Dave.

You people are underselling yourselves.

A thousand a night, indexed to inflation. First year in advance, and then payment every morning after that, with the condition that if you miss one night, it's all over.

I think the ongoing payment adds a bit of spice to it. Do you set a goal of X dollars and stop then? Will you be ordered by the court to continue wearing it for alimony for your gold digging ex wife that you met in the first year? Will the temptation of easy money for minor suffering slowly drive you insane? Time will tell.

"I have no mouth and I must scream" could end up being a plausible way to spend eternity.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS's fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.

What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.

And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?

Send them a letter via registered mail stating that upon receipt of said letter they waive their right to waive your rights.

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

"ChatGPT, write a letter to the community that says I am looking after this issue with untrusted BLOBs but do not be specific about anything."

Immediately switches to google play to turn off auto update for Nova Launcher

I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.

And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are "um,so", and all we're looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it... and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.

Dreams of a cyberpunk future where the sum total of the world's knowledge of any subject can be just a thought away

Most likely reality:

Popup ads are now intrusive thoughts. 40 percent of your implant's processing power is spent looking for cues in your environment to better serve you "curated content" (i.e. advertising). Knowledge is still somewhat freely available but just after this quick shout out to our sponsors.

When you're looking for something specific it's a coin toss whether you get actual knowledge or an AI hallucination and you can't tell the difference. You can pay $279.99/mo for premium access to verified sources, but if your licence expires you forget everything.

The arrival of Boost for Lemmy did it for me. So now it's a case of stumbling around and finding the communities I like, and beginning to post, and that always takes a little while.

No.

Because I'm not under the self-important delusion that everything is part of a grand conspiracy out to get me.

I'd aim for one of the rural areas in Discworld.

Relatively calm life, as long as you keep the local witch on your side.

// Dear programmer
//
// When I wrote this code, both 
// God and I knew how it worked. 
// Now only God knows!!
//
// Therefore if you are trying to 
// optimise this routine and it fails 
// (most surely) please increase 
// this counter as a warning for the 
// next person
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 254

but the only green hydrogen is from renewable energy powered electrolysis.

Clean until you use a bunch of equipment to get it. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that's a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your "stuff to share" folder in OneDrive and didn't put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you'll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there's no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams' SharePoint interface, the file that's automatically called "OneDrive.zip" without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.

how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability

Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile you're a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.

The first rule of corporate IT is, "control what's on your network". Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That's why they're being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.

What your code can do is run this first and if it returns false then do a quick double check using a traditional isPrime function. Really speeds things up!

You can stare at that code all afternoon but you won't spot the bug until a microsecond after you hit "commit".

The filesystem driver knows the size of the filesystem is larger than the physical size of the partition it is on. Because of that it refuses to do anything with it until that discrepancy is sorted.

Boot to a USB/ISO, run cfdisk, extend the partition size back to original or larger, then run fsck on the partition again.

McAfee wrote a program that used the Sqlite library for database storage.

When going about its data storage business for McAfee's program, the Sqlite library was storing files in C:\temp with prefixes like sqlite_3726371.

Users see that and get angry, and bug the Sqlite developers.

Now probably when initialising the Sqlite library McAfee could have given it the location of a directory to keep it's temp files. Then they could have been tucked away somewhere along with the rest of the McAfee code base and be more easily recognised as belonging to them, but they didn't.

So because of a bit of careless programming on McAfee's part, Sqlite developers were getting the heat because the files were easily recognisable as belonging to them.

Because the Sqlite developers don't have control of what McAfee was doing, the most expedient way to solve the problem was to obfuscate the name a bit.

Ok I'll just inject a little bit of context into those numbers because it smells faintly of a hit piece by Reuters, simply because of the timeframe used and the number of employees spaceX has.

My experience is 30 years in the mining industry, which in that time has become pretty good at managing safety, and reporting on it.

So I'll dig in a little.

Since 2014, so nine years.

SpaceX employee count : 13000 approximately.

Take about a quarter of that to weed out the paper pushers and company growth since 2014, gives us 3500 or so employees in the line of fire (that is, manufacturing and such).

600 reportable injuries, so about 66 injuries a year. About 5.5 a month on average, over 9 years.

Now those 3500 employees work 60 hour weeks (because: spaceX). So 5.5 injuries and 840,000 man-hours a month. I'm going to round those hours up to 1 million for convenience and to counter the fact that I ditched quite a few people in my initial assessment of SpaceX employees in the line of fire before.

