covering the screw head.
Secondary school teacher Enoch Burke is to remain in prison for contempt of court after refusing to engage with an offer from a High Court judge to release him for Easter.
I hate how the judiciary are falling over themselves to believe this cis white man can 'behave'. Would they be offering the same kind of anything to a more marginalised person?
@Elena ``of Valhalla'' based on what they announced. However, if you go and look on the source website (you don’t need a threads account to do so), there are no replies showing from outside Threads.
Just saying you guys, hat as long as we keep leaping to "let's make murderbots with the thinking sand!", maybe we should hold off on the whole "teaching sand to think" thing?
Having a dental implant crown finally fitted to replace a tooth that’s been missing for 4 years, especially when it was your biggest molar, is a profoundly weird feeling.
so i have a Synology and it was a bad experience because:
1. they will happily sell small ones where the hardware just isn't up to running the current bloated version of the OS
(specifically I got a DS216 then discovered this new device was below the *stated* reqs)
2. the BIOS is DRMed so you can't just put Debian on it or something sensible.
i have cut down enough of the software, including forcibly deleting bloated shit and making it impossible to auto-reinstall it, that it can serve SMB without running out of CPU
if this thing blows up or catches fire I'll probably get an old HP Microserver (near-silent, reputedly) and run a proper OS on it
This entry was edited (Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 1:43 PM)
I got a DS1019+ (in 2019) to replace my Drobo 5N. It's Just Worked since, but I'm not doing anything very complicated with it.
Looks like the closest current model is the DS1522+ (although that's 2022 hardware).
I like that the storage is just a pile of Linux and can be recovered on any PC.
I tried using it as a general Linux server, it's doable but the OS is a bit too opinionated to make that pleasant. Now it's just NFS mounted to a separate Debian box, as well as CIFS shares.
FeralRobots
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Also it's hard & expensive & they have more immediate things to do with their resources.