I took a running leap in a wide open living room, realized I was going to fall, stuck out my hand, and that’s why I’m ‘double-jointed’ in my right thumb. (That and being hyper mobile. But it didn’t pop out of joint before that.)
So - I don’t know if every state handles it this way, but my state has a public service commission that has the authority to approve the big projects that utility companies engage in. In my state, my PSC makes their meetings available to watch online, and the public can show up in person, or call in to offer comments about utility matters.
I guess a utility here has an agreement with a farmer to build solar panels and a few wind turbines on their property, but to connect it to the grid, they had to run lines over other farmers lands.
These people were complaining that the power lines would cause cancer, that the solar panels would ‘leak’ and poison the land. That the concrete used in the construction footings would leech chemicals into the groundwater (these are farmers that use pesticides and fertilizers, as well as ranchers that have all manner of chemical and biological effluent running off their livestock).
Which is all to say. I agree completely. I think they are poor stewards of the land and let their political beliefs get in the way of using the land well. Being sold power by people who do use the land to generate power in environmentally friendly ways is just desserts.
I was in Iceland a few months ago, and in some areas the rocks are only tens of years old. There are entire plains of lava flows that are only a few thousand years old. (Same for Hawaii, too.)
I just saw a headline that he’s going to work for Microsoft now.
My employer heavily uses Microsoft, and I’m in IT.
Since June, Microsoft eliminated all their training staff - the folks who show others how to use their software, reclassified their customer experience staff to eliminate the role - these folks met with customers to solicit product feedback and find out what people actually want, made unilateral and poorly communicated changes to security policies that impact hundreds of our users, turned on beta (preview) features for end users without testing - in some cases rendering software inoperable in our environment, and is disabling or limiting features that work(ed) in software covered under our enterprise license end is encouraging people to purchase entirely new software systems from Microsoft to regain the lost functionality.
Honestly, if he was fired for pursuing profits over quality, then he’ll fit right in.
So a conservative blog outs him, even though he asked them to please respect his private life.
The church he cares enough about to deliver sermons at sees fit to release a public statement about it - amplifying the reach of the blog and drawing attention to it in the local community.
And then the local cops just happen to pull him over while he’s driving for a ‘wellness check’?
I’ve never, in my life, heard of a traffic stop wellness check. We know what they were doing. We know what that church was doing. And we know what that blog was doing.
What a tragedy. I hope everyone involved knows the stain they bear.
Depends, I guess. I feel that our capacity to be horrible outweighs our ability to handle it well.
The movie’s AI is a fully present consciousness that exerts its own willpower. The movie also doesn’t have microtransactions, subscriptions, or as far as I can tell, even a cost to buy the AI.
That seems fine. Sweet, even.
But I think the first hurdle is whether or not an AI is more a partner than base sexual entertainment. And next (especially under capitalism), are those capable of harnessing the resources to create a general AI also willing to release it for free, or would interaction be transactional?
If it’s transactional, then there’s intent - was it built for love, or was that part an accident? If it was built for love and there’s transactions, there’s easy potential for abuse. (Although abusive to which party, I couldn’t say.)
And if, say, the AI springs forth from a FOSS project, who makes sure things stay “on the level” when folks tweak the dataset?
A personalized set of training data from a now-deceased spouse is very different than hacked social media data, or other types of tweaks bad actors could make.
The attorney hired by the city of Marion following the raids on a Kansas newsroom has blocked access to records that should be publicly available under state law....
I’m not trying to reveal too much about myself here, but the mechanism in my area is the same as the mechanism for any government-owned devices.
The device is copied by a digital forensics expert. If the device is also the subject of a discovery request, it is retained until two years after litigation has completed.
The copied data is analyzed by a FOIA coordinator that gives all the relevant information to the person who initiated the FOIA request.
I advise people to never conduct work on personal devices because the policy we work under explicitly states that personal devices will be subject to legal holds and FOIA if used for official business.