And with a bit of half-assery , I say, "ta-da!" and get 5.5 reportable injuries per million man-hours at SpaceX over the last 9 years.

So, what kind of number is that? Well for tracking this kind of thing normally you would work on a value called that "lost time injury frequency rate" - LTIFR - which is the number of injuries per million hours worked. Oh look, my previous rounding to a million has become very convenient.

Looking at the data that Reuters has given, and my half-assed guesses about employees, spaceX has a long term LTIFR of 5.5. Note that number drops significantly if you use SpaceX's entire employee base, which as a single entity, they would be quite entitled to use and report.

How does that number stand up against industry norms? 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars.

The fact that Reuters had to take 9 years of data to make the raw numbers sound alarming enough is a bad smell. They could have calculated LTIFR numbers for each year and figured out a trend and if that was alarming enough, they could have reported on it, like "SpaceX increasingly dangerous to work at!". The fact that they didn't makes me suspect it's a hit piece, although I am willing to accept they didn't want to get into LTIFR numbers and are dumbing it down for the general public.

Absolutely the number of serious injuries is a concern. Serious injuries are also at the top of a "injury pyramid", with every layer underneath broader, all the way down to "Ow, I stubbed my toe". If you have real figures for one layer (like a layer where an employee can't hide an injury), you can get a good idea of what the other layers should look like.

Judging from Reuters' numbers, the bottom "minor" layers aren't getting reported enough, which suggests a lack of safety culture at SpaceX. Although that could simply be from Reuters' using only public records, which, you know, only keep track of injuries worth keeping track of, so the bottom of that pyramid might only be seen by SpaceX internally.

In conclusion, the reporting by Reuters of raw numbers over long timeframes is suspect. That's not how things are done in the safety industry, which works with weighted metrics to get results they can compare between companies. Dig in a bit further yourself.

It brings that consistent Seattle blandness everywhere it goes.

Neal Stephenson said it best in Snow Crash :

"In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.

But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto."

Article summary:

Linux: Do this.

Apple: Do this.

Windows: Conspicuously absent.

Config state is an absolute shitshow on windows. Is this application's config in $APPDATA/local? Roaming? The registry? Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE? USERS? In its own folder in Program Files, oh Program Files(x86)? Maybe it's just in a folder in $USER.

Gives me the shits.

Article is good though, just wanted to vent.

"Hello I'm dgriffith, a community support member here at (official support forum) and I'm here to help.

Have you tried formatting your hard drive and completely reinstalling your OS? That often helps when your icons are misaligned on the desktop.

If this post helps, please mark it as useful, thanks!"

There's geological, and then there's ecological. Mars has geology but has no ecosystem discovered thus far.

So the question, "should we replace one ecosystem with another on Mars for our own benefit?" doesn't really make much sense. There isn't anything to replace, as far as we can tell right now.

Perhaps consider instead that creating an ecosystem where there wasn't one before is of an overall net benefit to life in the universe, of which all current evidence points to being present on only one planet.

A lot of the software components under the hood in Linux are replaceable.

So you have a bunch of different CPU and disk IO schedulers to suit different workloads, the networking stack and memory management can be tweaked to hell and back, etc etc.

Meanwhile Windows Server 2022 has...... ?

Suitcase sized device? Only one or two of them nearby? Then that's not a problem.

If you scale it to industrial sizes/quantities then the extra salinity in the area where you dump the waste products becomes an issue.

Eg my coastal city uses about 135 megalitres of water a day. Supplying all that from seawater requires you to put about 5 metric tons of salt somewhere, every 24 hours.

Stick 5 tons of salt a day directly in one place in shallow waters just offshore and you'll end up with a dead zone a mile wide pretty quickly.

So now you've got to water that salt down into something that's only slightly saltier than usual and that can be difficult because for my example 135 million litres of water a day, you want to dilute the waste by at least 10x that (to make it approx 10 percent saltier) and now you're cycling a billion-plus litres a day around the place.

So this is pretty cool stuff, but just need to be careful with the side effects when it's scaled up.

It's a perfectly cromulent word that describes the process that happens across nearly all consumer corporate endeavours, online included.

I just want my backspace key to go back a page in my history when I press it, LIKE IT USED TO BE FOR 20+ YEARS.

But no, this is apparently a "poor UI experience", so I have to put my hand on my mouse, locate the pointer, move it to the back button, and then click.

At least Firefox allows you to rummage around under the hood and set it back.

But it's three more letters. No deal.

Don't worry too much about it going to waste.

