sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
- Comment on The Home Depot tax at work! 2 hours ago:
It’s better than Phillips, for sure. I prefer Torx, myself, but as long as it isn’t Phillips, I’m in.
- Comment on The Home Depot tax at work! 5 hours ago:
Damn. Where do you live? In general. I’m in the Minnesota, and it’s almost easier to find Robertson screws, because Canada.
- Comment on No movie has a bigger cultural impact than Final Destination 2 5 hours ago:
You weren’t afraid of them before?
- Comment on The Westminster Chime is mostly played on crappy speakers. 5 hours ago:
I inherited a grandfather clock with real chimes that we have set to this; it does three others - Westminster Cathedral is one, I think, and I haven’t identified the other two.
It’s really nice when the chimes are real.
- Comment on In a few years, new smartphones will be as big and heavy as the first cell phones. 6 hours ago:
I can’t hit the letters on the keyboard with my thumb and holding the phone one-handed.
I can span an octave on a piano. I do not have small hands.
This is the real reason why I got a foldable phone. It doesn’t help with reaching things one-handed when it’s open, but at least folded it still fits in my front pocket comfortably, and let me sit with it there.
- Comment on The Home Depot tax at work! 12 hours ago:
Torx FTW. I only use Phillips in situations where Torx aren’t available. They still aren’t easily available in as many varieties as Phillips.
- Comment on The Home Depot tax at work! 15 hours ago:
15 years ago, I built an extension on a barn stall to suit my wife’s draft horse.
I am not a carpenter.
I was not trained. I had no experience.
What I had was Home Depot, and I’d seen enough framed work and enough videos about people building buildings, and the belief that I could “figure it out.” Also, this was a barn in rural country, and people wouldn’t be living in it so I wasn’t too concerned. So I bought a Saws-All and cut a giant hole in the side of the barn.
Long story short, I did figure it out, and it wasn’t half bad. Framing the roof gave me the most trouble; I kind of understood the theory, but I had the feeling it wasn’t as neat as it could be; it was the only part of the project that required joining. It had proper siding, a proper roof (with some composite corrugated roofing), and even a ventilated peak with corrugation foam under the top-thingy to frustrate wasps. It had a big-ass sliding door, which I bought pre-made. It had a12" ramp from the door into a paddock made of packed 3/4-minus (second hardest thing). The inside, like the rest of the barn, was just 1x4 horizontal planks, stained, which made everything easier. It didn’t need to be fancy, and the ceilings were all open, so no ceiling work.
In the end, I learned several things:
- Home Depot has everything you need to build a small house, including truck rental to get the material to the house.
- I waaay overbuilt it, out of paranoia that I would under-build it. I had double supports every 16" and horizontal cross beams. Like the rest of the barn, there was no floor - it was all packed 3/4-minus - but I poured a 1’x3’ concrete foundation over basebed gravel for the walls. I’m not certain anymore that the original barn had more that 4x4 posts sunk in concrete. I believe that, had I been experienced with building, I could have done the job with far less material.
- Home Depots wood is absolute shit. I screwed double 2x6s mainly to try to get the damned things straight enough to build on. And I bought only pressure-treated wood because I wasn’t certain that my siding job would be perfect, but also because this was open to the elements.
- I learned to hate Phillips-head screws with a passion that’s lasted the rest of my life so far.
- Someone with no experience can do something like build a glorified shed. A 14’ tall, 16x16, sided and corrugated roofed shed, but a shed.
I was pleased with the result, and I’m grateful for Home Depot because there’s no way I could have done that without them. Not within the season of weekends that it took me.
The only wood I’ll buy from Home Depot is unfinished shelving wood. Their shelving stuff is outrageously expensive, but it’s clean and straight, and properly cured.
- Comment on Todays touchscreen UI's are so forcefed with slide-options, widgets, AI assistants, popup UI's and auto- correct/translate... 1 day ago:
Yeah, maybe. I see it in 3rd party OSS launchers, too, though, and it does tend to pop up whatever I’ve most recently launched, which is almost never useful.
It’s horrible UX, whatever the motivation.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 day ago:
Man, I love a good nitpicking.
Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance
It’s a source of truth for you. It’s locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.
Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that’s on it. If they propagate a “delete” on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.
Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can’t happen with Lemmy.
