Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe it should be something along the lines of “slah-vah oo-kra-ee-nee”

  The “oo” part almost wants to be a “yoo” but doesn’t quite get there

  the “kra-ee” almost slurs together into a single “kri” sound

  And the “nee” almost drops off into “neh”

  Disclaimer- I don’t really speak a word of Ukrainian, there’s a pretty big Ukrainian immigrant community in my area so I’ve been around Ukrainian speakers and heard it spoken probably slightly more than the average American, but I’m probably missing the mark on that a little bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In one sense, the egg. Animals had been laying eggs for millions of years before anything like a chicken evolved.

  If we’re limiting our scope to just chicken eggs though, things get a little murkier.

  When we talk about chicken eggs, are we talking about eggs laid by a chicken, or are we talking about eggs from which a chicken can hatch? Or do both need to be true for it to truly be a chicken egg?

  In the first and last case, the chicken obviously needs to come first, a non-chicken can’t lay a chicken egg if that’s the criteria you’re going by.

  That middle ground though is interesting.

  The chicken is descended from the red junglefowl. Look up some pictures, they’re pretty damn chicken-y, I might even say they may look even more like a chicken than some modern chicken breeds. If I was out walking around and a junglefowl ran across the street in front of me, I’d probably chuckle to myself while I pondered the age-old question of “why did the chicken cross the road?” If one showed up in my friends’ backyard flock of assorted chicken breeds, it wouldn’t look at all out of place.

  But it is not a chicken.

  Chickens, however, are junglefowl. We consider them to be a subspecies of junglefowl- Gallus gallus domesticus

  Chickens did not emerge in a single instant. It took many years of selective breeding and evolution for the modern chicken to come into being. Countless generations of junglefowl gradually becoming more chicken-y until the modern chicken emerged.

  At one point in time, a bird was hatched that checked all of the boxes for us to call it a chicken instead of a junglefowl. The egg it hatched from was laid by a bird that was just on the other side of the arbitrary line from being a chicken. Unless you sequenced the two birds genomes you would probably be pretty hard-pressed to say which was the chicken and which was the junglefowl.

  So the first chicken hatched from an egg said by a junglefowl.

  However, that is one true chicken in a flock of not-quite-chickens. Odds are that chicken did not breed with another true chicken, but instead one of those near-chicken junglefowl. So its eggs would not hatch into a true chicken, but instead a chicken-junglefowl hybrid.

  And there was probably a long period of time where things teetered on that line, the occasional true chicken hatched, and then laid eggs that hatched into non-chickens, those non-chickens getting closer and closer to the line over many generations.

  Until finally it happened. Two true chickens bred, and lay an egg that also matches into a true chicken. The first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken.

  But again you’d be pretty hard pressed to pinpoint which bird that was in the flock. It was probably a wholly unremarkable bird that looked pretty much the same as all of the chickens and non-chicken junglefowl around it.

  The lines we draw separating different species and subspecies are pretty arbitrary. It’s more for our convenience to categorize things than it is to reflect any absolute truth about the animals around us. That line could have been drawn just about anywhere in the history of chickens and it would still be valid.

  There’s also potentially a nature vs nurture angle here. Chickens are social creatures who raise their young, they’re not running on pure instinct, to some extent they learn how to be a chicken from other chickens. A true chicken raised by junglefowl may act more like a junglefowl than a chicken in some ways, and vice versa. Is that important when determining what the bird is? When the differences between them are so small, I think it might be. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

  So there’s perhaps an argument to be made that maybe the first true chicken didn’t appear until at least a generation or two after that first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken. After all, if the young aren’t being raised by and around other chickens, maybe they’re not really chickens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends on the movie

  If, after 30 years it still has a lot of cultural relevance, I’d think of it as a “classic” movie.

  If it doesn’t, if it hasn’t aged well and/or faded into obscurity, I think it’s fair to think of it as an old movie.

  Probably around '95, I would have been watching Star Wars for the first time. It didn’t feel like an old movie to me then and it still doesn’t to this day. Other movies from that same era haven’t aged quite as well and felt “old” to me.

  Looking at some of the top movies from '95, some of them are just as enjoyable or relevant today as they were when they released, others feel dated and not relevant to me today.

