Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.

Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I’ll take the crypto.

Then get yourself a basic black & white laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good for that. The cartridges don’t expire and it’ll be ready instantly when you need it, whether that’s tomorrow or next year.

Here’s one for $120

And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.

IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.

It’s a good theory, but why were they shooting at civilian cars then?

I think your theory may make more sense than most (explains the abductions) but it still mostly seems nonsensical.

I think a broad look at Israel’s policies is long overdue in a few areas.
But this action virtually guarantees that won’t happen.

Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.

I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.

There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.

In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…

Nice in concept.

In practice this is useless- a $150k fine when removing the satellite will someday cost millions.

It’s also worth noting that de-orbiting was never the plan here. Geosynchronous satellites are too far up to make that practical- at 22,000 mi altitude, the amount of delta-v necessary for a deorbit is gigantic. So instead the satellite ‘boosts’ up to a ‘graveyard’ orbit about 300km above the geosynchronous ring.
Dish only boosted it 122km above the geosynchronous ring. Thus the fine. In practice this satellite will probably cause nobody any problems.

Ah how three mighty have fallen.
I remember the days when Google was optimizing their page to save 1/10th of a second of load time, when they publicly stated their goal was to get people off of Google as quickly as possible and on to whatever they were looking for. That was back in the ‘don’t be evil’ days. Those days appear to be long gone.

Just updated a Windows 7 box to Windows 10 the other day. So apparently this only applies to Windows 11. No idea if it lets you use Windows 10 as a stepping stone between 7 and 11 but don’t care. I have no plans to use Windows 11 anywhere anytime soon, so as far as I’m concerned if this means it will stop nagging me to upgrade, so much the better.

Interesting. Do you have any sources on this or more reading material behind it? I have yet to really see any things suggesting utilities are asking to do CapEx on infrastructure improvements but are being told no.

Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.

Use a bidet. The idea sounds weird- a toilet that sprays water up your ass. I wasn’t sure it was for me. Then I tried it. Holy fuck game changer. FULLY clean EVERY time.
But yeah, sitting down. Finish the dump, run the bidet, then wipe to dry, all while sitting.

Of course it is.

We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.

Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?

This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.

The key is make them easily removable.

If it’s ‘removable’ but it requires heating the edges of the phone up to 120F and then prying apart a sheet of hair-thin glass without breaking it, then most people won’t bother.

If it’s 4 Philips head screws then you’ll find a lot more people doing it.

Unfortunately, the economics for device manufacturers are clearly in the adhesive category- cheaper to assemble, and they’d rather a user buy a new device than service the old one so they DGAF how hard it is to service.

The only exception is companies like Fairphone catering to a niche audience of nerds who value repairability. Most people don’t even consider how hard something is to fix when buying it.

Sadly I think legislation is the only way to fix this. You have to legislate either a. that the battery be removable and replaceable without tools or ‘with standard fasteners and not adhesive’ or something like that.

The only way to really fix this is to stop gluing phones together.

Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn’t store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn’t have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.

However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.