A long while ago, my first foray into smart home stuff was a Phillips Hue system. I used to use it exclusively offline, but I got deeper into smart home stuff and wanted to add some integration into my system. I don’t remember what anymore, but it meant setting up a Hue developer account, so I signed up. Gave them my email address. Stopped using the integration, moved, reset the hub, used it offline for years.
This February I logged into the hub for some reason. I think an accessory wasn’t working and Hue user docs said to log in or some such nonsense.
Five days ago, I got an email from Amazon. They told me that one of the batteries in a Hue switch was running low, and they helpfully provided me with a link to buy new ones. Their page for the device indicated that they were being updated with its battery percentage every 4-8 hours - and that I had authorized Alexa access to my Hue system in February.
I checked the Hue app, and it indicated no apps or services connected to my account.
Logged into the Hue website, dug into my settings, and there were a dozen app’s and services that had been “authorized” to access my account - none that showed up in the app.
Every smart device that has been on my network - devices that I never integrated with Hue (on purpose!) were all happily showing very recent access times to my data. Systems I don’t have accounts to anymore. I revoked access, of course.
Three days ago Amazon emailed me to let me know a different device needed a battery, and showed that Hue had shared the battery level of the device with them that day - 2 days after I revoked access.
Yeah… all their products are getting trashed, reflashed, or used with zigbee hubs I’ve built.
Although the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program in late June, his administration has found ways to cancel more than $48 billion in debt since then....
I don’t know if turning off Bluetooth protects against flipper attacks (Edit: Nah.), but unless something has changed, it (sadly) doesn’t preserve your privacy.
It’s not really documented, as far as I can tell, but Bluetooth low energy stays on, even when you toggle Bluetooth off for both iOS and Android. As of iOS 15, even turning off iPhones means the phone is still trackable. (Unsure about Android on that front.) Apple’s ‘Find my’ network uses Bluetooth low energy, same as Bluetooth beacons.
I commented elsewhere with an explanation and a bit of speculation. I did later confirm that even ‘disabling’ Bluetooth doesn’t stop the attack.
The attack method works even when Bluetooth has been disabled using airplane mode from the control panel, which may surprise you. In which case, you’ll be shocked to discover that disabling Bluetooth this way, erm, doesn’t. Instead, you’d need to disable it directly from your device settings or run your iPhone in Lockdown Mode to prevent these advertising pop-ups from being received. Source
Assuming similar on Android, it’s possible, but not that easy toggle everyone knows about.
I mean, it sucks for everyone that can’t or don’t want to run homebrew OS’s.
The “One” link I shared above indicates the behavior became standard in Android 8 and iOS 11. They were released in August and September 2017, respectively.
I’m with the other person – no idea I’ve had about the future has held up over 5 years.
I’m getting married in two weeks, and we’ve already been together 7 years. I may not have the same job - I’m at my limit for promotions unless I become management. And I am going to sell this house by then - moving somewhere a little newer, a little more loved by its previous owners. I think, and hope, that in 5 years, I’ll be doing even better.
A week ago or so I posted a tan colored cutie that popped up in my garden. Wasn’t quite sure of what it was. I think now it’s pretty clear - and also has 5 friends all within few feet of each other.
Scrolling through my feed, I revealed the top of the picture first. Before I reached to the bottom of the picture, I got an intense craving for a burger on a toasted sesame seed bun.
While reading that article, I started to wonder about privacy controls that exist within Matter.
It’s sort of weird that every company seems kind of united behind it. That’s sort of rare.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Matter does a lot for those companies, but I don’t know if Matter currently offers any actual privacy.
The hubs and control devices can obviously report back to the manufacturer with any data they are legally allowed to collect. That surely includes network information (including nearby networks), any location or geofence activity, device types, events, and statuses reported by those devices. It’s all the data that could be harvested before, but through one hub. We’ve just obscured the fact that Google, Samsung,or even Apple are doing the collecting behind the Matter name. And when you give a device access to your network, it can talk to every device on your network and reach the internet unless you’ve blocked it. Does the Matter standard prevent devices from gathering information from other Matter devices, or even from your network/other networks around you? Does Matter dictate that devices may only share data with the Matter routers? That is: are they prohibited from using non-Matter communication protocols? Can a device request that a Matter hub send data to a server on its behalf? Can a device directly talk to an external server?