  It’s going to depend on your personal tastes and experiences of course. I can also sprinkle in a lot of platitudes like “you’re only as old as you feel” and “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

  I think there’s also room for some overlap. There’s classic movies that also feel dated. I think some movies can be both old and classics. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t agree that, for example, Casablanca, isn’t old, but I think that just about everyone agrees that it’s also a classic. Where the line is is pretty murky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GameCube Coming To Nintendo Switch Online With 3 Games At Launch⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I’m not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.

  While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there’s a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there’s a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.

  GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it’s a lot easier to emulate them.

  I’ve seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.

  If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they’re saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That’s your computer emulating a GameCube game. There’s not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.

  Spanish and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it

  Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

  The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

  Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

  I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

  Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you genuinely believe that, you are either living in some kind of serious tech nerd bubble, or you have no idea what replacing the OS means and you’re talking about doing software updates, tweaking settings, and installing apps.

  The vast majority of smartphone users probably don’t even realize you can replace the OS, and if they do they probably don’t see the need.

  For desktops and laptops, around 71% of them are running windows, somehow I doubt people are buying Linux or Mac laptops just to turn around and install windows on them. Then around 16% of them are running MacOS, and I doubt that any significant number of those are hackintoshes. A fair amount of the remaining 13% or so are probably people who have installed their own OS, but not all, some of them are using ChromeOS, I don’t hear much about people deciding to make their own Chromebook, and some people are buying an off-the-shelf Linux device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that if you lose your Social Security Card (USA) more than 10 times, the Social Security Administration will have to, by law, refuse to issue anymore replacement cards, for the rest of your life.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding (and it’s very possible that this is just urban legend) is that they’re intentionally made of paper so if they do get lost they’re more likely to fall apart instead of getting stolen.

  They’re not really intended to be something you carry around with you all the time, it’s not like you’re usually going to be expected to produce on the spot during your daily routine. It’s more the sort of thing you’d keep at home with your birth certificate and other such personal documents.

  IMO the real boneheaded move was making it a wallet-sized card instead of something more like a birth certificate. If you make something in that form factor, people are going to stick it in their wallets and carry it around with them and it’s going to fall apart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it better to leave a country, or stay behind to fight for it? And what about the ethics of fleeing instead of staying behind?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.

  If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DNA testing firm 23andMe files for bankruptcy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

  (Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

  But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

  And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

  And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

  With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can’t HVAC be made smarter?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My friends family has a shore house we’ve gone to a few times. It’s an old house, built before a/c was a thing, and still doesn’t have any. We throw open some windows and the house stays pretty comfortable, it’s warm but not at all unbearable even when the temps are in the 80s, 90s, occasionally even over 100 (fahrenheit of course)

  It does help that it’s at the shore so there’s basically always a nice breeze.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

  I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

  I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

  And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

  I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

  It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

  But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I’m happy to just chill where I am for a couple decades until I can retire. If I have to work, this honestly feels about as good as it gets for me. I don’t have any desire to climb the ladder or go hunting for a new job.

  I like the hours/schedule, we do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is pretty common in this field, so it’s a long shift but it’s a long shift sitting in an air conditioned bunker, and unless you come in for overtime you never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break. Now those 3 days are weekends, which sucks, but the flip side is every other weekend you have a 3 day weekend. And if you plan your vacations and such right you only need to take 2 days to get a whole week off, so my PTO can go a long way. Here we start off with about 2 weeks of vacation time (“about” because it’s based on 8 hour days and we work 12, it more or less works out the same but you’re always kind of left with some fraction of a day carrying over) then after 5 years you get another week, and again at a couple other milestones years. I actually really struggle to use up all of my PTO personally because nearly everything I do fits into a 3 day weekend.

  Benefits are solid, pension, decent medical plan, sometimes you can qualify for first responder discounts, etc.

  Different places have different policies on this, but where I am what you do between calls is pretty much up to you, as long as you’re not bothering anyone or making a mess, you can bring in a laptop and play video games or watch movies, read, work on some crafts, whatever as long as you can put it down when the phone rings.

  I work night shift, so things can get pretty dead and you get a lot of downtime between calls. Most people work 7-7, but I managed to snag myself a 3pm-3am shift, which I think is great- I get to sleep in until noon every day, but I don’t have to turn my schedule totally upside down if I need to do something in the morning.

