sxan

sxan, 10 days ago

Can’t imagine white.

Well, that’s it, right? Because not-white.

sxan, 10 days ago

Yeah, well, if they’re still wearing that shit during an active civil war - I mean, we’re taking about Phillies fans, so no great loss.

(Note: I lived on The Mainline for 20 years, so I think I’m allowed some ribbing. Phillies fans not only regularly trash Philadelphia in drunken riots after games, they also came to my new state and totally trashed Minneapolis while they were here. I don’t believe there’s a worse bunch of hooligans in the States.)

sxan, 10 days ago

The thing I think is the most irreconcilable, incompromisable, consistently demonstrated behavior of The Right in America is the blatant hypocrisy about nearly all of their planks. It’s the thing that, when the next civil war comes, will allow me to pull the trigger on anyone wearing a red baseball cap with little remorse.

• Everyone needs guns to defend themselves from The State, because 2A! (Except for black people defending themselves from no-knock entry cops who got the address wrong)
• The government shouldn’t be allowed to tell us how to live! (Except for LGBTQ* people, women’s choices about their own bodies, or homeless people)
• The Constitution is sacrosanct! (Except for the part about separation of church and state, we just ignore that part)

It’s the same for their every. Single. Position. It makes me weary, and furious, depressed and pessimistic.

sxan, 10 days ago

I’m not advocating anyone buy a gun, mind you. My general opinion on guns is the same about cars: the only person I truly trust to operate one is me; the rest of all y’all are just generally unreliable.

That said: get a long gun. Any non-Bulpup rifle with a 20” or longer barrel - it’s really hard to commit suicide with a long rifle. You can find a way, sure, but there are far easier, more reliable ways to off yourself than trying to figure out how to pull a trigger you can’t reach when the bangy end is pointed at your head. And the knowledge that most people who try doing this end up still alive but permanently mangled and with reduced faculties may drive you to seek those alternative methods.

Another plus for a rifle is that it’s simply a better weapon for killing fascists. We have a lot of evidence that handguns are almost never used in armed conflicts. They’re far less powerful than rifles (in general), and their effective ranges are drastically shorter. Get a cheap optic, do some practice shooting, and you’ll be better armed and prepared than any open-carry idiot running around armed only with their trusty Colt M1911 with official Trump pistol grips.

I really wish that last part was a joke.

I don’t mean to come across as minimizing mental health issues. I also can’t prevent you from trying to off yourself. All that said, I hope you are able to get help, and get healthy.

sxan, 10 days ago

It’s not, really: 10x5x2.5 cm, plus the wall plug; but it’s still there, and it’s irritating because they could easily have powered this thing over USBC. Hell, most of my flashlights have USBC charging ports. It’s an additional thing to carry, and another thing to have to plug in. Plus, not being USBC makes it far harder to run off a battery pack.

You’re right about the rest of it, though.

sxan, 10 days ago

I went from desktop to 100% laptop over several years; now I’m back on a desktop - using one of those Ryzen 7 mini-PCs - and a 36-key GMK Cherry MX split keyboard that, stacked, is barely larger than the computer. I’m seriously considering getting a small Thunderbolt dock and just carrying that with me between work and wherever. The only annoying bit is the computer I have isn’t powered over the USB-C port, which means also carrying a power brick, and that’s the straw that keeps me synching data between my computer and laptop.

I could move everything to a bootable USB device, but even over USB-C that’d be orders of magnitude slower than NVMe or SATA.

The laptop is only two years older than the desktop (and maybe less than that since I didn’t buy the most current model), cost nearly 3x the PC, and is utterly blown out of the water by the specs on the micro(? 12.5 x 12.5 x 4 cm) PC. Yeah, the laptop has keyboard, pointer, battery, and monitor; that impacts size and cost, but still. I could almost use my PC in a coffee shop, if it weren’t for the power brick and the need to do something about a monitor.

I have a foldable phone. Maybe by the time that display technology gets scaled up (and onto the market) there’ll be a micro PC that’s powered over USB-C and I can put together a small, laptop-sized case with everything I need.

The Frameworks are looking good, though, now that they’re selling AMD models. I’ll have to check in, in a year or so.

sxan, 10 days ago

I can’t stop giggling at the thought: 34 counts, each with a maximum 4 year penalty.