If data can be collected, and a server can be reached, there’s no privacy to be had under Matter.
The questions above are rhetorical, but without reading the actual Matter specification (which is ‘available’ online, if you give the Matter consortium your information), I couldn’t tell you whether or not there’s actually any privacy, or if this is just a group project to steal user data.
For us it’s mostly been smart home stuff. Our doors have keypads, and they lock automatically if we forget to lock them. Smart speakers take notes and set reminders the moment I want to take a note. I used to have a “Magic Mirror“ that showed my calendar. From plants to lizards, we got lights on timers.
The other part is just planning.
We organize things by location and use, and work with each other. If she’s on a task, I have to let her think it out, or else she forgets stuff. If I’ve left something out and she doesn’t know if I’m done with it, she won’t put it away - lest I forget I was even working on something. We have a few free spaces in the house where we can ‘dump’ stuff - confined areas that visible though they don’t get lost/must be tended sometimes, so we can ADHD, without making out of control messes. We are intentional about where things live - if something gets put up and one of us can’t find it, we wind up with multiples of that item.
Well, when the government fails to adequately regulate, leaving it up to industry to self-report, this is the only foreseeable outcome - for pretty much any industry.
Greed is a massively corrupting influence.
I know that the producers don’t self-report. They’re supposed to contract with testing labs, but when there’s a lack of standardized procedures and oversight, the producers lab-shop until they find a lab that has tweaked their processes in such a way that reports favorably on even substandard goods.
In that way, the labs become facilitators of a flawed regulatory process.
The only real fix is more and better oversight (including verification of results from testing laboratories) and standardization of testing procedures.
So the company that no longer can offer two-day prime shipping on most items, has missed their delivery estimates 4 times for me this year, and is often more expensive than local retailers wants to eliminate one of the only value added services to the increasingly costly and useless Prime.
I’ve never really considered hops to be an interesting flavor. It’s just… flat and bitter to me.
I truly don’t understand why so many people love IPAs, or try to sneak extreme hoppiness into other beer styles. (An IPA with fruit juice is not a saison! And a 70 IBU “kolsch” is a war crime!)
As a person who prefers the complex, bright and earthy flavors from grains and yeast, getting face-fucked at the end of every sip by a one-note weed pine cone is so disappointing.
While making my earlier comment, I actually looked it up to see if maybe there was something unusual about my perception of hops, but didn’t want to overload folks with info. It seems that some people are more sensitive to bitter tastes, such as those in hops, and some folks can’t taste them at all. It’s like if the whole cilantro/soap thing were less a dichotomy, and more of a spectrum. (And I’m one of the people to whom cilantro tastes like soap.)
That’s not to say I don’t recognize or value the contribution of hops to beer, but hops aren’t the primary driver of most beers flavor profile, nor should they be. In most beer styles, the bitterness of the hops are used to balance the sweetness of the malt so the beer doesn’t taste like syrup. This allows other flavors in the malt to come out, or flavors from the yeast to say hi.
For me it’s a very fine line. I think I’m more sensitive than the average person.
If the bitterness does more than balance, then it dominates all other flavors, including any flavors within the hops themselves. It’s just bitter, flat, and tastes like how bad weed smells.
I don’t believe it’s a matter of unrefined taste. I can talk to you all day about floral notes of lightly roasted grains, the heavier flavors of darker roasted malts, or what kind of funk a yeasty beer has.
But hops. Too much, and it’s just one flavor for me. I think the only time I’ve been able to enjoy a hop’s flavor was when I ate a fresh one on a brewery tour.
I feel like the comments are dragging you unnecessarily. Maybe one variant presents mildly, but the first line says hospitalizations are increasing. Is hospitalization ‘mild’?
The article contradicts its core premise in the first line.
