Tangential to this, but I’ve always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn’t in the loop

Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.

The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet

Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he’d be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he’d be out of office and we’d be about half a year into Dubya’s first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.

Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.

Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we’re getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.

We receive their reply about a year into Obama’s first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.

Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn’t even get to take part in this particular conversation.

We won’t get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn’t croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)

So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president’s hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.

You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)

When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.

We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.

I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.

You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.

I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)

Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.

And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes

Slipknot puts on a pretty damn good show.

They’re not a band that’s in my usual listening rotation, I don’t dislike them, they’re just not my usual kind of music. When I saw them it was a situation where someone I knew ended up with extra tickets somehow and I was more interested in the other bands they were touring with

I’d say they stole the show but I think they were actually the headliner, so I don’t know who they would’ve stolen it from.

I’m admittedly a sucker for a spectacle, and let’s be real, that’s kind of slipknot’s whole schtick.

Yeah, malls in the US at least are really dying in a lot of places.

I stopped into one of the smaller ones near me a few months back, I had maybe an hour to kill before I had to meet someone for dinner and it was close by so I figured I’d walk around for a bit, and it was downright eerie.

There were probably as many vacant spaces as actual stores, and half of the occupied stores were closed at like 5:00 on a weekday. Parts of the mall actually seemed like they only had some of the lights on, half of the escalators were turned off or out of service and there were maybe a couple dozen other people walking around the mall.

There was one part of the mall with no open stores, dim lights, and I didn’t see anyone else around and for a minute it almost felt like I had noclipped into the backrooms.

Can’t speak for OP’s situation, but I live near one of the largest malls in the country, and there’s maybe about a half dozen smaller malls scattered around within about an hour or so.

The big mall is still doing pretty alright, but if you were around maybe about 10-20 years ago, it’s pretty obvious that the crowds are way smaller than they used to be.

The mall used to pretty much be the place to go meet up with friends, spend time walking around hanging out, a lot of times there would be different events going on at the malls, they were always packed Friday nights and weekends, etc.

Now except for maybe a few key days during the holiday season, they’re just not busy.

The smaller malls are almost deserted, lots of empty stores, and some of the spaces are being rented out for kind of weird purposes (I think one of our local politicians- a state representative something, has their office space in a mall) a few of them have closed down entirely.

It really kind of depends on the type of anchor and the intended use

The most common little plastic ones that you’re probably picturing are pretty bad in most cases, but some of the heavier duty ones are pretty damn strong if used properly

I’d tend to chalk that up to user error, if you’re putting enough force on your toilet paper holder to pull it off the wall you’re doing something besides just pulling toilet paper off of it or maybe you installed it with the world’s shittiest drywall anchors

I’ve always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don’t need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it’s not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I’m seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.

Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.

I’ve frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV’s a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It’s actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I’ve ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn’t fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn’t allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I’m pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It’s possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn’t)

I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you’ve ever used.

On the subject of toilets, I can’t think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It’s probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.

Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works

Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.

As part of that, they generally can’t be toll roads, and rest stops can’t be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn’t be competing with local businesses)

There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they’re grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that’s neither here nor there)

HAAAWOOO!

HAAAWOOO!

HAAAWOOO!

Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.

For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.

Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.

Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.

Something you may want to consider is a cell signal booster, cell phones are a bit limited in the size of antenna and how much power they can transmit at because everything has to fit in a neat little rectangle.

But you can get a device to hook up to your car that will retransmit your signal at a higher power. With that you "might* be able to get a signal further out than you normally would.

It would be useful for stuff like this of course but probably also just in general if you’re in an area with spotty service.

I don’t have any particular brand recommendations or anything like that, I think WeBoost caught my eye as a pretty decent-looking option at first glance but I don’t know if they’re actually any good. They’re mostly a product I’m aware exists and I intend to look into more when I have some spare time and money because I camp and hike in areas with spotty reception a lot, but it’s pretty far down my to-do list, so you’re on your own for research right now.

There’s no reason to arrest him, he didn’t break any laws.

However, the NFL isn’t the government, they’re a private organization, they can tell someone that they’re banned from their properties and events just about as easily as you can tell someone that they’re not welcome at your back yard BBQ (as long as they’re not banning them because they belong to a protected class)

They’re probably well within their rights here to ban them just because they don’t like what he did.

However, I can almost guarantee you that with an organization as lawyered-up as the NFL he signed some sort of contact to be a part of the performance where he agreed to some policy or code of conduct or something that says in some way that performers aren’t permitted to go off-script like that, and not only can they decide to ban him for that but they may be able to sue him for breach of contract or something.

Went to a nudist resort with a couple friend last year, it was a great time.