I know, I know… no judge is going to issue the maximum penalty on each of those counts, especially in this case. But a man can dream.

136 years. happy sigh

sxan, 9 days ago

They die . Statistically, outdoor cats have half a life expectancy of 2-5 years, vs 12-20 of indoor-only cats.

We’ve owned rural homes a couple of times. One time, we owned a house on 5 acres at the end of a dirt-and-gravel road a half mile from the nearest paved road. On the other side of our neighbor’s house was a culvert, with an easement - a dirt “road” - that the irrigation company inspectors would use about once a month or so to check the state of the culvert. We were one of three houses at the end of that dead-end gravel road. At the time, (in the late 90’s) we had cats we’d let out during the day and bring in at night. During the four years we lived there, we had one cat that was killed by being hit by one of the irrigation inspectors. That easement was used by one truck, once a month, and it killed our cat. We lost a second cat to coyotes; at least the cat hit by the truck didn’t have the terrifying death of being torn apart by coyotes.

Maybe you’ll be lucky, and your cats won’t go into the roads. Maybe where you live you don’t have coyotes, or neighbors with dogs, or large owls. Maybe you’ll be lucky and your cats won’t meet any other cats and get infected with one of the exceedingly common diseases of feline leukemia, feline aids, or distemper. Maybe you don’t have neighbors who poison their pest mice and rats that your cats might find and eat and themselves die in agony from indirectly ingesting rat poison. Maybe you live somewhere without rabies (although I think it’s even gotten to the UK, now).

Maybe you don’t care if your cats get killed. But it you do care, keep your cats indoors. If you live somewhere rural, there are predators that can and will take a cat. If you live somewhere urban, it’s even more likely your cat will get killed by a car. And even if you have a perfect barrier that your cats won’t find a way over or under, it won’t stop poisoned rodents from getting into your yard where your cats can get at them, and your cats will get fleas and ticks and bring them into the house. Fleas are only a minor nuisance, sure; not a horrific, lingering death from rabies, and maybe you think you’ll use a flea dip - although keep in mind flea dips can give cats neurological diseases: it’s a poison that’s spread through their systems, and some cats react poorly to it.

But, again maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe for you the inconvenience of cleaning a litter box is worth the risk of your cat being killed. If being inconvenienced is your motivation, may I recommend a Litter Robot. They’re pricey, but worth every penny, and they last for years. And you’ll almost certainly enjoy your cat’s company for many more years.

sxan, 10 days ago

Martha Stewart was railroaded. Members of Congress - and some of the worst are members of my own party - regularly do worse.

Oh, but, yeah, sincerely: the meme is clever and funny.

sxan, 10 days ago

No, but I’m a registered Democrat. I’ve lived in several states, and not all of them allow you to vote in their primaries of you’re not a registered member. So the Democrat party is my party.

Now, if we ever get rid of the electoral college, and replace FPtP with approval out ranked-choice voting (or, almost literally anything else besides FPtP), that’ll change. But for now, I accept the reality that we vote for the lesser of two evils, or we throw away our vote in a futile, and unnoticed, gesture.

sxan, 9 days ago (edited 15 hours ago)

Psh. “Cardiovascular concerns.” Fucking read the side effects for the drugs you’ve already approved, FDA. You’ve allowed an autoimmune treatment drug that has a high chance of giving terminal fucking cancer, you dumb fucks. Fucking Viagra has “cardiovascular concerns.”

Biased, bought, dumb-asses.

sxan, 10 days ago

What’s the issue? It is a window conditioner, and it is in a window. Looks totally legit to me.

sxan, 10 days ago

Sad thing is, McDonnell Douglas was also founded by an engineer, but they’re the ones who screwed up Boeing.

sxan, 9 days ago (edited 15 hours ago)

Should the Secret Service be a consideration?

Let’s say Trump brutally tortured and sexually abused some pre-teens in a basement in Texas, was tried and convicted and given a death sentance. Does the fact that hrs under the protection of the Secret Service have any bearing on the judgment? Should it?