  We’re not union in my county, and while normally I’m all for unions, it’s worked out well for us so far, because one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime in some form because like I said everywhere struggles with staffing issues, and so far they’ve done a decent job of keeping our pay competitive without it (probably because I think the dispatchers in most if not all of our surroundings counties are unionized, so they know we might jump ship to them if they don’t pay us competitively)

  And for all of those practical reasons, it also feels good to know I’m helping people. I have absolutely saved lives in my time here, I’ve delivered babies, I’ve helped people through disasters and all manner of scary situations.

  And it’s always interesting. When the phone rings I never know what’s going to be on the other end, which of course has its ups and downs, but it’s always interesting. Some of the people and the things they call about are absolutely infuriating of course, but no matter what it is I always get a great story. I never come home to my wife asking me “how was your day” and have to answer with some boring “same shit, different day” kind of answer, there’s always something interesting. Sometimes it’s something I’m proud of, sometimes it’s something I’m pissed off about, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s “can you believe somebody actually called about this?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a 911 dispatcher, basically every dispatch center in the country is always hiring. There’s a lot of turnover, obviously it’s not a job everyone is cut out for and people get burned out, but also people use it as a stepping stone or career builder to move onto other things, a couple of my coworkers want to be cops and this looks good on that application, one went to work for FEMA, a couple have gone to be the dispatchers at local stations, people get promoted or transfer to other county positions (my agency is part of our county department of public safety, in some areas it might be part of your sheriff’s department, local PD, etc) or just go chasing higher paychecks or dream jobs (pay varies a lot around the country, we make decent enough money where I am, but some places really pay peanuts)

  I saw an ad on social media somewhere that they had a hiring event going on, so I went. I was working in a warehouse at the time, and a job where I could sit down in the air conditioning sounded really attractive.

  Civil service type jobs were already on my radar, I looked into becoming a park ranger for a while, and I’m an eagle scout, so I had a solid grounding on first aid and such.

  I showed up, filled out an application, took their aptitude test (we, and a lot of other agencies use something called criticall if you want to get an idea what that test was like. Some typing, reading comprehension, map reading, listening to some sample calls and answering questions about them, etc.)

  I passed the test, so as part of the hiring event I got an interview on the spot. If I applied outside of that, I probably would have had to schedule separate times for the test and interview.

  I did alright in the interview so they scheduled me for a job shadow to come in and sit in the room to listen to calls and radio dispatch for a couple hours.

  Then a while later I got my conditional offer. I had to get a hearing, vision, and drug test, and schedule a psych eval with the county psychologist.

  You all know what hearing and vision tests are like I hope, for the drug test they did a hair test. I shave my head, so I was expecting them to take some beard hair, but apparently their policy is to do underarms if that’s the case.

  The psych eval wasn’t anything too in depth, sat down with him for a few minutes, chatted about my mental health (no real issues there) then I got handed a very long test booklet to go fill out, lots of multiple choice questions that seemed to basically be gauging if I can play well with others.

  And I assume at some point in there they ran background checks and such. Some places get really in depth with that, interviews with the sheriff, polygraph tests, etc. but mine was all pretty out of sight and out of mind.

  Then class started. About a week into it we had to go to the county detectives office to be fingerprinted. But otherwise after that it was just all training.

  Requirements here are pretty minimal, clean background check, high school diploma/GED, ability to pass all the pre employment screening, etc. At my agency past drug use isn’t necessarily a disqualifier, as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired and don’t get caught lying about anything you have done. Some other places are of course more strict about that.

  If anyone thinks they may want to pursue a dispatch job, your local agency may list the job under a couple different names, dispatcher, calltaker, telecommunicator, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to cylindrical plugs?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first words in the body of his post are “barrel jacks” so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.

  Since other, probably more common, names for “coaxial power connector” include things like “barrel plugs” and “barrel connectors” and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.

  The rest of it feels like he’s just trying to explain the concept to people who aren’t as familiar with them.

  But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don’t really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.

  Also they’re overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I’ve seen some that have a ground too, but don’t quote me on that, I’m not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)

  But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you’d need more connections in the plug. You’d need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you’d need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.

