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pixelscript @lemm.ee
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Comments 246
John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed
  • That's because, to my understanding, the prerequisite to be able to launch one is "handle the raw, unfiltered firehose of all the traffic on the entire platform". A relay has to be a mirror of the entire company's hosting infastructure, and you'd have to essentially do it for free. It's no puzzle to me why no one's done it yet.

  • Specifying file paths
  • For a few years now, Windows has had the capability of marking certain directories as case-sensitive. So you can have a mixed-case-sensitivity filesystem experience now. Yeah. :/

  • Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering?
  • Honest question: what about cigarette butts makes them not biodegradable, exactly? To my vague understanding of what they're made of, I know them to be cheifly comprised of paper and extract from dried leaves. Even after considering all the other additive compounds in cigs added for taste and effect, I can't picture a lot of it by mass being forever chemicals like plastics.

    That asked, I'm not convinced littering is acceptable even for biodegradable things. Far from all "biodegradable" materials completely disintegrate on a short timescale. Even IF cigarette butts degrade like plain paper and dry leaves, they wouldn't do it quickly. If it's a place where even a single smoker haunts multiple times a week, smoking and discarding multiple cigs at a time, they can pile up faster than they disappear.

    And that's not even considering all the toxins that would leech out from the things that will remain at elevated levels for as long as the littering continued.

  • Speaking words of wisdom...Let It Be, Let It Be
  • I feel like the "we don't know what this function does" meme is kinda bad. There's no reason beyond maybe time crunch why you shouldn't be able to dissect exactly what it does.

    Despite this, the notion of a load-bearing function is still very relevant. Yeah, sure, you know what it does, including all of the little edge case behaviors it has. But you can't at this time fully ascertain what's calling it, and how all the callers have become dependant on all the little idiosyncracies that will break if you refactor it to something more sensible.

    It has been several times now where a part of my system of legacy code broke in some novel fantastic way, because two wrongs were cancelling out and then I fixed only one of them.

  • Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?
  • I think you can have it, but you'd need to spend a pretty penny.

    All it would take is calling an electrician to run the appropriate wiring from the place you want the kettle plugged in to you breaker box, connect it to the breaker box with the appropriate breaker, cap off the other end with the appropriate plug (a 240V plug does exist in America), and then buy a kettle capable of receiving the rated voltage and current and splice on the appropriate plug (because I presume you won't find one sold with that plug).

    An extremely expensive way to save maybe three minutes boiling water, but you can do it.

  • Mississippi politician files ‘Contraception Begins at Erection Act’
  • It's not clear at all, no.

    Is this proposal patently ridiculous? Yes. Do I believe there's at least one legislator in Mississippi who unironically believes in this bill exactly as written, and is playing this completely straight? Considering all that's happened so far, why not?

    Satire doesn't work when the obvious hyperbolic nonsense is within actual expected behavior of the satirized.

    I won't claim one way or the other that this is or is not satire. I don't know who this legislator is and I don't really care. But no, with the whole article you're pasting everywhere in this thread as my only context clue, I certainly didn't find enough evidence to be convinced he doesn't actually believe this.

  • Apple deadnamed the Gulf of America and conservatives are triggered
  • One can more or less envision the President as the CEO of Federal Government, Inc. and executive orders as internal memos to the employees.

    If you don't work there, following the memo is not your problem.

    But if you do any kind of business with someone who does work there, you can be hit by the secondhand effects.

  • Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID
  • Security questions don't care what you put in there. It's not an exam. It's basically just an alt password.

    I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I'm cooked anyway, so.

  • American measurements
  • Worse still, the pattern does not continue like one would expect.

    • Nominal: 2x4 -- Actual: 1.5" x 3.5"
    • Nominal: 2x6 -- Actual: 1.5" x 5.5"
    • Nominal: 2x8 -- Actual: 1.5" x 7.25"
    • Nominal: 2x10 -- Actual: 1.5" x 9.25"
    • Nominal: 2x12 -- Actual: 1.5" x 11.25"

    There's just an arbitrary point where they decided to take an extra 1/4" bite out of it. I'm not sure whether that's more of an effect of shrinkage from kiln drying being proportional to the original length or an effect of industry practice to mill smaller boards to eke out more cuts per tree.

    And for the record, yes, I am aware the discrepancy is not entirely explained by shrinkage. They do a planing step after drying. But the shrinkage is a not insignificant part of it. They have to round down to the nearest convenient dimension from wherever the shrinkage stops.

    If longer boards shrink more, the finished boards would necessarily have to be smaller. I question whether that's the effect at play, though, because I believe there was a phase in the industry where that extra quarter inch wasn't taken off, and they changed their minds about it later.

  • Percent age 25+ with Bachelor's degree or higher
  • This is somewhat a "people live in cities" graph, but not as stark of one I expected. Not all big cities are so educated, plus there are a lot of rural places that draw in a surprising number of people with advanced degrees.

    Still, I'm amused that Interstate 29 in specific lights up like a string of Christmas lights.