“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,’’ EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an essay in The Wall Street Journal.

They are Zealots of Mammon.

I think if the question is, “How can I shift blame for the soaring price of crude from my own disastrous war to Putin’s war?”, this would be a pretty textbook way to answer it.

Off-by-one errors are real errors. A common mistake rookie developers make (or used to make, anyway) is forgetting that arrays are zero-indexed when creating an array, then seeing the value that should be in array[n-1] when they read array[n].

Another common off-by-one error is double counting: Some accumulators don’t do all their processing in the same function, and occasionally one thing will be checked for inclusion twice, causing the accumulator to have one more element than it should.

I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.

Human-human interface configuration falls under networking issues. And naming things, now that I think about it.

And occasionally off-by-one issues :(

The vilification of the Luddites as cantankerous tech haters is a really good example of how malicious falsehoods can succeed, I think. I’d guess that most English speakers who know the word would define Luddite as “someone who hates technology”, and I think it resonates on some level because we all hate technology some of the time. The fact that Luddites didn’t indiscriminately hate technology, they just destroyed the means by which their oppressors oppressed them, is handily swept aside. And I never even questioned that narrative on Luddites until I happened to read up on them.

It’s sneaky, because before then “Luddite” didn’t feel like an important or politically charged term at all. It was simply a slang word for people who grump about technology. Calling people haters just short-circuits any examination of the so-called haters’ reasons. It’s exactly what people say about terrorists, except instead of technology its freedom. They just hate freedom. I wonder how many people have “terrorist = freedom hater” embedded so deeply they don’t even think about it.

These are just the ones we know about. I’d guess for every one person who gets charges brought there are at least 100 cops getting away with the same damn thing. We won’t have a clear idea of how bad the problem is until years from now, and that’s assuming that the American coup doesn’t stick. If it does, this will be the norm for a while. Widespread abuse, and a few who fuck up badly enough to get caught.

Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we’re alive. I assume you’re talking about financial fraud; I don’t know how similar detecting “fraud” accounts would be but I imagine there’s some overlap.

I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.

I think exceptions and tokens play an important role in permitting the followers of fascists to deny the general principles of the people they follow, even in their own minds. For example, if Vance’s wife is brown, then Trump can’t hate all brown people, right? Then he must be rounding up those other brown people for some reason other than their being brown. The news keeps saying they’re rounding up criminals, many of whom happen to be brown, and the Left keeps screeching that Republicans hate all brown people, but his wife is brown… so the Left must be lying. The evidence to the contrary is right in front of your eyes.

And so on. Tokens are kept around by Republicans because they provide the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability to people who are afraid of non-whites but don’t want to think of themselves as racists. It’s a convenient off-ramp from a road that would otherwise tempt them to think difficult thoughts about themselves and the policies they approve of or at least willfully ignore.

How curious, especially because Tennessee imports so much of its culture from Texas. Maybe its an age thing, I am mid 40s and my impression is that that idiom is less prevalent with the youth. Never gave it much thought before.

Yep. His punishment is having his consciousness split between all his roommates, everyone whose lives he made hell, experiencing all their ire, in parallel, for eternity.

On the other hand, I have heard both referred to as cartoons, often with some derogatory prefix like “pervert” or “Democrat”. Ditto The Simpsons. I always assumed that calling them cartoons was fairly widespread; maybe it’s a southern and/or conservative thing specifically.

It does usually carry the connotation of an insult; IME there’s generally an understanding in conservative circles that anything “cartoonish” is inherently childish and therefore unworthy of any respectable adult’s attention, and any adult who admits to enjoying animated TV is given a raised eyebrow, at least by the older folks.

I think that’s an idea with legs. So many posts on this comm get responses on the theme of “That opinion, while possibly unpopular with the general public, is extremely popular on the internet / in the fediverse”, often accompanied by some suspicion of gaming the system for upvotes. I think it would be interesting to see the differences between c/only_unpopular_irl and c/only_unpopular_on_fedi.

I get it. I think you may be preaching to the choir here on the fediverse, but I think this is actually an unpopular opinion IRL.

There’s a connotation of childishness or simple-mindedness to the word “cartoon”, at least in my neck of the language, born of the era of newspaper funny pages and saturday morning cartoons for kids. Some people (but not all) use “cartoon” to mean any visual art (still or animated) that isn’t either hyper-realistic or actual IRL footage, and I think those two things give rise to the notion that all animated or cartoonish media is only suitable for children. The natural next step in this chain of thought is that any adult who enjoys any animated or cartoonish media must be childish.

It’s a stigma I learned as a child and had to get over as an adult, and I’m glad I did; there’s a lot of great animated content out there that I would have missed out on if I hadn’t. Some of it, like Bob’s Burgers, is kid-friendly but still has some really great storytelling. Some, like Bojack Horseman or Archer, are more squarely aimed at adult audiences, and also have some really great storytelling.

I haven’t mentioned anything that falls under the “Anime” umbrella; that’s not because I don’t like anime, but I am simply late to the game and there is an insane amount of content, and it feels paralyzing figuring out where to start. I keep having One Piece recommended to me, and I would like to start climbing that mountain one day, but 1000+ episodes and counting is a daunting mountain.

That’s all, I’m just writing stuff because I should be sleeping but can’t, and this is preferable to lying awake in bed with my thoughts. Hope your boredom is a pleasant one :)

I was looking around for active electricians’ comms and found this:

https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/akunohana_learning_electricity

It’s new and small, but akunohana is actively posting as they’re learning about electricity; I’m going to follow along and see if I can contribute.

Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.

Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.

If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃

Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.

You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.

That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.

It’s coming along slowly. I don’t have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I’ve been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.

So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I’m the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.

I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.

Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.