Charles U. Farley

They/them. Queer, neurospicy GenX parent of two kids living in #Pittsburgh #Pennsylvania USA.

Boost = endorsement. Please have a profile and some posts and read my pinned posts before requesting to follow.

#anarchism #retrocomputing #amateurradio #space #electronics #c64 #rc2014 #zig

#nobot (including any unsolicited bot interaction) #noarchive #noindex #noscrape #nobridge #noAI

Avatar alt text: A pixel art front view of a tracked robot in gray on blue with black outlines. It shows the width of the robot as 1.0m. From the game "Hacker II".
Header image alt text: A screenshot from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). It shows a ceiling-mounted multi-sided scrolling text display with two lines. The top line sys "WARN" and the second line says "THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM" scrolling across the two sides that are in view

Public Key

npub1a36n5u2z95sv8jnmdmeusrf7t9nrvlweferv0xf2at0fpmaflggqef07t5

NIP-05 Address

freakazoid_at_retro.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswcaf6w9pz6gxrefakau7gp5l9je3k0hv5u3k8ny4w4h5sa75l5yqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aq6metjw

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

relay.primal.net

Author Public Key

npub1a36n5u2z95sv8jnmdmeusrf7t9nrvlweferv0xf2at0fpmaflggqef07t5

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Published at

2024-09-09T12:03:17Z

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0 Metadata

Event JSON

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Last Notes

2024-09-18 17:24:45

Companies outsourced critical functions like logs, monitoring, and paging, because they thought it would be cheaper. Meanwhile, once the outsourcing companies had hoovered up all the expertise in how to do those things, they started jacking up prices. And now these companies are paying the much larger but harder to measure costs that come from being stingy with your logs and metrics and making people jump through hoops to get necessary PagerDuty access.
Like with knowledge of how to build datacenters and operate on-prem servers, this expertise was built over decades. It will take decades to get it back. Tech as we know it seems unlikely to survive the mistake of outsourcing business-critical functions to companies that suffer far lower consequences than their customers when they fuck up.

2024-09-18 14:50:32

I've posted about this before, but it bears repeating, and Bread and Circuses' post about melting glaciers in central Asia reminded me of it. Extreme weather gets a lot of attention, but it's not how climate change is going to kill billions and cause the collapse of civilization. It's water.
The thing that first made me realizing this was seeing this bit at the end of The Big Short and wondering what it meant by "investing in water". It turns out Burry, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, has been investing in farmland that has secure access to water, because trying to contain, transport, and sell water is not only more expensive for a lower-value commodity, but brings up images from the movie Solarbabies in people's minds. Because, you know, so many people have seen & remember Solarbabies. (They literally cover the oceans to control people, but in reality they won't need to do that; climate change is making water scarce for us.)
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453043-the-big-short-michael-burry-buys-farmland-hand-over-fist
https://retro.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/159/082/003/494/409/original/3396dc9153296d31.png

2024-09-18 14:28:23

Apparently I'd already blocked "fedilore". Didn't even bother to put a note on their profile because their profile itself raises enough red flags that it seemed pointless.

2024-09-17 15:11:06

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Or EVs for that matter. AIUI the safety mechanisms on lithium ion batteries are active, involving microcontrollers. Are there EVs where the microcontroller that protects the batteries from overcharging or rapid discharge are connected to the CAN bus? Or the battery heating and cooling system?

2024-09-17 14:59:45

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This article says the pagers were "hacked and remotely detonated", which implied a vulnerability in the pagers themselves. A vulnerability which allowed seriously injuring the user.
A vulnerability that could exist in American and European pagers being used by emergency personnel. Or even cellphones, which have much larger batteries. Or laptops.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/dozens-of-hezbollah-members-wounded-after-pagers-explode-in-lebanon

2024-09-17 14:55:57

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Can someone explain how pagers can explode? Did someone infiltrate the supply chain and implant tiny bombs in them, or is there some remote attack that can cause their batteries to explode?

2024-09-17 14:51:59

Exploding pagers? WTF?

2024-09-16 14:41:22

It's time to stop kidding ourselves that wealthy nations have no plan to deal with climate change. They absolutely have a plan: eugenics and warfare.

2024-09-16 14:18:46

Cassandra, but everyone believes her and just doesn't care.