But it’s also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.
Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.
They day they’re not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯
I don’t know. This post was the first I’ve heard of it, but since then I’ve seen a couple more “organic” posts asking if anyone thinks it’s good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it’s genuine interest. I’ll wait a bit and see, personally.
- Comment on Todays touchscreen UI's are so forcefed with slide-options, widgets, AI assistants, popup UI's and auto- correct/translate... 1 day ago:
Reactive UIs are so horrible. It sounds great, in theory, and I believe there might be a way to do them well. They do address the infinitely nested submenu problem. But - especially on mobile, as you say - having UI controls change is fraught.
On the desktop, it’s horrible when I user has to constantly search for functions because the buttons and menus are constantly changing with small context changes. I’ve observed even power users hunting for an operation because the button bar is constantly re-arranging itself. I’ll never forgive MS for introducing that awful feature.
And on mobile, it’s worse, because widgets change as you’re using it and you lose control of the process, or UI elements disappear or move as you’re trying to click on them.
UI designers are trying to address the complexity paradox: either you constrain user options, or it’s impossible to prevent many functions from being hidden in nested option trees - whether pages or menus - where users struggle to find them.
I think the “search” function is the best solution; assistants are, in most cases, the worst.
My current pet peeve is the trend in launchers to change the pinned app bar contents on Android with commonly used apps, so that you’re never quite certain which set of apps are going to appear, and in which order. I always turn that off and pin the apps I want: stop re-arranging my shit!
- Comment on Mapped projections have been a thing for a while now, but why aren't people mounting projectors and dancing carefully choreographed moves to match a projection on their bodies? 1 day ago:
This video illustrates that the answer to OP’s question is: because in almost all cases it’s probably cheaper and more flexible to do it in CGI. The only time projector mapping would be useful would be on live performances.
Which would be cool, but probably too subtle or constrained for the audience to appreciate? Like, how far can the projectors be, and how bright to overcome stage lighting? How much can the actors move? In the Pond ad, the model moves, but very subtly. I noticed it most when she makes a slight shaking movement to coincide with the makeup “falling off.” There are no sharp movements.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 2 days ago:
This is similar to Jami. Jami has http name servers for lookup, and (optional) http DHT proxy servers for NAT traversal. Beyond that, it’s peer-to-peer DHT. The DHT isn’t global, it’s shared between connected clients. DHT are also key-value stores, and Jami’s issues are not with the name server, they’re with message synchronization between clients.
Actually, I have to qualify that I don’t know what causes Jami’s delivery issues, but it’s probably not the name servers or proxies, because you can (and I have) hit them directly with a web browser or curl. From what I can tell, the Jami developers don’t acknowledge issues or are incapable of or unwilling to track them down, but the point is that it’s very likely the P2P part that is giving them trouble.
P2P is Ia hard problem to solve when the peers come and go online; peers may not be online at the same times and there’s no central mailbox to query for missed Messages; peers are mobile devices that change IPs frequently; or peers are behind a NAT.
You may be right about the design; I scanned the design summary, and easily could have misunderstood it. I don’t think it affects the difficulty of building robust, reliable P2P applications.
- Comment on doctors 2 days ago:
This. And I suspect what they’re taking about isn’t common except in very specific cases, like transplants.
If there’s a compatible kidney doner available, and it’s a choice between an obese and a non-obese adult, they’re going to give it to the person more likely to survive and make longer use of the donation, and all other things being equal that’s the non-obese person. OP will categorize this as “denying care,” but it’s really a question of saving the person who isn’t likely to die anyway from comorbidities.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 2 days ago:
I don’t take issue with your points, but you’re conflating issues. I think it’s worth clarifying some terms up front.
Being utterly independent isn’t necessary for decentralization. Decentralization very specifically means there’s no single holder of the data; it does not have any implication for dependencies.
Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms, and as long as you doing don’t run your own server, you’re effectively on a centralized platform. This is to your point about being “always dependent on something, somewhere in some way.” It’s true for Lemmy; it is not true for all systems, not unless you’re being pedantic, which wouldn’t be helpful: you being dependent on electricity from your electric company doesn’t mean an information network can’t be “truly” decentralized.
