ApathyTree

ApathyTree, 13 days ago

1,3,10,8,9, in the order I read them.

Why limit myself to one maladjusted coping mechanism when I can have several! One for each weekday and wildcard weekend!!

ApathyTree, 13 days ago

Still looking for my pack. Every time I think I find one it dissolves.

ApathyTree, 13 days ago

Cats like “yeah, I don’t care, where’s my food hooman…?”

ApathyTree, 29 days ago

Shit, that means I’m ableist…

(Only toward myself, I’d never think of anyone else the way I think of myself, and yes I recognize the issue there)

ApathyTree, 29 days ago

I really want to know what joke that raccoon told…

ApathyTree, 29 days ago

I’m distro hopping because Ubuntu was perfect for me in basically every way, but I don’t want to be locked to a closed distro…

I haven’t found anything I like yet, and I don’t have the skills (or motivation) to make core Debian feel the same.

I’ll probably end up back on Ubuntu, at least for my server machine… it just worked the way I wanted it to, and the ui was lovely for me. Plus it’s stable enough that I can just keep it up indefinitely without issue.

ApathyTree, 29 days ago

Probably best option is to sand it, prime it, and repaint it. Use a UV resistant paint made for plastic or UV resistant top coat, and should be good for several more years.

The green black gunk is probably algae, maybe with mildew (guessing you live somewhere that gets humid, or at least takes a while to dry from dew) so feel free to wipe it down with bleach or a fungicide after sanding but before you paint it.

ApathyTree, 28 days ago

In that case, I’d recommend the sanding, then a wipe down with bleach for the algae, then primer impregnated with a fungicide like Zinsser mold blocking primer (just an epa-approved example, but decent place to start). It’ll form a barrier between the raw degraded plastic and the paint (so anything existing won’t continue to grow), as well as helping prevent molds from growing in the new paint layers.

Just wait for a really dry day to do it (much as you can, you know, or if you have a garage you can run a dehumidifier in that may work too), and let the paint dry for a long time between coats to prevent any moisture trapping.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I think Mozilla has something like this as well (also a subscription).

I’m of the opinion that, at this point, one of the best infosec things a company could do is include a subscription like this (assuming they are safe and work as intended) for all employees as part of their compensation package, much the way they sometimes provide financial consulting services or gym memberships. Maybe one of the providers will start offering enterprise packages.

If we could purge large quantities of data on employees, it would be that much harder to use social engineering for hacking. As a bonus, if enough people got themselves purged, it would entirely disrupt the data harvesting and selling models, potentially making them worthless. That would be a huge win.

But I don’t think many people are going to pay for it themselves. They just won’t care that much. So as a work perk, it incentivizes them to use it by being free.

I’m not in IT or anything, but my close friend is in security, so it’s something I consider quite a bit.

Edit to add: obviously I’d rather see it illegal to collect data and sell it and all but that’s not going to happen any time soon, and this could be a lot faster. And if it becomes a business expense, businesses might just push for legislation…

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

Well shit.

Good to know, thanks.

When you say they reversed course, do you mean they scrapped the project entirely, or went back to the model they were going with when they announced it?

ApathyTree, 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago)

What if you added a shit-ton of planters and skylights/lights in the huge main hallways (assuming skylights aren’t there already, which they are in a lot of cases), and put windows inward toward your year-round community gardens? The inward-facing walls tend to be glass, so would need to be replaced anyway, and those hallways and congregation spaces are more than wide enough for abundant edible greenery if there aren’t sales kiosks and junk everywhere. You could make a really inviting view entirely indoors.

Retrofitting the plumbing might be a bit of a problem unless you made everything high efficiency, and just built up the floor a bit, which I think could be a fairly minimal expense by going down the main hallways to existing facilities, with shared plumbing between two units/stores like a duplex. (those cement floors suck anyway, so you’d want it built up at least in the units). That makes it easily accessible for fixing. Or a lot of places have back hallways, you could run exposed plumbing through those and run directly into each unit.