2024-09-14 17:29:41

In the grand scheme of things, there are only low-information voters. Nobody has enough information to choose a politician.
Simple solution: no politicians.

2024-09-14 16:35:16

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Damn, only 2321 in total even including those that require multiple code points. I don't even remember why I thought there were more than that.
Base 921 encodes 256 bits in 26 emojis...

2024-09-14 16:35:16

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Damn, only 2321 in total even including those that require multiple code points. I don't even remember why I thought there were more than that.
Base 921 encodes 256 bits in 26 emojis...

2024-09-14 16:22:14

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Hah, I'd missed that you said secret key. I seem to recall that was the original idea behind emoji-based codes, though they also look cool.
I ran a script over https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/16.0/emoji-sequences.txt and only got 1185 that don't require 2 codepoints, so you're right. I did test with one codepoint sequence and confirmed it only uses a single character of my Mastodon character limit, so I may still publish an implementation just for fun.

2024-09-14 16:22:14

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2024-09-14 15:47:39

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Hmm. If we assume bigint math is available, we could use 3184 of the emoji and encode your public key with only 22 emoji :D

2024-09-14 15:41:46

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Encoding as emoji is funny, because the UTF8 ends up being 4x as many bytes as the original key, so 128 in this case, but because social media limits the number of characters and not the number of UTF8 bytes, it uses only 32 bytes of your character limit, less than hex or base64 would even though both of those would use less space in the database, in RAM, and on the wire.

2024-09-12 20:08:30

This is the intent of this practice. It's the same as looking the other way when kids get bullied. Institutionalized schooling is about normalization, about punishing those who are different. That's why we all change classes at the bell, sit at desks in nice neat little rows, are assigned homework, expected to be quiet and not move around. There is no way to fix such an institution, because it's not broken. It's working exactly as designed.
https://mas.to/@KatyElphinstone/113122892190450176

2024-09-09 17:25:37

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And that's the pattern, right: we have people who are just constantly being harassed on here, so "white moderates" can just wait until they do something in their anger that they can convince other white moderates is beyond the pale, and then they pounce.
The sort of character assassination Eris's mob are engaging in is exactly the sort of thing the fascists do to Black and Brown people who get killed by cops in the US. Stuff anyone would do if treated the same way. Often milder stuff. You basically have to be *perfect* or whatever is done to you is considered justified.

2024-09-09 17:19:29

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I mean, it's certainly not something I would do. But that's different from deliberately interpreting it as a serious threat when you know damn well it's not, and calling for calling the feds.

2024-09-09 17:12:20

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I don't really have a problem with death threats against Nazis. And to whatever extent Eris is not literally wearing a Swastika armband (though she is on a freeze peach instance that just happens to be OK with trans people as long as they're white and don't defend Brown or Black people) the person making the alleged threat is also Brown so when you start nitpicking about it it's just tone policing. And of course calling the cops on a Brown person is very likely to result in their death, so it's *also* a death threat by kadams, on top of the tone policing.

2024-09-09 16:52:18

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It was the most recent set of posts when I just looked, though I was looking through my own instance, so I may not have gotten a complete picture of his timeline.

2024-09-09 15:34:08

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Incidentally, Eris and other users on her new instance are bragging about having been defederated by mastodon.art for hosting bigots. So, that's who kabrams is defending against the Black people she's harrassed just because they didn't have the right tone when complaining about her harassment.

2024-09-09 15:26:24

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Also the FBI according to packetcat, though I didn't see that in my quick skim.
It's the same old story: a few white trans people start a dogpile, confused white "allies" jump on, a bunch of people's true colors shine through.

2024-09-09 15:24:09

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Go read kabrams's timeline, telling people to report the Black admin of tenforward.social to the RCMP for mentioning AK-47s in the context of one of the most notorious bigots in the Fediverse, Eris, whom he completely fails to mention in his "receipts".

2024-09-09 14:50:59

Reduced mufos on union.place to just one in preparation for possible defederation or swatting the whole instance.
Dear union.place folks: did you know your admin is a bootlicker who believes in calling the FBI on people?

2024-09-09 13:39:45

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I don't know why people are so incapable of seeing that the fact that the men who wrote "we hold these truths to be self evident" owned slaves and went on to create a state that protected slave ownership. Clearly they did not mean what they wrote at all. You will always fail if you try to extend protections meant only for property-owning men to all humans, because those protections literally depend on the subjugation of others. There's no patch that can fix that. It needs to be thrown in the dumpster and then nuked from orbit.