  Now a lot of the devices we’re charging by USB don’t necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?

  IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn’t even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.

  I’m sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.

  Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.

  I’m sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided “why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port”

  And I’m sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.

  And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they’d have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing “you don’t need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with”

  And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.

  As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

  I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

  It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I overall agree with technology connections on this with two caveats.

  I have, in my day, used some truly craptastic electric stoves that seriously struggled to get a normal sized pot of water to a rolling boil. This was definitely the cheapest, crappiest stove that an Airbnb owner could possibly find to furnish the kitchen with.

  I’ve also used some really crappy gas stoves but none have struggled that hard. So I think if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for budget brand stoves, you may find yourself really frustrated with some electric options.

  Also, my home stove is a somewhat less craptastic electric stove, but still not at all high end. I find that for some of my cookware the burners are too small resulting in some serious hotspots in the middle while you can barely cook on the outer edges even after letting the pan preheat for a decent amount of time. You’re always going to have some amount of a hotspot with almost any stove, but this one is really drastic, and I’ve never experienced anything so bad on gas stoves, probably because the heat escaping around the edges manages to heat the outer parts of the pan a little better.

  I’m not exactly pining for a gas stove, and I can’t have one in this house even if I wanted one, but it is a little frustrating sometimes as someone who likes to cook, which technology connections has admitted is not one of his many niche interests.

  My next stove will be induction, and probably every stove I ever buy after that.

  I guess the overall takeaway from this is, if you’re buying an electric stove and actually like to cook, don’t cheap out and make sure you get one where the burners can handle the size cookware you might use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨are terfs actual feminists or do most transphobic women just call themselves that?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re going to get into some “no true Scotsman” territory here pretty quickly, there’s not exactly a worldwide organization that determines the “feminist agenda” or a universally agreed-upon checklist that determines that you are or aren’t a feminist if you check so many boxes. It’s going to depend a bit on who you are, where you come from, etc.

  For example, if you come from some sort of backwards ultra-conservative Christian background, it might be fair to call you a feminist just because you think women should be allowed to wear pants instead of a dress, because in that context you are, even if most of the rest of the world has long-since moved past that stage of feminism.

  I think most if not all TERFs probably hold some amount of views that could be called feminist from certain perspectives. Whether or not they mesh with any of the more mainstream views on feminism is a different matter entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recreate old chess pieces⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have any specific recommendations for software or services, but I do have a couple general thoughts on this problem

  How many pieces are missing and how ornate is the set?

  If you have at least one of every piece the easiest course of action is probably to 3d scan them. A scanner is probably a bit pricey to buy just for this one project, but if you ask around you can probably find a hobbyist or makerspace that will let you use theirs.

  If you can’t find a scanner, as long as your set isn’t too ornate, most chest sets are probably pretty easy to model for the most part. Except for the knights which are of course horses which are a weird irregular shape, most chess pieces are essentially cylinders and cones of various sizes stacked on top of each other. With a little quality time taking measurements with some calipers and some youtube how-to videos, you could probably learn enough to make a pretty decent model pretty quickly.

  You might even be able to carefully trace your pieces onto a piece of paper or maybe use a contour gauge to do the same, scan that tracing into your computer, and create a 3d model from that profile. Heck, you might even be able to just take a picture of the pieces then trace them on your computer.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve done any 3d modeling personally, but something like that is a feature in a lot of software I’ve used.

  Then you’d just need to add some details- a slot cut into the bishops hat, some crenulations at the top of the rook, a cross on top of the king, etc. which should all also be pretty straightforward to model

  Again, if you ask around at makerspaces and such you can probably find someone willing to take up the challenge or help you figure out how to do that.

  Of course if your set has a lot of textures and details you wouldn’t be able to capture them that way, like if your pieces have a face or otherwise aren’t rotationally symmetrical, or the rook has a brick pattern, etc.

  And if you need to model the knight, that’s going to take some more advanced modeling skills unless it’s a really simple and kind of abstract horse.

  If you are missing pieces entirely, unless you can track down another set to use as a reference, you’re going to have to recreate them from scratch. You can take some styling cues from the other pieces- like the bases are probably all pretty much the same, but beyond that you’d kind of have to work off of memory and eyeballing them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do the femcels and the incels not.... date each other?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Because they mostly all have terrible personalities and would find each other totally unbearable just like the rest of us do.