What usually happens next is that your "lifetime licence" turns into an "ohhhh that's a licence for the OLD system. We've introduced Plex Ultimate 2000! It's got all these great new features, and it's only $3.95 a month. Don't worry, we won't forget our greatest supporters, whoever has a lifetime licence for the worn out, old system, their first year's subscription will be 25 percent off, yaay!"

Especially after all the spam on Facebook like:

"RANDOM_FRIEND wants to get in touch with you on Threads™!"

"RANDOM_FRIEND just posted something on Threads™! Check it out!"

Etc etc

And then the interleaving of Threads™ teaser posts amongst Facebook posts with half a sentence and then "..." and any interaction with it prompts you to join threads so you can read the rest of that sentence that hooked you in...

Or the "easy and fun™" way that every Instagram account has a Threads™ account just waiting to be activated by you.

I wonder how much of a user base they would have without all the jamming it down user's throats.

Booked a place in Queenstown (New Zealand) on a long weekend via booking dot com. Tourist town, you know what it's going to be like on a long weekend, and I had trouble finding a place a week out, it was a short notice trip.

Same, "no need to confirm!"

Arrive 5pm..... nope, no room, fully booked due to the long weekend, nothing from booking dot com as far as the hotel is concerned.

Slog through booking dot com's horrible script driven online chat, 90 minutes later, "oh noes we can't find a place in Queenstown, here's your money back plus a 5 percent off your next booking voucher for your trouble".

6.30 pm in Queenstown on a long weekend.

After ringing through every accommodation provider I could find on Google I eventually found a place that had a four bed room for $450 for the night, vs the $150 I had originally planned.

And as a final irritation, the money that they naturally zapped out of my card in an instant at the time of booking took three weeks to be returned to my card.

Booking dot com, booking dot never again you fucks.

My main issue with all of this is that I'm not interested in maintaining a charge for yet another wireless device.

I'm a frequent flier for work. My wired noise cancelling headphones run on a single AAA battery for 14+ hours straight. I can buy a small pack of AAA batteries at the airport in 30 seconds and get 60 hours of listening time. I don't have to worry about putting them back in their carrying/charger case. I don't have to worry about charging that case. If they go flat and I don't have a spare AAA battery (the case actually has a convenient hole for a spare AAA), they still work, albeit with a noisier background. And they plug into in flight entertainment system headphone sockets. Haven't seen a Bluetooth option on IFE systems yet.

Would I want to go jogging with my wired headphones? No. I do have a pair of bose wireless earbuds, and they're nice. But every time I think about using them, they are flat in their charging case. I don't want to have to keep the charging case on charge soooooo for 90 percent of my usage , the wired ones it is.

Read the first couple of lines in that file, they provide a vital clue as to where you should be looking and what you should be doing.

I highly doubt that consumer internet in Japan is terminating fiber directly into peoples' computers.

You run fiber to the home and gigabit ethernet or whatever internally in the premises. All your other complaints re: cost and etc aren't really an issue for last mile consumer grade fiber.

I have seen installers run a fiber drop cable across from a power pole, bring it down an outside wall , then staple it to joists under a house, cleave off the end and stick a mechanical splice on it, bang it in the power meter, all good, plug it in the fiber modem, good to go in less than 20 minutes. All this stuff uses standard components and technology that's been available for 10+ years now.

Also no one uses cat3 for data and it can't be run for 'hundreds of feet'. And LC fiber IS used in the US - that's a kind of connector not the kind of fiber

It's probably the standard "last mile" half assed solution where they decide to use existing phone lines and VDSL from a box down the street instead of biting the bullet and running fiber.

I kind of feel that trawling social media looking for the words of potential mass shooters isn't going to be the thing that solves - or even slows down - the mass shooting problem that the USA has.

The World Copyright Office then?

Oh wait, three seconds of googling suggests my posts are most likely covered when I post via my home instance in Australia.

"You don't need to register for copyright in Australia. The moment an idea or creative concept is documented on paper or electronically it is automatically protected by copyright in Australia. Copyright protection is free and automatic under the Copyright Act 1968."

That's a fun quote but this has been literally THE most expensive and comprehensive automotive recall in history, with upwards of a hundred million cars affected worldwide.

It was also instigated and enforced by government regulators in numerous countries, vehicle manufacturers didn't really have a choice in the matter.

States in my country (Australia) solved the "recalcitrant owner problem" (which sounds like the issue in the article ) by preventing owners from renewing the registration on their vehicle until the faulty components had been replaced.