2024-09-09 13:25:08

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Or you can look at it another way: by the European nation-state's own creation myth, the job of a state is to protect human rights. No state does that, therefore there are no states.

2024-09-09 13:23:26

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"Rights" in general are just part of the creation myth of modern (European) nation-states. A replacement for the divine right of kings that's no less superstitious.

2024-09-09 13:22:05

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Something that's not protected for all human beings can't be called a human right. Since no state intervenes on behalf of "unlawful combatants", no state recognizes human rights. Or they pick and choose who they consider to be human. Same thing.

2024-09-09 13:02:56

Have you ever thought about why the Geneva Conventions don't protect "unlawful combatants", and why a designation even exists that excludes someone from all human rights protections?

2024-09-09 12:03:13

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Write protect it and dd all the data off to another device to try to reconstruct the filesystem on.

2024-09-06 11:30:10

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What if it's not a technical reason? Intel is crashing and burning and only makes their own CPUs (though through external foundries lately) while ARM is a bunch of IP cores made by multiple companies. Google and Facebook have both been trying to get away from Intel for over a decade to give them better leverage on pricing and features.
The real question is why they stuck with Intel for so long. In the server space it was because nobody came close on dual socket, which companies wanted for density.
As for why now, I think it's just because Intel has been seriously stumbling lately due to poor leadership and some bad luck. AMD has caught back up and nVidia is doing really well.

2024-09-05 13:56:11

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The US constitution says it does not enumerate people's rights, but if the framers really intended that, they should not have listed rights at all. Instead, they should have drawn much clearer boundaries around the powers of the government.
Just truncate the First Amendment to its first five words.

2024-09-05 13:43:09

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The important concept isn't even "religion" but tradition. But a country founded on genocide certainly wasn't going to include protection of anyone's traditions but white people's in its constitution. And they always conveniently defined "religion" to exclude anything inconvenient to them. because religion is a fake concept.

2024-09-05 13:37:45

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My religion is anarchism, therefore the existence of government violates my religious freedom.

2024-09-05 13:23:09

I don't believe in "religious freedom" as a separate concept from freedom generally, or even as a category of freedom. Because I don't believe you can separate "religious" beliefs from any other deeply held belief. The only reason to do that is if you're trying to privilege a specific set of beliefs to empower specific hierarchies.
In other words, "religious freedom" is not just nonsensical but a contradiction in terms.

2024-09-04 18:45:08

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It's because of proliferation fears, which for whatever reason the US federal government seems obsessed about. There have been a bunch of experiments like the Integral Fast Reactor, but they keep shutting them down because they depend on reprocessing during which someone could hypothetically (but probably not actually) extract plutonium. It's baffling.
But you're right, the volume of waste is *tiny*. Tiny enough that so far we've been able to just store it all on site at nuclear power plants. The long term storage is mostly just so we don't have to manage it forever. It just seems silly when we can convert all the long-lived waste into inert stuff and short-lived waste by sticking it in a fast reactor.

2024-09-04 18:26:14

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From an engineering and science perspective, I'm strongly pro nuclear power. But I've become convinced that governments have neither the ability nor the incentive to do it safely or in a way that won't wreck the planet. In the US they're adamant about a once-through fuel cycle and then burying the waste to become the problem of the next thousand generations.
Honestly I hold little hope for fusion as well. At best it appears a single power plant will need to be way too large, which based on our history of large projects means decades to build and massive cost overruns such that the electricity is expensive and comes too late to have enough impact.
[@beka_valentine](https://kolektiva.social/@beka_valentine )

2024-09-02 13:05:15

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We need as much video as possible of people doing this, preferably with license plates, to show that regardless of Tesla's claims their customers still believe they do not have to pay attention.

2024-09-01 16:30:05

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https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/31/why-biden-plan-to-boost-inner-cities-risks-an-epic-fail-00176926

2024-09-01 15:30:24

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I 100% agree. So we must judge them based on the impact of their actions. And the impact of the Democrats' actions so far has been genocide, more CO2 emissions, 2 new wars and the closest we've come to nuclear annihilation since the Cold War ended, more cars, and more resource consumption. Their "green tech revolution" is very heavily biased toward EVs.
Biden's attempt to tear down inner city freeways is laudable, but it's also not making much progress.
@npub12ru…l44y @npub1jf6…jumu

2024-08-31 23:43:31

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But that means the Democrats obviously can't be engaging in protectionism to get votes, since people don't want it. They must be doing it for the money.