A distributed ledger can be truly decentralized. Blockchains aren’t always distributed ledgers, and not all distributed ledgers are blockchains, but whether or not a specific blockchain is resource intensive has no bearing on whether or not it’s centralized. This is the part I take issue with: it’s irrelevant to the decentralization discussion.
Bitcoin is decentralized: no single person or group of people control it, and there is no central server that serves as an authoritative source of information. If there were, it wouldn’t be nearly so ecologically expensive. Its very nature as something that exists on equally on every single full node is part of the cost. You can take out any node, or group of nodes, and as long as there’s one full node left in the world, bitcoin exists (you then have a consensus verification problem, but that’s a different issue).
But let’s look at a second, less controversial, example: git, or rather, git repositories. This is, again, fully decentralized, and depends on no single resource. Microsoft would like you to believe that github is the center of git, and indeed github is the main reason git is as popular as it is despite its many shortcomings, but many people don’t use github for their projects, and any full clone of any repository is a independent and fully decentralized copy, isolated and uncontrolled by anyone but the person on whose computer it exists. Everything else is just convention.
Nostr is yet another fully decentralized ecosystem. It is, unfortunately, colonized almost entirely by cryptobros, and that’s the majority of its content, but there’s nothing “blockchain” or crypto in the core design. Nodes are simple key/value stores, and when you publish something to Nostr you submit it to (usually) a half-dozen different nodes, and it propagates out from there to other nodes. If you run your own node, even if your node dies, you still have your account and can publish content to other nodes, because your identity - your private key - is stored on your computer. Or, if you’re smart, on your phone, and maybe your laptop too, with backups. Your identity need not even be centralized to one device. No single group can stop you from publishing - individual nodes can choose to reject your posts, and there are public block lists, but not every node uses those. It is truly decentralized.
I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures. Jami is a good example of a project plagued by DHT sync issues. I’m not surprised they’re taking a long time to get stable, because this is a hard problem to solve - a deceptively simple problem to describe, but syncing hides issues like conflict resolution, updating published content, and all the administrative tools necessary in a world full of absolute shitheads who just want to cause chaos. It does look to me as it it would be fully decentralized, in a way Lemmy isn’t, if they can get it working reliably.
- Comment on 3-2-1 Backups: How do you do the 1 offsite backup? 4 days ago:
I used to say restic and b2; lately, the b2 part has become more iffy, because of scuttlebutt, but for now it’s still my offsite and will remain so until and unless the situation resolves unfavorably.
Restic is the core. It supports multiple cloud providers, making configuration and use trivial. It encrypts before sending, so the destination never has access to unencrypted blobs. It does incremental backups, and supports FUSE vfs mounting of backups, making accessing historical versions of individual files extremely easy. It’s OSS, and a single binary executable; IMHO it’s at the top of its class, commercial or OSS.
B2 has been very good to me, and is a clear winner for this is case: writes and space are pennies a month, and it only gets more expensive if you’re doing a lot of reads. The UI is straightforward and easy to use, the API is good; if it weren’t for their recent legal and financial drama, I’d still unreservedly recommend them. As it is, you’d have you evaluate it yourself.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
And long before that, pidgin Latin was the lingua franca in the west. After that and before WWI, the French were trying really hard to make French the common language Western international language.
Us Americans should be pushing for adoption of Esperanto. We’ve benefited from it because of our economic dominance, but as our empire crumbles, there is a very real chance that the lingua franca will change. We may find ourselves forced to learn Mandari or Hindi to participate in the global economy; it would behoove us to use our waning dominance to push for adoption of an easy, regular language. If the language doesn’t give an advantage to one power group, it has a better chance of surviving global power shifts. The best global language is one which is everyone’s second language: it levels the playing field.
One day, Americans are going to find themselves at the bottom of that hill. We’d be smarter you flatten it as much as possible before that happens.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Good thought.
The conlang community calls them “Constructed Languages”, to attempt to clarify that an individual (usually) built it out of nothing.
Pedantically, all human languages were constructed by humans, but that’s one of those unhelpful distinctions that don’t help people talk about the topic. Clearly, Esperanto, Iso, Volpuc, Klingon, Elvish, and Lojban are in a different category than French, English, Russian, and Korean. The later are evolved with rules derived from common usage of native speakers; the former are constructed from rules and are no-one’s native language.
Conlang and Natural language are just terms to distinguish between them.