At the risk of sounding argumentative: The byline of the article says that COVID has gotten milder. The first line of the article says hospitalizations are on the uptick. I feel it’s a bit downhill from there.
I don’t disagree with the premise. As soon as it became clear that COVID was a pandemic and not something that could be quarantined out of circulation, epidemiologists and armchair experts alike have supposed that COVID would become milder. (It’s not evolutionarily advantageous for a virus to be too deadly to its host organisms. That’s sort of a self-limiter.).
I think a milder, more cold-like (or perhaps indistinguishable from cold) COVID may be the ultimate outcome.
That said: To get more into it - I don’t like the article because it appears to contradict itself and it doesn’t account for the same sorts of things that the guy I responded to was being criticized for - variants, vaccination status, immune systems, and anecdotes.
The one bit of real science in it is a paper published in April 2022. And while I’m sure the scientists who wrote that paper did fine work, their research was weeks or months old by the time the paper was published.
That means the only information referenced in the story that isn’t an anecdote is over a year and a half old - published only a few months after Omicron was even recognized as a COVID variant.
And I guess that’s my main issue. It’s a non-story. It asserts something it doesn’t validate. But the commenter asserted something they can’t validate either (to us), and folks dragged him for it.
For what it’s worth, 3 people I know, and myself recently experienced symptoms similar to what OP described. My doctor and a PA at an urgent care both said something to the effect of those symptoms being on the rise. Not saying I should be more trusted but I have a contradictory experience to the article.
If we’re going to be critical of people who have no reason to be misleading, then perhaps we should also be critical of folks who are trying to serve us advertising.
I think the issue comes down to collective trauma and lack of free speech by the oppressed.
The massacre of the native peoples, horrors of slavery and resulting civil war, Jim Crow era in the south, the war on drugs, and the war on terror are all genocides in their own right, but the voices of the oppressed have been silenced in history books and mass media under the guise of ‘keeping the peace’ or promoting unity, while the people who facilitate(d) these things continue(d) to play a role in shaping national discourse.
(Say nothing of ‘lesser’ national traumas, such as prohibition, the race riots of the 50’s and 60’s, the intentional lack of healthcare for the gay community during the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the ongoing class war that’s being executed through education access and cuts to social programs.)
The U.S. has never looked inward, or if it has, it has largely chosen to ignore the lessons that could be learned.
I think that even if there were a nationally traumatizing event of the sort that transformed Germany, the U.S. would gleefully skip past it to repeat the same mistakes.
I believe the issue is not lack of opportunity to learn, but a resistance to learning and a refusal to, as it were, e pluribus unum.
Huh. One of my users recently needed help after seeing a photo as his desktop background.
He said he was opening images and one became his desktop background. I just thought it was user error and walked him through fixing it.
Maybe it wasn’t…
Two gangs, “Yoda” and “DZ Mafia” are vying for control of the drugs market in the notorious northern neighbourhoods of France’s second biggest city....
In addition to my normal skewed interpretation of the world/flights of fancy, I’m also running off 2 hours of sleep today and I really thought the picture accompanying the article was a picture of a French gangster.
I was so impressed at how the French approach even gang wars with a bit of pomp.
I was kind of disappointed when I opened the article to see that she’s just like, a cop. I mean, still fancy, I guess, but not “blastin’ with gold filigree on my hat” fancy.
Also - horrifying. I hope they get that under control.
How fucking stupid is that? Sorry, but not having a good morning. This is like when I found out you can’t set the number of rings either. Sometimes I just want to smash all my tech and go back to rocks, sticks, and leaves.
I’m on iOS, and I have “silence unknown callers” turned on. I’m sure a similar Android option exists.
Basically - any number that calls me that is unknown (that isn’t in my contacts or I haven’t called/picked up before) goes right to my nonexistent voicemail, which means they’re immediately hung up on.
Auto-dialers are funny. Most are configured to redial on connection fail. Yesterday I received 38 calls in a 2 minute period. Never got a single notification about it
I’m almost purely digital for pretty much all of notifications that come my way - even my doctor.
