notabot

@notabot@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Effort require Effort⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oof, that sounds rough. Are these the kids got hit hardest by the pandemic lockdowns? If so, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope that this is an aberration and next year will be a bit more 'normal ', if you can get through this year with your sanity intact. It’s got to be rough on the kids too, the ones who aren’t causing trouble must still be struggling to deal with itm and the ones who are just sound desperate.

  I enjoy teaching, or at least, transferring knowledge and experience, I’ll do it to pretty much anyone who sits still long enough, and I’ve been told I’m good at it, but you couldn’t pay me enough to teach a classroom full of kids all day, so you have my respect for that.

  Good luck, and I hope things get better for the kids and teachers everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I enjoy reading dead tree books as much as anyone, and whilest the publisher/distributor can’t take it away, there are plenty of ways you can lose access to them. Fire and flood being the two obvious ones, whereas digital books can be backed up offsite. It’s also easier to carry many books when they’re digital compared to physical.

  For books I care about I try to get both a physical and a (drm free) digital copy for the best of both world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A suitably large catapult would deliver the necessary delta-v, not release pollutants into the atmosphere, and would make a satisfying ‘sproing thump’ noise in doing so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inaccuracies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bend them the other way. Start with all fingers open for zero, and curl them as needed. You only need to move them a bit, so even twenty (thumb and ring finger back, the others curled) isn’t too hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This took me a great deal of strength to publicly acknowledge⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t go cold turkey, but if you reduce your intake slowly you can probably wean yourself off of it.

  (Please don’t do this)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lucky to be alive? Come on now, thats a stretch.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How’s he doing? Well, he’s been up and down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TriliumNext Notes - The last note taking app you should ever need⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a non-starter for me because I sync my notes, and sometimes a subset of my notes, to multiple devices and multiple programs. For instance, I might use Obsidian, Vim and tasks.md to access the same repository, with all the documents synced between my desktop and server, and a subset synced to my phone. I also have various scripts to capture data from other sources and write it out as markdown files. Trying to sync all of this to a database that is then further synced around seems overly complicated to say the least, and would basically just be using Trillium as a file store, which I’ve already got.

  I’ve also be burnt by various export/import systems either losing information or storing it in a incompatible way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Follow RSS feeds from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Follow RSS feeds from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you could, I’d appreciate HackADay. I’ve found a community for it on lemmy.ml, but it only seems to have one post from a year ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a tunnel boring machine were installed facing downward in a cemetery, you wouldn't need to expand the cemetery⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What?!?? I just tap my finger on the glowy thinking rock and demons/faye/angels take my messages to other people’s thinking rocks and bring me their responses. I don’t believe in all that ‘electricity’ witchcraft!

  Seriously, yes burial uses a fair bit of space, which is part of the reason cremation is increasing in popularity in many places. Even with burials though, many graveyards reuse plots after some number of years, once the previous body has decomposed to save space. For those wanting a more ecologically friendly method than cremation, there’s the option of resomation too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a tunnel boring machine were installed facing downward in a cemetery, you wouldn't need to expand the cemetery⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a safe and reliable way to dispose of a corpse that might be diseased, will smell bad as it decomposes, and would certainly attract scavengers if left lying around. The same goes for cremation, it really just depends on local custom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Authy got hacked, and 33 million user phone numbers were stolen⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re talking about being able to regain access with no local backups (even just a USB key sewn into your clothing) your going to need to think carefully about the implications if someone else gets hold of your phone, or hijacks your number. Anything you can do to recover from the scenario is a way an attacker can gain access. Attempting to secure this via SMS is going to ne woefully insecure.

  That being said, there are a couple of approaches you could consider. One option is to put an encrypted backup on an sftp server or similar and remember the login and passwords, another would be to have a trusted party, say a family member or very close friend, hold the emergency codes for access to your authentication account or backup site.

  Storing a backup somewhere is a reasonable approach if you are careful about how you secure it and consider if it meets your threat model. The backup doesn’t need to contain all your credentials, just enough to regain access to your actual password vault, so it doesn’t need to be updated often, unless that access changes. I would suggest either an export from your authentication app, a copy of the emergency codes, or a text file with the relevant details. Encrypt this with gpg symmetric encryption so you don’t have to worry about a key file, and use a long, complex, but reconstructable passphrase. By this I mean a passphrase you remember how to derive, rather than trying to remember a high entropy string directly, so something like the second letter of each word of a phrase that means something to you, a series of digits that are relevant to you, maybe the digits from your first friend’s address or something similarly pseudo random, then another phrase. The result is long enough to have enough entropy to be secure, and you’ll remember how to generate it more readily than remembering the phrase itself. It needs to be strong as once an adversary has a copy of the file they jave as long as they want to decrypt it. Once encrypted, upload it to a reliable storage location that you can access with just a username and password. Now you need to memorize the storage location, username, password and decryption passphrase generator, but you can recover even to a new phone.

