sxan

sxan, 10 days ago (edited 1 day 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, 11 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, 11 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, 12 days ago

Put. Engineers. Back. In. Charge.

All of the C-suite, except maybe the CFO, should be aerospace engineers. That’s how it was back when Boeing made great planes; how to fix the company isn’t rocket science. Just get rid off all the MBAs.

sxan, 14 days ago

This cannot be emphasized or repeated enough. Before the acquisition, Boeing was led and run by engineers. After the acquisition, MBAs and Finance people were put in charge.

This happens at all large companies, eventually, and it’s why they all inevitably shit the bed. It’s just in this case, it’s killing a lot of people in the process.

sxan, 16 days ago

I want to see the posts where they successfully crow about how well it worked. We’re only seeing half the story here! Or maybe after they get their $5M, they are too busy spending their money to post?

sxan, 16 days ago

A hedge fund bought Red Lobster.

Sold all of the ladder (so the hedge fund no longer owns the land).

The people the hedge fund sold the land to jacked the rents (because the hedge fund couldn’t have, since they don’t own the land).

And since the hedge fund still owns Red Lobster, they screwed themselves over.

Right? That’s how this reads.

sxan, 27 days ago

“Improved mental state”?

“Improved self-confidence”?

I think the person who made this list did not grow up as a girl. This coming hard on the heels of man/bear.

sxan, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I think he’s walking a line. On the one side are people who want the US to stop all support until Israel stops, want the US to stop threatening the international courts seeking to hold Israel officials accountable for war crimes - essentially, want the US to treat Israel like we are treating Russia. On the other side is a powerful, well-funded pro-Israel lobby (which the Palestinians don’t have) and a traditionally fairly cohesive and influential pro-Israel voting block. Plus, Israel is our Ally, like officially; Palesteine is not.

He’s slowly, slightly shifting from full-throated support of Israel, but so far all he’s doing is withhold some ordinance. It feels as of all he’s doing is pissing off both sides, rather than shifting some support.

Honestly, I think he’s in a no-win situation. It’s critical for the USA that he win this next election - Trump is an existential threat to Democracy in the US. There’s a lot of money and influence he loses by not getting the pro-Israel lobby on his side, and who does he lose by continuing support? Are the disenfranchised youth going to vote for him if he pivots on Israel? All the folks who’ve been complaining (rightly) about the cost of living, housing prices, healthcare costs, loss of rights over their own bodies - all these folks who protest-voted in the primaries and are threatening to protest-vote in the general election… they’re all suddenly going to jump on Team Biden if he cuts off Israel? In enough numbers to counter what he loses from the pro-Israel lobby?

So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.

Edit: Came across this article here today, which I think has basically the same view.

sxan, 1 month ago

If he doesn’t win, it’s unfair by definition, right?

I’ve lost the ability to even be depressed by this shit anymore.

sxan, 4 months ago

That’s how they got Capone. Tried and true way for getting crooks that rely on henchmen and ambiguity.

Trump’s modus operandi includes a lot of implication. He makes ambiguous comments; henchlings that interpret his ramblings the way he wants get promoted; those that don’t, get fired. Prosecution is difficult when they can’t get a good, direct quote proving intention and direction.

But crooks will be crooks, and there’s always the IRS to save us from the worst of them.

sxan, 4 months ago

Don’t underestimate domestic pro-Israel agents’ ability to assassinate a US politician’s political career. Lemmy is not the American media, and the latter is still largely supporting Israel’s campaign.

sxan, 4 months ago

While I applaud compensating FOSS developers, there’s a devil in the details: all software stands on the shoulders of many giants. The nature of software, and software users, means that most money is going to go to front-end developers, regardless of effort. They, in turn, would have to rigorously re-distribute most of that money to the developers of the great many many libraries and frameworks that their software depends on. I would argue that it is practically impossible for this trickle-down to happen fairly, which would result in developers of deep, indirect dependencies used by everyone being ignored. Throw a shitty, low-effort GUI on restic, and you’d end up with all the donations. If you’re ethical, you’d give 99 cents for every dollar to the restic devs; how likely is that? An added wrinkle is that people are really bad about estimating the relative worth of their efforts; even if everyone in the stack is ethical, how do you estimate the relative value of your effort against the effort of the database binding library you use? How much of your donations do you give to each developer of the 40 libraries you directly import?