I don’t live in the area code where my phone number is from, and haven’t in so long that there’s only a few people that would call me from that area code.
And - well spotted - The 38 call salvo from the day prior was actually a contractor trying to get ahold of me. Because it was a number from my current area code, I went ahead and called them back. The person who called me only tried to dial once, and the redials were all the computer automatically retrying.
Admittedly, it is less than optimal, but in the 5ish years I’ve gone without a voicemail, it’s the second time I haven’t picked up for a desired call.
Usually when I know I’m going to be receiving calls from new folks, I’ll first try to call their number or text them - even if the number isn’t in my contacts, if I’ve interacted with it in some fashion, it will ring through. Or I’ll disable the ‘straight to voicemail’ for a time.
It’s not too onerous, and I really hate spam calls, so the effort of remembering to enable/disable it a few times a year is worth it to me.
And, for what it’s worth, I do think it has an effect. Earlier this year I let calls through and forgot to block them again, and it was 3 weeks before I got a spam call. Before taking such extreme measures, I was getting about 5 a week.
It would really funny if black folk decided to make it something stupid.
Bunch of rap videos with blinged out Pomeranians. Stock footage of a flock of them running and barking.
🎵 come around, imma get you with my pomeraptors 🎵
3 months later, a slew of news reports from Sinclair owned news stations about small dogs and behavior issues. Some crying church lady with dry wispy blonde hair, talking about how Jesus only loves golden doodles.
Then a flood of memes calling Pomeranians finger guillotines, a stream of repeated news articles about the same few attacks, repeated to false consensus.
I’m trying to transition off of reddit completely and I dislike what they have done. But that being said, I thought it was quite honorable of them to not censor the ‘fuck spez’, be it comments throughout the site or on /r/Place. They even left the giant fuck spez ending in the official time lapse of /r/Place and the...
Even though Reddit knew that r/Place would attract an obvious message, what’s left after it’s done?
Reddit has already shown they’re contemptuous of their users and do not care about their opinions.
Is a protest that boosts site engagement really effective to a site that exists because of engagement?
I don’t think I’m being cynical when I say I think bringing back r/Place was a means to juice their numbers - a way to cover up falling user engagement.
My suspicion is they’re trying to buy time to come up with a better plan. r/Place represents another month of fooled advertisers.
I have to be honest, I had no idea what I was in for. I hadn’t seen a single preview and had read one (relatively spoiler free) review of the movie.
I think it was really entertaining. The jokes were funny, edged on surreal, but didn’t get ridiculous. Of particular note, I usually cringe these days when it comes to Will Ferrell in a movie. He’s great, but I feel that he tends to run over directors (or maybe they misjudge his fit in the story), and they let him go absolutely nuts. He was definitely silly here, and retained his essential Ferrell-ness, but still managed to do that in a way that served the movie.
The references were top notch. The bit referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey had me rolling in my seat.
I feel that the movie did an excellent job of dealing with its core theme. It made value judgements without brow beating the audience about them. And it treated even objectively bad things with a degree of nuance and sympathy.
Edit: I forgot to mention this, but I am now also desperate for a bit in a Deadpool movie that opens on Barbie doing Barbie things while the narrator narrates something and then DP shows up, breaks the 4th wall and asks who the fuck is talking, and the narrator and him have a brief “wait, what?”-type exchange. Then DP has a recurring bit where he keeps glancing to the sky, expecting the narrator to come back.
(Sure it’s probably not contractually possible, or sensible from a story perspective, but Helen Mirren’s narration really made me think of DP.)
In 2016 I was coming out of a nasty depression. I wound up falling into a smaller subreddit and even became a ‘cool kid’ with a group of folks from it. We spun up a group chat and became very good friends - to the point of sharing our lives, meeting each other, and in my case - I started dating someone from the chat, and she moved halfway across the country to live with me. She is my forever person.
Last week, I was thinking about what had been lost in the 10+ years of comments and posts that I had either overwritten or deleted. So much of my life was shared there. And so much of my future will be determined by experiences there. I legitimately cried.