  The second option is to generate the emergency, or backup, codes to your authentication account, or the storage you sync it to, and have someone you trust keep them, only to be revealed if you contact them and they’re sure it’s you. To be more secure, split each code into two halves and have each held by a different person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This smiling robot face made of living skin is absolute nightmare fuel⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was more suggesting that it might be a bit eldritch, but sometimes humor doesn’t come across quite right/

  The linked paper is focused on studying the ‘perforation-type anchor’ they use to hold the tissue to the mold as it grows, rather than keeping it alive afterwards. During growth the tissue and mold were submerged, or partially submerged, in a suitable medium to keep the cells healthy, and it was only when the resulting models were tested that they were removed (although one test did seem to involve letting it dry out to see if the anchors held). Growing the various layers of cells seems to be a solved problem, and I suspect that includes keeping them supplied with nutrients and such, so the authors aren’t examining that. What’s not solved is how to keep the tissue attached to a robot, which is what the authors were studying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This smiling robot face made of living skin is absolute nightmare fuel⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you really want to know? There are some things that the human mind is not meant to contemplate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perfection⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Crabadile - the ultimate lifeform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Garfield do you smell burnt toast?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks a lot, I just sprained my brain trying to make sense of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fossils⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I understand your point of view, but I would argue that even an aesthetic category such as ‘poetry’ can exist without sentient beings to experience it. Ultimately the category is not defined by the things in it, but by the criteria that define what is in it, and so the category of ‘poetry’ is populated by everything that fits a definition along the lines of: combinations of words or arrangements of things that would spark an aesthetic experience, rather than things that do spark such an experience. This is necessary if we wish to include works that have been created, and which presumably do not generate precisely those feelings in the author, but which have not yet been experienced by others yet. I would suggest we should include such works from creation, rather than them suddenly becoming poetry when first experienced by an audience. If we use the latter definition, who creates the poety, the author or the first audience?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fossils⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That argument seems to boil down to whether or not a thing can be a member of a category before that category is described and named by humans, or presumably any sentient entity. You seem to ne arguing that it can’t, I would say it can.

  Considered anything that existed before humans. Let’s take dinosaurs. They existed, but before humans came up with the name ‘dinosaur’ were they dinosaurs? I would say that the category existed even though there were no humans to describe it. Likewise with aesthetic categories, the entity exists and either fits within the category, or it does not, even if the category has not been described by humans. Thus, if you consider fossils to be poetry, they are, indeed, poetry older than words.

  If we’re nit picking the meme I would instead take issue with the concept of fossils being a memory of bones. We have fossils of plants, boneless creatures and even soft tissue from creatures with bones. Despite that, I think the meme is reasonable enough, and a fair way to look at things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maths⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you ever seen them both in the same room at the same time? I know I haven’t. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨damnit, again⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’d be far more mortifying if it was the other way around!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨slayyyyy, maybe scavange too⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, Hippocrates is the local moving service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Like magic⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen reports that slowing down the rate that someone with dyslexia reads by adding some difficulty to recognising the words and likewise increasing how much they have to focus on seeing the words actually helps with compression. I suspect this works in a similar way. It took me a few goes to work out how out of order it wss, and I’m not dyslexic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That may be your perfect search engine, I jyst want proper boolean operators on a sesrch engine that doesn’t think it knows what I want better than I do, and doesn’t pack the results out with pages that don’t match all the criteria just for the sake of it. The sort of thing you described would be anathema to me, as I suspect my preferred option may be to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not just nukes, but nuclear shaped charges, at a rate of maybe one per second for a manned vehicle or even more for a faster cargo only mission.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2024-05-06 downtime⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the update. If you have the time and energy after the migration I’d be interested to hear details of the new setup, we have servers using vswitch too, and while I haven’t run into trouble myself I’d like to avoid it if possible. You know what they say about the wise learning from others’ experience!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah rabies, a delightful little horror that makes it so painful to swallow that victims will flinch at the mere sight of water, then drives them into a frenzied rage in an attempt to spread through bite wounds. It looks like they’ve developed a couple of protocols (Milwaukee and Recife Protocols) that give the victim a chance, even if mot a good one. They both involve an induced coma so that you don’t attack anyone, so that’s fun.

  Get your vaccinations folks, running around foaming at the mouth and attacking anyone near you isn’t a good way to go out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they understand ‘rules’, rather they mess with the brain structures that control self regulation. It’s believed that around 30-50% of the human population may have a /T. Gondii/ infection, with a corresponding link to other diseases. High levels may also go some way to explaining the prevalence of high risk behaviors in certain areas, although proving a correlation is challenging due to confounding factors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh come now, there are so many more interesting parasites that mess with your brain for their own benefit; Trypanosoma which messes with your sleep before slowly killing you, Naegleria fowleri that just straight up eats your brain and a host of others that do weird and wonderful things.

  Look at it this way; before you were surrounded by mind controlled ants, suicidal rodents and other such horrors without even knowing it. Now you do know about them. What’s that? I’m really not helping? Ok, I’ll stop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Carl?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’ll be Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It invades the ant’s brain and causes it to leave it’s nest and go somewhere better for the fungus then wait to die as the fungus errupts from its head.

  If we’re talking about nightmare mind control horrors, we shouldn’t forget our old friend toxiplasmosis gondii, which infects rodents, then alters their behaviour so they’re not afraid of cats, in particular. This leads to the rodent getting eaten so the parasite can infect the cat, which is the only place it can reproduce, before spreading from the cat faeces back into the rodent population. It can also infect humans where there is evidence that it affects behavior too, particularly making males more careless of rules.

  Sleep well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Or we could do metric time⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Linux has been switching that to 64 bit, applications just need to catch up and use the new call. They’ve got almost a decade and a half, so I’d hope they’ll all be updated, but you know there’ll be something subtle and critical that only gets done at the last second.