We camped out, I got there first and started setting up camp. I didn’t exactly have a solid plan but I was kind of figuring I’d set up my tent first so I’d have somewhere to leave my clothes, but it was one of those hot muggy days where the second you step outside your clothes are drenched in sweat, so after about a minute of feeling gross and sweaty unloading my car I decided screw it and ditched my clothes and immediately felt so much better.

Also I’m pretty sure that literally everyone hates doing laundry. If you’re not wearing clothes you don’t have anything to wash and put away. It was pretty nice being away for a few days and having basically no laundry to do when I got home except the clothes I wore for the drive.

Also all-around just a very positive experience. A lot of nudists aren’t exactly the kinds of people you’d necessarily want to see naked, I can pretty much guarantee that whatever you don’t like about your body someone there has the same thing or worse on full display. And once you get over the initial sensory overload you pretty quickly set noticing people’s bodies or the fact that they’re naked.

The average hamster lifespan in captivity is usually only something like 1-2 years, this guy lived for like 4.

He was in rough shape towards the end, his fur was falling out, he’d pretty much set up camp in one corner of his cage and rarely left.

Eventually my mom decided to take him to have him put down. I strongly suspect that we may be the only people to ever request that at the local SPCA

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know all of the minute technological or legal details about how and why our systems work the way I do. At the end of the day I’m a user of the systems, and not really privy to all of the technical and policy decisions happening behind the scenes.

I believe that handset gps based location is part of the Next Gen 911 (NG911) standards that are in the process of rolling out. Different agencies and corporations that own and maintain the infrastructure are in different stages of implementing that in different places. I don’t really know what the timetable is on all of that is, if there even is one, I’m genuinely not sure if there’s any set in stone date where everything everywhere must be fully ng911 compliant by then.

The handful of counties around me are definitely in different stages of rolling it out, my dispatch center has had text to 911 capabilities since well before I started there 6 years ago, and I’m pretty sure one of our neighboring agencies only got the ability to handle it within the last 2 years or so. Another neighboring county is or is about to get video capabilities, which we don’t have yet.

I suspect that the current state of the regulations is that new phones must have the ability to send that gps data, but I don’t think it needs to be turned on by default, and I don’t think dispatch centers are required to make use of it yet, but again I’m not sure.

The current state of it where I work is we get it on a lot of our calls but not all. It’s also kind of a hacked together system where it comes through on a web page and not directly integrated into our phone or CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems. I believe the new CAD we’re upgrading to will have it fully integrated, but last I heard that is probably still a couple years away.

Phone networks are kind of a mess, countless different companies, contractors, and different levels of government, have all been working together (or sometimes against each other depending on your point of view) to patch together old legacy systems to the new stuff coming out- copper, fiber, analog, digital, cellular, satellite, VoIP, etc. And different levels of government have more or less funds available to them and allocate those funds differently, so the wheels of government, as they say, turn slowly. I work in a relatively wealthy county with a pretty large population in a highly developed part of the country, so we’re probably towards the leading edge of the new tech rolling out compared to some dispatch center in the backwoods middle of nowhere (I have had to talk to dispatchers all over the country and occasionally even in other countries, there are definitely some with better capabilities than we have, and there are also some where you get the distinct impression that you’re talking to one of two old ladies sitting in a trailer behind the police station sharing a carton of Virginia Slims and entering calls into a computer with a faded sticker proudly declaring that it’s Y2K ready.)

Hanging up will send your info to them and they will call back to make sure there isn’t an emergency.

911 dispatcher here

This will depend a bit on agency policies and technological capabilities as well as what emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone and unable to be shared in an emergency call

At my agency we get a lot of butt dials, our policy for hang ups or open line calls from a cell phone is that as long as we didn’t hear anything suspicious (someone yelling, gunshots, etc) we will usually disregard the call. If we have an open line we’ll listen for about 30 seconds or so and if nothing sounds off we’ll disconnect and continue about our day. If something sounds fishy we’ll stay on the line/call back, and we’ll send police to the area if we have a good location.

There’s a couple exceptions, like certain wifi calling or femtocell setups are treated as being from a landline because we have a solid address, so we’ll always dispatch police unless you stay on the line and confirm that there’s no emergency.

And our discretion comes into play a bit. We might ignore 1 or 2 hang ups from the same number, especially since the calls may not even ring through to the same calltaker so it may not be obvious we’ve gotten multiple calls until we’ve gotten a good handful.

Different agencies policies on that will vary. I know one of our neighboring counties will always send police to the area when they get a hang up whether or not they heard something suspicious.

