• 3 Posts
  • 217 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 9th, 2023

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  • The problem is, yes its its theoreticaly possible, but praticaly speaking it would be near impossible.

    Theoretically, you need to get 51% of the population all vote for one person. However, with FPTP, you get one choice on the ballot. Is the average voter going to risk their vote on a 3rd party, or vote for who they belive to be the “lesser evil” of the two that have a shot at winning.

    Even if you do manage to get 51%, there’s the electoral collage. Never forget, our democracy has built-in the ability to overwrite the presidential vote.

    Your first hurdle is getting any one to name an independent candidate.



  • You should probably get a louder smoke decetor if you can barely hear it upstairs.

    I’m going to go with the DIY approach;

    For the water sensor, I’d look into the possibility of linking the basement alarm to a speaker upstairs. I’ve no idea what kind of alarm you’re looking at or what the electronics are like. Theoreticaly, you can jump off the audio signal just before it reaches the speaker. Send the audio signal through an amp (located close* to the alarm, preferably where it won’t get wet) and connect it to a speaker upstairs.

    I would never try to mess with a smoke detector I rely on, but a water sensor…buy two and have fun.

    *the amp is to overcome voltage drop in the new cable, I doubt that the sensor electronics will be capable of driving a seperate speaker with at least 30 ft of cable between it.




  • Parents: you need to read lots of book in your free time to get smart and go to collage.

    ~~~ Many years later ~~~

    Me: I would like to attend university next year. I will pursue an education in literature to achieve my goal of becoming a published author.

    Parents: you will not! There is no success as an author, I will not support you going to to school for such a waste.




  • Would a compromise be to simply archive them but not make them freely availible until they enter public domain.

    For more current book; if they are out of print then they can be made availbe for limited loan, like any other digital library. If a digital copy is avalible for purchase from the original publisher/author, than its not fair game. Unless they come to an agreement, perhaps add supported for freely accessing a book otherwise available for purchase.

    If they got rid of the download option, it would make it much more difficult to just use a DRM stripping tool (a friend told me about these terrible pirating tools, I certently don’t know how to use then). A lot of digital libraies have a dedicated app that you can only view content from. Utilize whatever anti-screen capture systems banks and Netflix use to protect from simply taking screen shots. Make is easier to access the books legitimatly than it is to pirate them.

    Lastly, don’t just make everything freely availible next time there’s a world crisis.





  • Remote software repairs are definatly good, pretty cool and worth bragging about. If you have to do a physical repair, you’re probably better off just sending a new probe [citation needed], but as I said the time investment is huge.

    It is a legitimate question, however the way it was asked has a negative vibe, intentional or not. You pretty much gave a good option and bad option and said “pick one” - generally when that’s asked, we assume the asker assumes the negative is true (it’s hard to explain). To me, it could be interpreted as “just curious, I assume this probe is only taking pretty pictures, so why do you bother repairing it?”.

    Personally, I’ve been trying to avoid jumping to those types of conclusions, but its not easy. Text has no tone, and phrases sometimes have a secondary tonal meanings that people will insert. “Just curious…was it you that didn’t refill the coffee machine this morning?”




  • I’m going to copy paste a reply I left somewhere else. This was for iOS AI, I’m unsure what the implemention for macOS is. If they are scanning everything then I do not support it.


    From what I saw,

    MS Recall is a 24/7 AI monitor system that captures everything you look at and saves it for later. They didn’t even do the bare minimum for protecting the data, it was just dumped in an unencytped folder where anyone get wholesale access to the data. All trust has been lost.

    Apple is using AI as a tool to improve specific tasks/features that a user invokes. Things like assistant queries and the new calculator. They have said some promising things in regards to privacy, specificly with the use of ChatGPT - any inquiry sent to ChatGPT will ask the user permission first and obscure their IP. This shows they care enough to try, they have not lost our trust - but we remain skeptical.


    If apple tries the same thing by scanning everything wholesale, then that’s getting over shadowed by the promises made by the implentaion on the much more popular iOS.



  • The way I see it, if they’re too young to have scocial media, they’re too young to be on scocial media.

    It’s real odd when you consider how society is now okay with parents posting pictures of our children openly for the world to see. Yet when the kids start sharing pictures of them selves to friends it’s super dangerous for them.

    The sad part is now private photos are at risk with all the cloud minning and “AI” crap. The idea that no matter how much I lock down my privacy, simply sending a picture of my kid to their grandma, who will save it to her auto-cloud phone gallary, is still going to feed that picture to the collective is sickening.


  • From what I saw,

    MS Recall is a 24/7 AI monitor system that captures everything you look at and saves it for later. They didn’t even do the bare minimum for protecting the data, it was just dumped in an unencytped folder where anyone get wholesale access to the data. All trust has been lost.

    Apple is using AI as a tool to improve specific tasks/features that a user invokes. Things like assistant queries and the new calculator. They have said some promising things in regards to privacy, specificly with the use of ChatGPT - any inquiry sent to ChatGPT will ask the user permission first and obscure their IP. This shows they care enough to try, they have not lost our trust - but we remain skeptical.