Another issue I personally have is that compensation invites obligation. It breaks the itch-scratching foundation of FOSS.

Finally, I think introducing money into FOSS is a virus that ultimately destroys the only functioning communism in the world. It changes developer behavior, or at least introduces perverse incentives, in undesireable ways. I’d rather end-users contribute in whatever way they can: well-written bug reports, PRs that fix spelling in docs, wiki “how-to” contributions, code contributions. From each, according to ability. That’s what keeps FOSS running, and that’s the spirit of FOSS.

Now, I’m fully in favor of for-profit companies funding and supporting projects. They’re making money off FOSS, and should roll that down. All of the same trickle-down issues apply, and certainly it introduces the same perverse incentives, but greed should have a cost, and all for-profit companies are by definition engines of greed.

sxan, 5 months ago

We have LG washing machine, fridge, and dishwasher. All of our original appliances crapped out within 2 years of each other, and were all around the same age and original to the house. LG was the least shitty, review-wise, in the price range with the features we wanted; they all of them came with WiFi modules. It appears modern appliances are now like cars - if you want certain features, you’re forced to also get features you don’t want.

In any case, the marketting justification for each was:

• dishwasher: download additional washing modes, like rinse-hold. Alerts when the machine is done. Remote start.
• washing machine: alerts when the machine is done. Remote start.
• fridge: I don’t recall (it was the first to go)

None of ours has been given access to the WiFi, so I just count it as a tax.

We also replaced our garage doors recently; the contractor literally didn’t carry any opener models without WiFi. I had to source those myself.

The most frustrating thing about all this wasn’t the WiFi, though; it was that the cost to repair each of them was 80% the cost of a new appliance, and most of that was parts. I’d do it again the same way. For comparison, the one appliance I’m trying to not replace is the oven, and we’ve had to have someone come out twice in as many years to fix it. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to just replace that, too.

I get furious just thinking about the waste. Sure, the new appliances are better - the dishwasher is far quieter, is larger inside, and has better drawer geometry, for instance. But we would have been happy in our ignorance if it would have been cost effective to fix rather than replace.

None of the originals were LG, BTW. I don’t know how robust these will be. The old appliances lasted 20, but I’m not naive enough to think modern appliances will last that long. If I get anywhere near close to 10 years without a major repair, I’ll be thrilled.

sxan, 5 months ago

Software developers experience this daily, except without the fun drinking and partying parts.

• write code & check it in
• go home
• maybe get some sleep, maybe
• go to work the next day
• get mad at whoever checked in that code

sxan, 5 months ago

Probably not testing, but rather demonstrating to potential buyers (the pig in the background). It sells better, and demonstrates the seller’s conviction that the product works.

sxan, 5 months ago

Humans. Where is my snow?

sxan, 6 months ago

Master and Commander. It’s atmospheric and fun, and I’m sad they didn’t make more with that cast.

sxan, 6 months ago

Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.

Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.

Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.

If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.

Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.

The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.

sxan, 6 months ago

Swimming. It could save your life.

sxan, 6 months ago

The entire fucking web worked with no ads for literally years. I do not feel bad, and won’t lament if companies can’t afford to pay people to cram even more JavaScript into web pages.

Sorry, web developers. Your masters are making you do evil things. It isn’t your fault, but I hate your jobs.

sxan, 6 months ago

This is an experienced DM.

sxan, 6 months ago

Do you speak Russian, or Chinese? B/c you won’t be very effective doing it in English or high-school level Spanish.

sxan, 8 months ago

Hah! My ChatGPT bot did 60 slides in 90 seconds, and submitted it hours before yours. See YOU in court!

sxan, 10 months ago

since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time.

This, more than anything happening at Reddit, demonstrates to me that people are leaving Reddit in droves.

Just weeks ago, Lemmy was slow, quiet place; it was rarely worth visiting more than once a day in terms of new posts. Since the Reddit protest, Lemmy has had a sea-change in volume, and that bespeaks a major migration.