2024-08-31 15:44:14

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I agree with that. But we don't. "The economy" is issue number one on voters' priority list by far, and climate change is #18, well below immigration. So unless policies can show a meaningful improvement to the economy over the span of a term, politicians get voted out.
The only way things are going to change in even the most perfect democracy is if voters' priorities change. And that's probably going to take multiple catastrophes clearly linked to climate change. And I mean big ones, because we're incredibly good at just adapting to smaller ones.

2024-08-30 17:07:32

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There's basically no way to claim that they're doing it to fuck us over without admitting that EVs have nothing to do with protecting the environment. Because if they did (and the Democrats actually cared about protecting the environment) they'd be celebrating that shit.

2024-08-29 12:14:43

Capitalism will only ever tolerate UBI as a means of control. Keep us quiet and passive for fear of being disqualified. Keep the threat of houselessness looming over our heads.

2024-08-24 21:49:59

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I think the question you're really asking is why the only radical politics embraced by mainstream political parties is fascism. The answer is because fascism is the only radical politics capitalism will allow.
@npub1jf6…jumu

2024-08-24 21:31:12

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I don't think most people really care that much about right vs left; they just want populists.

2024-08-24 20:08:36

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As you said, the Tea Party kept buying you dinner. There was a well-funded, nationwide effort to coöpt Occupy. And when you feel like you need numbers on your side it can be hard to say no to people just because they don't share exactly the same goals and methods as you.
But it wasn't just coöption; plenty of Bernie supporters ended up voting for Trump, because they "just wanted change". Probably some significant lessons from Weimar Germany there. The Germans "just wanted change" too.

2024-08-24 19:32:04

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Oh, sure, I'm not saying no good came out of it, just that while people knew they were dissatisfied with the status quo, they didn't seem to have much idea what they were advocating FOR, and the result was the same thing we keep getting with every red/brown alliance: red gets suppressed because they're always seen by the capitalists as the greater threat, so brown ends up coming out on top.

2024-08-24 19:18:10

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One can draw a straight line from Occupy to Trump, and not just as "backlash". The most alt-right person I've ever met is Justine Tunney, who created the Twitter handle and domain they used. 4 years later she petitioned the US government to appoint Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/occupy-wall-street-10-year-anniversry-1227856/
https://fortune.com/2016/03/23/occupy-wall-street-donald-trump-rise/

2024-08-16 14:38:15

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It's a stroke of genius that they've convinced us that we're "worthless" if we don't work. Even that word is charged: why are we measured by what we're "worth" by a standard set by people we don't give a shit about?
So that's gotta be the first step in breaking the cycle: realizing your value doesn't come from what you can produce.

2024-08-16 14:27:25

The effectiveness of "retail therapy* creates a vicious cycle:
1. Boss makes you feel like shit
2. You buy stuff to make you feel better
3. You have to work more to be able to afford the stuff from step 2
4. Go to step 1

2024-08-13 16:59:37

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LOL turns out I know the admin, and yes, the rules will be enforced.

2024-08-13 16:05:06

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I guess we'll see if mstdn.plus enforce their own rules. This is the first time I've seen someone from there, and it's never a good sign when the first interaction with an instance is a fucktard like that.

2024-08-02 19:29:28

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Yep, mostly due to annoying boosts at this point, though occasionally I go through all follows on a poorly moderated instance and soft-block folks whose posts/boosts I don't find especially interesting, with varying degrees of strictness depending on how bad the instance is. I've ended every day for the past week or so with fewer followers than I started with.

2024-08-02 17:56:33

AI will not successfully predict crimes. At best, it will identify people the government can successfully convict of crimes.
The only reason the "justice" system isn't way worse than it is is because investigators mostly can't cast a very big net, which increases the probability that, if they prosecute someone, they committed the crime. AI throws that out the window, allowing them to cast a net over the entire population. We can easily end up with a situation where the actual probability a defendant committed a crime is 1% or less, because all prosecutors care about is convictions, not whether the person convicted actually did the crime. And that's what "justice AI" will be trained to produce.