- Comment on Of all the vegetables beets is the most metal 5 days ago:
They are surprisingly sweet. Too sweet, for my taste. They’re better than you might think - art least, I was expecting worse after growing up with aunts who put them in shit like jello, and all the times I was tricked thinking I was getting canned pureed cinnamon apple … whatever the hell that stuff is … and getting canned pureed beets. Had my first roasted one as an adult and thought, hell, this is pretty good.
But, yeah, too sweet. Not sweet enough to be a dessert pretending to be a vegetable, like baked sweet potato with marshmallows, but too sweet to be a stand-alone vegetable.
Chop one up, salt it, and roast it in the oven until it’s not hard anymore. They’re cheap, and you lose nothing but a buck and some time by trying it. You might discover a new passion!
- Comment on You can't have Panama Canal without Anal 5 days ago:
And when you go through it, you also get an anama.
- Comment on Light switches should be glow in the dark 5 days ago:
Man, this has taken me forever to respond to. There’s no reason, really, except it was in a run of comments I thought would take longer responses and I shelved for desktop time. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I completely agree about new build - it adds such a small amount proportional to the overall cost. Even when upgrading, I just do a few switches a year, as I notice them. Like, the most commonly used ones get replaced first, but after that it’s just when I find myself thinking, “I really need to automate this one” that I change them. I swapped out several wall sockets after the first Christmas in our current house, for example.
- Comment on When you think about it The Sun is actually at the very bottom. 6 days ago:
Naw, it was clear what you meant. Don’t mind the peanuts.
- Comment on When you think about it The Sun is actually at the very bottom. 1 week ago:
You found you were going and just couldn’t stop, right?
- Comment on Second US Navy jet is lost at sea from Truman aircraft carrier 1 week ago:
The Gettysburg shot down the Truman F-18; the Truman didn’t do the shooting.
It has dropped two F18s into the sea though.
- Comment on You know how fire trucks, ambulances, and cars all have strobe lights? Well, if you add up those lights, street by street, there is a single street on earth that has the most strobe lights. 1 week ago:
I don’t think so. In one comment someone asked whether they should include signage, b/c Las Vegas would definitely win, and OP answered that it would be interesting to see categories.
OPs original thought was that, at any given point in time, in the world there exists a street with the most flashing lights. All the examples they gave were cars, and that must include hazards. There isn’t a street in the US that always has an ambulance in it. There may be one where it’s more frequent, as in front of a hospital, but it’s not always. And hazards are maybe less frequent than active ambulance lights, but they’re not rare.
Hazards aren’t a defect; they’re not a short circuit in someone’s headlights. They’re not someone pumping their brakes - just like a police light, you turn them on and the lights blink until you turn them off.
How could you include sporadic, flashing ambulance lights but not hazards? I don’t understand the thought process.
- Comment on You know how fire trucks, ambulances, and cars all have strobe lights? Well, if you add up those lights, street by street, there is a single street on earth that has the most strobe lights. 1 week ago:
People do stop in the street and put in their hazards for various reasons, though. Legally or illegally, people stop in the street in front of businesses where there’s no parking and run in to get something; cars fail, or get flats. Especially with fender benders; even if there’s a shoulder, people justifiably put on their hazards. It may be less frequent than an emergency vehicle being in any given street at any given time, but in (US) metropolitan area it’s not uncommon.
- Comment on Socialism bad 1 week ago:
There’s two girls, but because of inflation and Cup Developers buying all the cups and renting the cups out, driving up cup prices, the girls can afford only one cup.
- Comment on You know how fire trucks, ambulances, and cars all have strobe lights? Well, if you add up those lights, street by street, there is a single street on earth that has the most strobe lights. 1 week ago:
You don’t have hazard lights? You should check: you probably do, and you want to know where they are so you don’t spend a half hour searching for them when you need them.
- Comment on Assuming the world is a simulation 1 week ago:
Or, just phases in the game. Like, Civilization, only magic fades away when you enter the industrial age. Sure, you’ve got all this written media talking about the supernatural and magic, but there’s no enduring proof, and later generations just accept it as superstition, despite the global written anecdotal evidence.
Love it.
- Comment on Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers. 1 week ago:
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
- Comment on great shoe idea 1 week ago:
I… what? He’s doing what with these shoes?