That said, you’re probably right. He’ll have to spend a couple of years playing golf at Mar-a-Lago, a truly unjust and extreme punishment 🙄

sxan, 10 days ago

I didn’t read the article; the CBS news site isn’t the worst, but it employs some of the common, horrible site design patterns, and is painful to read.

However: 34 counts. Each with a maximum possible 4 years incarceration sentence. It increases the odds of some jail time, for at least one or two counts.

The judge is said to be taking a lot of factors into consideration; I hope one is them is the unusually unanimous verdict on such a large number of counts.

sxan, 10 days ago

But, for once, the big news items have been mostly good. It’s a nice change in Lemmy, which - and I’m a lot happier here than on Reddit as the culture is less toxic - is inundated with mostly negative news. There are occasional good news posts, but they’re rarely national or world level impacts.

So two really big, globally impacting, effective (vs, e.g. ICC issues sternly worded letter saying it doesn’t like something) good news items in one day is great.

sxan, 10 days ago

He’s a king just for the sheer, blunt honesty.

sxan, 10 days ago

Who’s your manager? I want to speak to them.

sxan, 10 days ago

Problem is, you have to play all of them to get all the specialized terminology, and it sometimes overlaps between games.

I’ll bet I’ve played at least one game you haven’t. I know there are dozens of games I haven’t played, and even if I had time and wanted to dedicate all of my free time to RPGs, I doubt I could play then all enough to learn them well enough to recognize each from a half-dozen words in a meme.

sxan, 10 days ago

Yup, agreed. Better than those damned pods, though.

sxan, 9 days ago (edited 15 hours ago)

• $320,000
• 25m (minutes) flight time (45m (miles) range)
• “Scale model” stage - all life-size video/images are renders

The fan attachments are large enough, and are designed, to provide lift, which would be more impressive if it had a useful run time. It’s great that people are thinking of ways to combine VTOL concepts in human-sized quadcopters, and maybe this will inspire some other, more practical, future product. This one, though, I doubt will ever come to market.

Edit to make the UoM more clear, because context is hard.

sxan, 10 days ago

Maybe. But if you image someone with a deep accent, only fundamental reading skills, spelling words by sound… if you read it out loud it almost sounds rural Kentucky, or Tennessee.

Although, I don’t know how they came up with “gledding,” unless that’s how they learned it by hearing it. It’s consistently wrong, and no amount of accent accounts for it.

Ooo! I now what it sounds like! Have you ever seen the parody YouTube series “Precious Plum?” It reads like someone with that accent spelling by how they say the words.

sxan, 10 days ago

I feel alternately sad and disbelieving when I see this one. The poster is either fake, or obviously lacking in a basic education. This goes beyond stupidity, and speaks rather to someone who wasn’t given any schooling, and is spelling entirely by sound. The latter just makes me sad.

sxan, 9 days ago

You did this programmatically, or in an application? If it were a stand-alone program, it’d make a nice screen saver, especially if the use could just keep it running with no loop.

sxan, 10 days ago

Oh yeah. We are super sensitive about our subs.

I once worked for a compny that subcontracted out to the government and to comanies contracting with the government. We were bidding on a job working with some company who was making sonar systems for the nuclear subs, and I was brought along to basically represent the dev team to work on the (a?) software component. I had to get a secret security clearance, which - if you haven’t been through this - is a dozen or so pages of the last decade of everything about your life: every address you’ve lived at; a list of people and contact information who’ve known you for that entire time and who will vouch for you; every job you’ve held and contact info for the companies… everything except an actual anal probe. And remember, I had to do this just to get into the building to talk to these people. I mean, maybe not normally, but they weren’t going to waste their time talking to me if I didn’t have the clearance. Then when I got there, it had the craziest security I’d ever seen: an outside badge door, so you had to call someone to get you, a little room with a security guard station, then another secure door the security guys had to open. And then there were badge doors in the building for different sections.

The job sounded fun: I was told one phase of testing required the developers to go on a test cruise, to answer questions and debug while underway; getting to ride in a nuclear sub (without having to join the Navy) might have been worth suffering my claustrophobia and massive distrust of submarines in general. But we didn’t win the bid, and I never got to use that security clearance that was such a massive PITA to get.

Anyway, it made me very conscious of just how serious the US takes submarine security. This guy, I expect, will disappear into an oubliette and never be heard from again.