If the only place you are seeing this sort of behavior is Reddit, it’s not worth worrying about. If you are so obsessed with what other people are doing on Reddit that you feel the need to ask about it on Reddit/Lemmy, it’s probably time turn off your devices and go touch grass. Always remember the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with pseudo-anominity say a lot of stupid stuff.

You’re one of those folks who are too stupid to understand probabilities and what polls are actually saying, aren’t you?
The polls in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election were actually pretty good. The final aggregate error was right around 3.4 points [1]

Anyone who suggested that there was a clear favorite was lying about what the polls said. That’s not a failing of the polls, its a failing of the media reporting on the polls. Sure, there were some particular, individual outliers. The Anne Seltzer poll comes to mind. But, credit where it’s due, Seltzer published an outlier poll, because that was the outcome of the poll based on then methodology she had been using for a long time. Like with scientists publishing null results, it’s actually really important that such things are published and not hidden, but they are usually hidden.

Go talk to people in the real world, instead of reading articles written by fellow shut-ins, and realize that the narrative is FAR different for the average person.

Then plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. And quite the opposite here, if you’re out talking to people within your own social bubble, you’re far more likely to get a warped view of reality. This is one of the reasons polling is so hard, getting a truly representative sample of the population is hard. It is also likely a reason polls keep underestimating Trump. People with low social trust seem to favor Trump, and those same people are very hard to poll. They don’t often pick up the phone and often aren’t willing to divulge their political choices to strangers on the phone. So ya, expecting the polls to “miss” by 3-5 points, underestimating Republicans isn’t all that out of line.

My prediction is the Dems will pick up just barely enough seats to take back control of the House. Not a snowballs chance in hell of taking back the Senate.

This is funny, because this is very much an opinion which will have been informed by polling. It’s also what most analysis are coming up with:

• House
• Senate

Articles like the one posted by the OP are just pure hopium. Dems may make some gains this year, but a rational analysis of the current polling data tells a bleak story. They might get the House, the Senate is basically out of reach.

Large companies are already heavily involved in Linux. Based on this data some of the biggest contributors this year were Meta and Google. Both companies are at the forefront of enshitification of the internet, but they built their mountains of shit on a foundation of Linux.

I’ll extend the truffle hate to all mushrooms. If I wanted food covered in fungus, I would have waited for it to start rotting.

Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire but I don’t know how that could work.

I doubt this would work. Financially, my family is towards the middle of that chart now. We were lower when we had our first kid and only a bit improved when we had our second. And honestly, it was pretty touch and go whether or not we would have the second. Our first was a handful as a baby and it left us wondering if we could handle a second. Thankfully, he calmed down a lot (or we just got used to the new normal) by the time he was pushing 18 months. After we had the second one though, I fully embraced the “cut my nuts off” solution to birth control (vasectomy). I don’t regret that choice at all. None of that was ever about finances. It was simply about the fact that raising children is hard and takes a lot of time.

Ultimately, I think the decline in birth rates isn’t about finances or selfishness, it’s just a change in social norms. Society has spent decades training people to the “nuclear family”. Movies, TV, and other media has pushed the “2 kids and 1.5 dogs in a home in the suburbs” for so long, that people internalized it. So, folks who do want to have kids shoot for that. Having 4 or 5 kids is now seen as an oddity, rather than the norm.

There is also a much better acceptance of women as something other than a walking womb to be filled. We no longer look at an unmarried woman in her 20’s or 30’s as some sort of spinster to be shunned. Sure, negative stereotypes still exist (e.g. Crazy cat lady); but, it’s much rarer for fathers to be selling off their 16 year old daughters to 40 or 50 year old men as child brides to be kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for the next 30+ years of their life. Women are expected to have full lives now, which may or may not involve raising children. As one might expect, many have taken full advantage of that and simply chose to not have any. This move from what amounts to sexual slavery to being treated as an actual person is going to mean there are fewer women having children and many of them delaying until they are actually old enough to make an informed decision about it.

Depending on which version of Sleeping Beauty you’re reading, this isn’t that far off.

I’m not sure if they have tried a crossbow on the breastplate or brigandine. I do know Tod Cutler has, in the past, created a crossbow specifically to mimic the longbow Joe Gibbs shoots. So, my bet would be on it being pretty similar. At the end of the day, armor really did work and worked well. There is a reason it stuck around so long in history. Even to the point of firearms showing up. Some armor could stop early muskets.