  They also generally don’t really want to date any sort of actual human that exists in the real world. They want to date a perfect parody of the opposite sex, incels are looking for someone who looks like Barbie (or whatever their idea of a perfect body type is, some go for a the petite almost childlike look after all) who wakes up looking like she just left the salon, who is totally subservient to all of his wants and needs, never speaks up unless it’s to stroke his ego, a perfect cook and maid, an oversexed freak in the sheets, who will bear however many children his twisted ego wants to inflict on the world but never gain a pound or show any stretch marks, wrinkles, or grey hair

  In short they don’t want to date a real person, they want a real doll who does their laundry and squeezes out children.

  And they’re convinced that these mythical creatures exist out in the real world but that someone is conspiring to keep them from them, because obviously they’re the perfect example of masculinity and why wouldn’t these perfect females be flocking to them otherwise?

  And I’m not certain exactly what sort of fictitious Superman feels are after, but the same overall sentiment applies.

  Or else they’re just deeply in the closet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK, that on most smartphones, if you press the power button 5 (or more) times in quick succession, you can quickly call emergency services.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know all of the minute technological or legal details about how and why our systems work the way I do. At the end of the day I’m a user of the systems, and not really privy to all of the technical and policy decisions happening behind the scenes.

  I believe that handset gps based location is part of the Next Gen 911 (NG911) standards that are in the process of rolling out. Different agencies and corporations that own and maintain the infrastructure are in different stages of implementing that in different places. I don’t really know what the timetable is on all of that is, if there even is one, I’m genuinely not sure if there’s any set in stone date where everything everywhere must be fully ng911 compliant by then.

  The handful of counties around me are definitely in different stages of rolling it out, my dispatch center has had text to 911 capabilities since well before I started there 6 years ago, and I’m pretty sure one of our neighboring agencies only got the ability to handle it within the last 2 years or so. Another neighboring county is or is about to get video capabilities, which we don’t have yet.

  I suspect that the current state of the regulations is that new phones must have the ability to send that gps data, but I don’t think it needs to be turned on by default, and I don’t think dispatch centers are required to make use of it yet, but again I’m not sure.

  The current state of it where I work is we get it on a lot of our calls but not all. It’s also kind of a hacked together system where it comes through on a web page and not directly integrated into our phone or CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems. I believe the new CAD we’re upgrading to will have it fully integrated, but last I heard that is probably still a couple years away.

  Phone networks are kind of a mess, countless different companies, contractors, and different levels of government, have all been working together (or sometimes against each other depending on your point of view) to patch together old legacy systems to the new stuff coming out- copper, fiber, analog, digital, cellular, satellite, VoIP, etc. And different levels of government have more or less funds available to them and allocate those funds differently, so the wheels of government, as they say, turn slowly. I work in a relatively wealthy county with a pretty large population in a highly developed part of the country, so we’re probably towards the leading edge of the new tech rolling out compared to some dispatch center in the backwoods middle of nowhere (I have had to talk to dispatchers all over the country and occasionally even in other countries, there are definitely some with better capabilities than we have, and there are also some where you get the distinct impression that you’re talking to one of two old ladies sitting in a trailer behind the police station sharing a carton of Virginia Slims and entering calls into a computer with a faded sticker proudly declaring that it’s Y2K ready.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK, that on most smartphones, if you press the power button 5 (or more) times in quick succession, you can quickly call emergency services.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hanging up will send your info to them and they will call back to make sure there isn’t an emergency.

  911 dispatcher here

  This will depend a bit on agency policies and technological capabilities as well as what emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone and unable to be shared in an emergency call

  At my agency we get a lot of butt dials, our policy for hang ups or open line calls from a cell phone is that as long as we didn’t hear anything suspicious (someone yelling, gunshots, etc) we will usually disregard the call. If we have an open line we’ll listen for about 30 seconds or so and if nothing sounds off we’ll disconnect and continue about our day. If something sounds fishy we’ll stay on the line/call back, and we’ll send police to the area if we have a good location.

  There’s a couple exceptions, like certain wifi calling or femtocell setups are treated as being from a landline because we have a solid address, so we’ll always dispatch police unless you stay on the line and confirm that there’s no emergency.

