Ah, a youngling.

My first programming language was Basic; my second, assembly; third, C. I didn’t get to new-fangled languages like Pascal until i was in college, long after I’d learned the only really useful fundamentals of programming and computer software.

Everything else is just gloss, convenience, and bloat.

Man, imagine being a kid seeing this happen. It’d either be a cool memory, or lifelong psychological trauma.

Bestiality, at least; the name doesn’t necessarily imply vore, though.

I haven’t been on Reddit in years; did they change the rules? Vote manipulation, or encouraging it, is still an account ban offense, right?

This.

I think people tend to think about doing things while they’re in control that fuck the other party, often forgetting that - at some point - power is going to flip and they’ll be the underdogs. That said, Republicans tend to abuse these procedural instruments more.

But you have the right answer: the filibuster can be useful, if it’s not easy to use and requires true dedication. Right now, it’s just a spike strip (mostly) conservatives throw down whenever they want to throw a tantrum.

The dozer has an enclosed compartment, but that like like a pretty violent tumble. Was the driver’s compartment (which isn’t really identifiable) enough to protect the driver, or is s/he now part of the machine?

Also: Badger 288 would have simple eaten the dozer, and added it to the souls its already reaped.

I… I don’t get this. The trains are functioning as batteries? Regenerative braking is nice, but why is only a third going to power the trains themselves? Why not 100%? TFA says they’re issuing the “spare electricity” in the grid; “spare?”

These aren’t perpetual motion machines; they’re not violating the third law, and they consume more energy than they produce. Most off these article is about the (obvious) benefits of adding regenerative braking to subways around the world, regardless of cost; what confuses me is: why are they spending money and effort to route regenerative braking into other uses, which is what the title literally says (“trains”, not “train power grid”). It seems like an inefficient and circuitous way to tap other demands into a subway power grid.

Unless what’s really happening is that Barcelona is just tapping other demands into the (robust) subway power grid, and coincidentally adding regenerative braking, and someone decided to make the wild conceptual link that the power being fed back into the grid by braking is part of the overall power being used by new sinks. Which is like saying that my piss is being used to provide drinking water, because it goes back into the overall water cycle one way or another.

I, for one, have never seen that bumper sticker. So you’re good with me.

They should have kept them there, like badges. Collected more and gotten totally blinged out. It should have a badge for WWII.

Ah, yes, but that’s just packaging. Did you ever stop to consider how they are harvested and processed to give them that crunch?

I can’t speak for other Americans (USA, in particular, which is who I assume you meant), but for me it’s the nature of the oligarchical regime and their views on individualism. I’ve read the Chinese CSL, and spent a couple of days in a session presented by international lawyers and security professionals explaining what it meant for our business, how we needed to navigate it, and how it was being implemented. It’s scary.

Information is power; specific information about you is power over you. It’s control.

As for the government, I think it’s more a matter of the fact that China is far more well positioned and equipped to surveil US assets. Russia is bumbling, pre-occupied, and doesn’t make any computer components we use. Chinese chips, on the other hand, are in everything. The US is worried that, in a conflict, we could discover that China is able to simply… turn off all of the F35s. Or shut down or coopt firing systems on our war ships. Or disable coms or NV gear of ground troops. All of our modern equipment is computerized to more or lesser degree, and the failure of even seemingly simple resisters, sourced from China, could result in misoperation of gear, at best. If the espionage is more sophisticated, with more important components, it’s conceivable China could locate and monitor assets; missiles which ignore counter measures and always hit because the target is broadcasting a homing signal.

Most off these hypotheticals are probably not within the realm of current technology, and that what access China is able to embed in computer components is far more limited. But we don’t really know, and it’s far more dangerous to underestimate than to overestimate capabilities.

Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch’s distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of “optional.”

Gender-affirming surgery is “optional.” Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.

This thing is exactly my exit strategy. My living will gives my wife absolute authority to decide to terminate my life if she sees fit; whether or not the state would allow it is another matter, but at least my wishes are known. These include conditions of cognitive decline; my step-father recently passed after a protracted decade of horrific decline, and no fucking way all I going through that.

While you’ve got a more pragmatic solution, to be frank, if I’m going I’d like to do so with some guarantees and comfort. I’m not comfortable with the risk of accidentally half-assing the attempt with something I jury-rigged and end up with brain damage and the inability to complete the job. I’m hoping that some state will have the balls to jump into suicide tourism and open clinics full of these specific devices, so if things get bad and I’m still able to travel, I can go in some comfort.

I’m fucked if I’m comatose, because most options are simply removing support and letting the patient starve to death, and I fear being conscious (enough) through that protracted process.

We have such shit laws in this country (USA) about giving people autonomy over their end-of-life process.

Where did you think they came from?

Exactly. Mastodon-ish would be unsuitable as a server for a number of reasons: the loose, but still expected, character limitation; the lack of emoji responses; generally poor threading support; and the overall subscription feed-like model. OTOH, it’s based on a follow-the-user model, which is nice. I’m less familiar with Friendica, but AFAIK that’s also a follow-the-user model.

The issue with Federation is the general expectation that these are public places. You can lock them down, but that’s not what they’re designed for, and in my case, the risk of misconfiguration exposing a bunch of toddler pictures that the parents want to keep private is too high. I think of the server is federated-by-nature, then it must also be paranoid-by-default; I don’t trust share-public-by-default projects to not introduced something in an upgrade that exposes data. At least if the base presumption of the developers is that all information is private by default, the risk is limited to true accidents rather than false assumptions.

ActivityPub is enticing. It’s an exciting spec, and offers many client options. I’m worried only about those base assumptions.

Photoprism’s app space is pretty bad, but there is an completely hacky yet reliable solution for Android:

1. PhotoBackup
2. The PhotoBackup server on your Photoprism server
3. A cron job that runs the photoprism import command every few minutes.

Since I’ve had this set up, it’s worked as well as Google Photos ever did for keeping my phone snaps synced to the server. It’s been more reliable than SyncThing for my data, reacting and syncing faster, and it doesn’t mysteriously periodically just stop running like SyncThing.

I don’t know if PhotoBackup is available for iOS, but if it is, it works a treat.

This is the right answer. I specifically don’t use beets because it does this, and (1) I have things organized how I like, and (2) I’ve changed music servers a half dozen times in the past decade and am leery of an app that has to “own” the library.

But the reasons I don’t use it are exactly the reasons you’re looking for, and it sounds like a perfect fit for you.

So, do I extrapolate to the rest of the world?

Yes. Also assume that anyone who disagrees with you is either insane or stupid. It’s the modern human condition!

Honestly, I think Android is fucked for debugging stuff like this. I installed a program on mine and my wife’s phones - different makes & models - and configured them exactly the same, including the app settings in the OS. Mine works perfectly and barely shows up in battery use, near the bottom. Her’s drains her battery even when she’s not using it, regularly running at 50% of total battery consumption.

With Android YMMV is the rule, rather than the exception. There’s just too many variables.

It’s the main way I sync my phone.

I have a different app for photos, but SyncThing on my phone, and on my desktop, and again on one of my home servers, do most of the download and data syncing.

Occasionally I’ll have to manually run SyncThing; I’m not certain that Android is reliably starting it after reboots, but for the most part it just does it’s thing really reliably. There is a lag; it can take a few minutes for changes to sync - it’s not immediate. For me, this isn’t a problem, and I’d rather that than a battery suck, so I haven’t messed with it.