Replace the screen, maybe? And now you have an extra laptop.

Funny enough, they tested something similar. They got a modified compound bow to push the same archer and he shot a replica 15th century breast plate. He also used a 70 pound compound bow to shoot the breastplate several times.

It’s really a lot more in depth and interesting. In this one, they shot a lot of arrows against a target in brigandine, mail, and arming doublet with arm armor and gauntlets. Thanks to the volume of arrows shot, there were hits on basically every bit of it, including one hit to a eye slit in the salet.

Sadly, yes a lot of organizations didn’t get the memo. But this really is the current guidance. In NIST 800-63B Section 5.1.1.2:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

I deal with this sort of thing pretty regularly for the company I work for. We get threat intelligence from several vendors when they see our users show up in “dumps”. Basically, threat actors will package up stolen credentials in a large zip file and make that available (usually via bittorrent) for anyone to download. Security vendors (e.g. Mandiant, which Google bought) download those dumps and search for accounts associated with their customers and send out these warnings when they find one. On the customer side, if the breach was recent we’ll force a password reset and warn the user about the breached password, with a recommendation to change their password on the affected site and also change any passwords which might be similar elsewhere.

Why do we force the password reset, even when it wasn’t the account for our business which was breached?
There’s a couple reasons for this. First off, people still reuse passwords all the fucking time. Maybe this victim didn’t, but we have no good way validate that. Second, even without direct reuse, folks like to have one main password that they apply slight variations to. They might use “Hunter 42!” at one site and then “Hunter 69*” at another. This isn’t smart, attackers know you do this and they have scripts to check for this. Lastly, if an organization is following the latest NIST guidance, you’re not changing your password on a regular cadence anymore. With that is the expectation that passwords will be rotated when there is a reason to suspect the credentials are compromised. Ya it’s annoying, but that’s part of the trade-off for not having to rotate passwords every six months, we pull the trigger faster on forced rotations now.

If you get one of these, consider it a good time to think about how you come up with and store passwords. If you are re-using passwords, please turn off your computer/device and don’t come back to the internet until you have thought about what you have done. If you aren’t already using one, please consider a password vault (BitWarden or KeePassXC make great, free choices). These will both help you create strong passwords and also alleviate the need to memorize them. Just create a strong master passphrase for the vault, let it generate the rest of your passwords as unique, long (12+ character) random junk, and stop trying to memorize them (with the exception of your primary email account, that gets a memorized passphrase).

Ya, I actually run both uBlock Origin and NoScript in my browser on my phone and personal machine (desktop). On my work laptop, those are a no-go. So, I get the full ads experience on my work machine when traveling.

I run Pi-Hole in a docker container on my server. I never saw the point in having a dedicated bit of hardware for it.
That said, I don’t understand how people use the internet without one. The times I have had to travel for work, trying to do anything on the internet reminded me of the bad old days of the '90s with pop-ups and flashing banners enticing me to punch the monkey. It’s just sad to see one of the greatest communications platforms we have ever created reduced to a fire-hose of ads.

Go for it. It’s already broke, even if you make the problem worse, it won’t functionally change what you are planning to do with it (throw it away). Do be careful around any capacitors, @[email protected] made a very good point about discharging them carefully. I took a hit off a capacitor for the flash in a disposable camera some years ago and was certainly shocking.

This sort of thing is just awesome. I really wish there was more information on repairing these sorts of electronics out there and accessible to non-electricians. I do get that sometimes it really does take someone with a lot of specialized knowledge and training to troubleshoot and fix things like this. But, even basic, “look for X and try Y” type stuff for us plebes to make the attempt. Sure, we’ll fail as often as we succeed, but even that would save a lot of electronics from the scrapheap.

Fixed my monitor rather than tossing more e-waste in the landfill. Replaced a couple blown caps and it’s running like a champ again.

Sorry about rolling that grenade under your bunk Mr. Secretary, GenAI told me to do it.

Those just invent new frameworks every six months which everyone should totally use this new framework, for reasons. Though, maybe that’s just JavaScript.

Ya, he’s not gonna be found “safe”. The last few nights have been well below freezing in much of Virginia. With a gun and a lack of cold weather gear, there’s not a lot of safe outcomes available. Though I’d guess he hasn’t noticed the drop in temperature.