But change is inevitable, and we’ll always make the best of it.
What stupid thing have you done bc of a movie?
I’m expecting some child recreating superhero stunts and gerting hurt
Native Americans are building their own solar farms (www.bbc.com)
What's the Oldest Thing You Own?
Intellectual Rule (lemmy.world)
Safety and Research were Sacrificed for Profit under Altman (www.theatlantic.com)
Article from The Atlantic, archive link: archive.ph/Vqjpr...
Future generations (lemmy.world)
The outed crossdressing Mayor is your regularly scheduled reminder
What is uploaded to the internet stays on the internet. For analysis by random people until there ceases to be an internet....
Imagine if the movie "Her" (2013) was real and people could fall in love with an AI, would you be weirded out by someone if they did that and especially if it was someone you knew?
with the way AI is getting by the week,it just might be a reality
words search (slrpnk.net)
I got goblin warlock...
City of Marion refuses to turn over records following newsroom raid that should be publicly available (www.kshb.com)
The attorney hired by the city of Marion following the raids on a Kansas newsroom has blocked access to records that should be publicly available under state law....
‘People have no idea’: How smart devices spy on us and reveal information about our homes (english.elpais.com)
How Biden is continuing to cancel student loan debt despite Supreme Court ruling (www.cnn.com)
Although the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program in late June, his administration has found ways to cancel more than $48 billion in debt since then....
Flipper Zero can now spam Android, Windows users with Bluetooth alerts (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
18+ Filters off, where do you really see yourself in 5 years?
All grown up (lemmy.world)
A week ago or so I posted a tan colored cutie that popped up in my garden. Wasn’t quite sure of what it was. I think now it’s pretty clear - and also has 5 friends all within few feet of each other.
Matter 1.2 is a big move for the smart home standard (www.theverge.com)
What are some items that make your life easier?
My recommendation is a small thing: a trashcan with a swinging lid!...
Legal cannabis labels inflate THC potency contained in products, executives say (www.theglobeandmail.com)
Amazon To Start Running Ads In Prime Video Series and Movies, Will Launch Ad-Free Tier For Extra Fee (deadline.com)
Elon Musk’s Neuralink approved to recruit humans for brain-implant trial (www.theguardian.com)
Company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device after getting green light from independent review board...
it's that time of year (mander.xyz)
Sore throat, then congestion: Common Covid symptoms follow a pattern now, doctors say (www.nbcnews.com)
Doctors who treat Covid describe the ways the illness has gotten milder and shifted over time to mostly affect the upper respiratory tract....
How is woke a religion? (lemmy.world)
I’ll fight anyone who shits on Gen Z (i.imgur.com)
Windows 10 - when attempting to open multiple image files simultaneously, instead of opening they become my desktop background.
This has been going on for a couple months at least, but not much longer than that....
Drug war shakes France’s Marseille as rival gangs shoot it out (www.aljazeera.com)
Two gangs, “Yoda” and “DZ Mafia” are vying for control of the drugs market in the notorious northern neighbourhoods of France’s second biggest city....
😡Just learned that blocking a caller on android doesn't block their voicemails😡
How fucking stupid is that? Sorry, but not having a good morning. This is like when I found out you can’t set the number of rings either. Sometimes I just want to smash all my tech and go back to rocks, sticks, and leaves.
rule (lemmy.ml)
Very honorable of them to leave up all the 'fuck spez'
I’m trying to transition off of reddit completely and I dislike what they have done. But that being said, I thought it was quite honorable of them to not censor the ‘fuck spez’, be it comments throughout the site or on /r/Place. They even left the giant fuck spez ending in the official time lapse of /r/Place and the...
How's the "Barbie" movie? [SPOILERS]
Not a promotion, so not against strike rules. Just think of this as an interpretation/review from someone who happens to really like movies....
Banjo's 2nd Birthday (lemmy.world)
Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st (www.reddit.com)
The latest from /r/ModCoord.