Keep some of the kitchens in the food court running, open some markets/maker spaces or create hangout/childcare options in the big shops that can’t be converted to housing, and you can employ people and give them access to quality resources with whatever access issues they may have. Plus then you could rip out 90% of the parking lot and plant trees or build more housing or something. That sounds pretty economically sound to me, just not up front. And not profitable for anyone who would spend on it.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

Plus side for squick thoughts, probably not that warm. The ocean is quite cold and things lose heat 25 times faster in water than air, so it would likely cool down considerably between being…… extruded…? And consumed.

Then again, I don’t know a whales body temp to start with, so there might be a lot of heat to lose. Idk if that’s better or worse…

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

So I’m not a biologist either but I’m going to speculate on the temp thing. (Somewhat educated speculation - science of all varieties is my jam)

Basically my hypothesis is that between insulation and size, they aren’t capable of losing heat fast enough to fall below their baseline temp, but any old temp would probably have worked fine, as long as their fats stay liquid (and for all I know that’s 36C, but that seems highly unlikely - you’d want to be several degrees warmer in case of emergency, else you’d get stiff and die for sure).

They have a nice layer of fat for insulation and that’s all well and good, but they are massively huge and a lot more spherical than most animals. So, they have a small surface area to volume ratio, and lose heat slower as a result. And because they are huge, and muscle twitch is heat generating (to say nothing of leaky heat-producing brown fat, idk if they have this, but most mammals seem to for thermoregulation), they likely produce a gob of heat internally just existing. Much like we believe the larger dinosaurs were endothermic due to sheer size (and some evidence from their bone structure).

Side note - Imagine how many calories it would take to maintain basal metabolic rate when you are losing that heat to 4C water at literally all times. It takes us about 1500-2000 calories for this function and we only lose heat to air that’s relatively close to our body temp.

I did a super quick scan of melting points of various fats, and while without knowing exact compositions of whale blubber idk the melting point, a surprising amount of the animal fats we use for cooking melt around 25-40C, with most large terrestrial animals (cow, pig, deer, etc.) falling between 32-40C (goose fat was the 25C).

If their composition hadn’t worked, though, they could have evolved a polyunsaturated fat (like fish oil) with a lower melting point.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my ted talk ;)

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

They’d have to focus on getting rid of their smell… that’s probably why foxes didn’t win the dog/fox pet battle. They smell very strongly.

helpfulhyena.com/what-do-foxes-smell-like/

But agreed on ferrets/cats :)

ApathyTree, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.

So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)

I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.

Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.

This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)

time.com/4897581/total-solar-eclipse-years-next/

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

I’ve accidentally bought a couple of ps4 games that lost servers within a year of launch, super frustrating, because they look great to play (and they weren’t exclusively multiplayer, so it makes no sense to me to scrap the single player along with multiplayer servers).

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

What important event did I miss this week, worthy of a meme?

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

I have full coverage with decently high coverage values (above minimum across the board, some substantially so)

I pay 60/mth, but I have a flawless driving record (driving since 04, not so much as a ticket) and live in a rural low cost state so that may factor in.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

If you are in the US, this might help :)

I’m sure you can order most of these things online.

treehugger.com/guide-buying-edible-insects-485840…

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

Totally fair. I first had crickets when I was a kid (in a sucker from a museum. I was the only one in my class trip willing to buy and consume it), so it doesn’t bother me at all, but I get the squick.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

That’s because turkeys take out the car with them. Whole shebang goes to the morgue.

Ok maybe not the morgue, but they do tend to get nicely lodged in whatever part of the car they get struck by. This is generally the front grill, as they are about 5-year-old size and tend to travel on foot, but they are flying bowling balls and can lodge into windshields pretty well too.

I’ve heard of a number of people hitting them (rural area) and the turkey soup always goes with the car.

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

My drunk self is a pretty good speller. Incoherent ramblings, but all properly spelled and punctuated (best I can tell).

Got anything stronger?

ApathyTree, 1 month ago

A lot of people would play this as a game.

Just introduce internet controlled cart devices, gamify it, and you could make your workforce essentially free end enjoyable to participate in.