And as for the information that’s shared, by default all we get is your phone number, carrier, which cell tower it hit off of, and an approximate location based on cell tower triangulation (which is kind of hit or miss, sometimes it’s really accurate, other times it’s basically useless)

If we need to we can contact the phone provider to try to get subscriber info. That can take a while and can be hit or miss too, like if you haven’t updated all your information with them, if you’re on a family plan with other people, or if you’re using a smaller provider that is really just reselling Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T service, it can make it a little hard to accurately track down who actually owns that phone.

If you’ve called recently, we can try to look up your information from priors on your phone number.

If you’ve filled out your emergency/sos info, and enabled it to be shared with us, we can access that, It also often gives us access to a more accurate location for you, but otherwise we only get what you’ve put in there. If you haven’t kept your name, address, emergency contacts, medical info, etc. accurate and up to date there, that’s another stumbling block for us. We can sometimes work backwards from what info is there, if we have your name and age we can try to narrow things down, but if you have a common name it can be hard to tell which 27 year old John Smith is the one who called us.

Do with that what you will, fill out your emergency info or don’t depending on what you’re comfortable sharing with us, consider how it might be used to save your life if you’re, for example, in a car crash and too hurt to speak to us, or how an oppressive government might use it to track you down at a protest (from 911 we can’t just access data on random people’s phones unless they call us, and we can only request a ping on a phone number from your phone company under certain circumstances, and that’s a bit of a process and all it returns is your location based on cell tower triangulation, which again isn’t always very accurate. Police and certainly the feds have a bit more leeway than we do, though I don’t know the extent of that, and if they set up a stingray or similar device I have absolutely no idea what they might be able to access)

I’d like some PC support for HDMI CEC

My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.

My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what’s hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.

I’m aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I’ve been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.

Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.

I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it’s not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.

We need the old timers running the party to step aside. Give up the reigns, retire when they’re able and let younger blood fill their seats, or give their blessings to 3rd parties and choose not to run against them (and preferably without outright endorsing them either so the Republicans have a harder time making the claim that they’re just the same Democrats wearing a different hat, just step aside, choose not to run a candidate, and let the new parties do their thing)

We need younger people to step up. Run for office, call and write to your elected officials, show up to vote, demonstrate in the streets, etc. pay attention to politics (no one like politics except fucking sociopaths, but they’re part of how the world works, trying to ignore them because it’s boring or it makes you mad or whatever has the same kind of energy as pretending gravity doesn’t exist because you don’t like it when you fall and scrape your knees- you’re just going to get hurt even worse if you don’t take those basic forces of the world into account.)

We need to take a step back and agree on a list of priorities. Ask 100 liberals/leftists/democrats what the most important issues are to them and you’re probably going to get 100 different lists. Climate change, LGBTQ rights, wealth inequality, healthcare, police reform, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, homelessness, drug abuse, legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage, foreign policy, domestic surveillance, free speech, corruption, term limits, etc. just to name a few off the very top of my head

And frankly, we need to pare that down to a handful of solid issues that appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and that we can agree that these issues are the most pressing and we must make real progress on right now because there won’t be a later, and we need to agree to suck it up on some of the other issues that need to go on the back-burner for now, especially since those issues don’t have as broad support yet and so trying to bundle them in with our overall policy is just torpedoing our efforts to make any sort of progress at all.

LGBTQ rights for instance, they’re human rights, and they should be a goal that we’re striving for. We also don’t really have the popular support needed to get much done there, often even within our own “liberal” parties the numbers aren’t looking great. We should be proud of what we’ve accomplished and fight tooth and nail to hold onto whatever gains we’ve made, but we may need to walk this back from being a top-of-the-ballot issue and accept that maybe we need to deal with, for example, the climate catastrophe that is happening right fucking now and do whatever we can to prevent world war fucking 3 from breaking out in Europe first.

And we can also claim some pretty significant victories for LGBTQ people if we just avoid framing them as an LGBTQ issue. If you slap an LGBTQ sticker on a law, CHUDs will come out of the woodwork to make up excuses about why it’s bad. But if you play your cards right and avoid their trigger words you might just be able to slip some healthcare, wealth inequality, education, and police reforms through that will both help LGBTQ people now (because a rising tide raises all ships) and pave the way for further advancements down the line (because a better educated populace with less issues of their own won’t feel as much need to make LGBTQ people their scapegoat for every minor inconvenience)

Or if you don’t have the patience or will to do that, the other two options are

1. Accept defeat. You live in maga world now, live by their rules or risk the consequences.

2. Full-on revolution, no half measures, organize fast, hit them hard before they have a chance to do anything about it and rebuild the world better.

I have no desire to live in maga world. I also don’t have any desire to live through what would surely be bloody revolution with no guarantees that the right people will come out on top, so I am really hoping people get the hell on board with plan A.