  And our discretion comes into play a bit. We might ignore 1 or 2 hang ups from the same number, especially since the calls may not even ring through to the same calltaker so it may not be obvious we’ve gotten multiple calls until we’ve gotten a good handful.

  Different agencies policies on that will vary. I know one of our neighboring counties will always send police to the area when they get a hang up whether or not they heard something suspicious.

  And as for the information that’s shared, by default all we get is your phone number, carrier, which cell tower it hit off of, and an approximate location based on cell tower triangulation (which is kind of hit or miss, sometimes it’s really accurate, other times it’s basically useless)

  If we need to we can contact the phone provider to try to get subscriber info. That can take a while and can be hit or miss too, like if you haven’t updated all your information with them, if you’re on a family plan with other people, or if you’re using a smaller provider that is really just reselling Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T service, it can make it a little hard to accurately track down who actually owns that phone.

  If you’ve called recently, we can try to look up your information from priors on your phone number.

  If you’ve filled out your emergency/sos info, and enabled it to be shared with us, we can access that, It also often gives us access to a more accurate location for you, but otherwise we only get what you’ve put in there. If you haven’t kept your name, address, emergency contacts, medical info, etc. accurate and up to date there, that’s another stumbling block for us. We can sometimes work backwards from what info is there, if we have your name and age we can try to narrow things down, but if you have a common name it can be hard to tell which 27 year old John Smith is the one who called us.

  Do with that what you will, fill out your emergency info or don’t depending on what you’re comfortable sharing with us, consider how it might be used to save your life if you’re, for example, in a car crash and too hurt to speak to us, or how an oppressive government might use it to track you down at a protest (from 911 we can’t just access data on random people’s phones unless they call us, and we can only request a ping on a phone number from your phone company under certain circumstances, and that’s a bit of a process and all it returns is your location based on cell tower triangulation, which again isn’t always very accurate. Police and certainly the feds have a bit more leeway than we do, though I don’t know the extent of that, and if they set up a stingray or similar device I have absolutely no idea what they might be able to access)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a metaphor you like in your language?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Esperanto

  krokodili- verb, literally something like “to crocodile”

  It means when an Esperanto-speaker speaks in a language other than Esperanto while amongst other Esperanto-speakers.

  No one’s quite sure why that’s the term for it, most likely because crocodiles have a big mouth.

  When I learned that, it suddenly made a lot of sense why Duolingo taught me the word for “crocodile” so early.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It kind of sounds like that article is about the “hey Siri” feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording

  Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they’re just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I’m not ruling it out entirely, and I’m certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)

  But I think most of the time most of the time they don’t need to

  They know what ads you’ve seen on your phone/computer, what you’ve been googling, the websites you’ve visited, where you’ve used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you’ve been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you’ve been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.

  That’s all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you’re going to have well before you do.

  And don’t get me wrong, that’s creepy as fuck.

  I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.

  And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you’re talking about through your microphone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are the inside parts of toilets universal?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much exactly what you probably think they are, I think they’re mostly a thing for people living off grid and maybe some RVs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are the inside parts of toilets universal?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of

  For most toilets there’s universal fittings that will work just fine, you may need to adjust them a little bit, but they’re made to be adjusted, and they’ll work just fine with most toilets.

  If you have the original factory parts in your toilet, they may not be adjustable, and if you tried to swap them into another toilet they may not fit/work in other brands/models, or they may kind of work, but maybe not quite right.

  There are a handful of brands that don’t tend to play well with the universal fit parts, I want to say Kohler is one, and if you go to a hardware store, most likely they’re going to stock the universal parts, then a couple of the most common oddball brands.

  There’s also of course some weird toilets that are just totally different- pressure assisted flush, composting or incinerator toilets, etc. that aren’t even working on the same principle as most toilets, but I think the odds are that if you have one of those, you know that already.

  Also I haven’t played with any toilets that were manufactured that way, but I did retrofit one of my toilets to be a dual-flush. Those kits seem pretty universal, but probably double-check before trying to put them in an oddball toilet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launching c/Latvija, the community for Latvia on the Fediverse! Calling all Latvians and those interested in Latvia and the Baltic countries to join and support us.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.