2024-08-02 16:40:48

I wonder if my number of follows will bottom out somewhere around Dunbar's number?

2024-08-01 19:44:58

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I'm not sure I understand the question. I just meant that the larger the instance is the less likely it is everyone is going to agree on the right set of people/instances to block, so they're more likely to pick conservative or no lists. I was assuming rational admins. The right thing to do with shit admins is to name and shame and get people to move off. Something I think we do far too little of given how much damage those instances are able to do as people continue to sign up unaware of the history.
This is also why I say never invite anyone to "Mastodon" or "the Fediverse" but to a specific instance or a small number of choices. The average expected experience if they just pick an instance off joinmastodon.org is bad, and one should only subject people they dislike to that.
@npub1pyz…ew64

2024-08-01 18:59:19

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A blocklist doesn't even need to be applied instance-wide. I imagine especially large instances would only want to use very conservative blocklists if they use any at all.
@npub1pyz…ew64

2024-08-01 17:13:25

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As predicted by Lawnmower Man.

2024-08-01 16:41:54

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So far we've tended to have unilaterally maintained lists, and a lot of the people stepping up for governance roles seem more interested in attention than in actually doing the hard work of governance. Those who are doing a good job often get little to no thanks for it, because when they're doing a good job we don't even notice they're there. How many instances do we never hear about because their admins take care of problems right away, or don't get many problems because they decided early on that open signups are a bad idea?

2024-08-01 16:05:41

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The way to avoid having a shared blocklist "get polluted by the politics of its maintainers" is for it to have transparent policies, including how to get on and how to get off. The reason people or instances are listed needs to be clear as well. There needs to be a clear appeals process.
This all seems obvious to me. It also seems obvious to me that the reason it seems non-obvious to others is that they don't actually care much about solving the problem. They'd rather just throw up their hands and talk about how complicated and hard it is.
It's not complicated and hard. You just have to stop comparing real solutions to these non-existent "perfect" solutions that exist only in your head, like "heuristics". I have done this for a living, from being the abuse administrator for a nationwide ISP to Second Life to Facebook. It's waaaay easier to moderate when you are just tweaking heuristics and shadow-banning people in ways they can barely even detect, can't prove, and can't appeal. And you'll probably get away with it if you have a billion users. But it can never work here. And honestly it doesn't actually "work" for Facebook, because it's unethical.
Real moderation doesn't scale very well. It requires a moderator per 100 users or something around that. We have that. We just need to accept that the Fediverse runs on trust and that that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

2024-08-01 15:55:03

Was going to boost this, but Jerry seems to be sort of implying that Black people are getting harassed because their instance admins aren't doing a good enough job, and he only mentions the downsides of shared blocklists. Good effort, but I'll stick with what Black people are saying.
https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/112887084476486558

2024-08-01 14:37:37

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Still not voting because my sibling and I have very different types. She likes bald men with beards and big noses.

2024-08-01 01:02:12

Dear web site developers:
the opposite of "yes" is "no". Not "not now". Not "maybe later".
Learn some fucking English.

2024-06-19 12:00:23

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(I'm going by the author's original description of the bot, but I haven't found it since noticing this error.)

2024-06-19 11:58:42

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My understanding is that it's using wet bulb temperature, which it's calculating from dry bulb temperature and relative humidity. In my reply I confused wet bulb temperature and dew point (edit: oh wait I ended up not mentioning that), but the post gives a relative humidity of 84%, which doesn't appear to be close to accurate anywhere around there.

2024-06-18 15:49:23

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Open-Meteo is showing a humidity of 11% there right now, and I would think this would make the news if it were accurate. I think your humidity source may be inaccurate for at least some locations.

2024-06-15 18:22:41

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Not go to jail today, or directly for making the post, maybe. Just suddenly find it hard to find a job, get a loan, graduate from college, etc. We're already seeing the full machinery that was applied during the McCarthy era being revved back up again to go after people who question the status quo.
@npub1g8l…vwtm

2024-06-09 18:49:33

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More than more than complicit. Israel is an American/British colony.
@npub1alt…k00h @npub1058…8yln @npub1dpj…222w

2024-05-29 20:09:47

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I ask that you consider the possibility that we have already passed the point where reform is no longer possible. We can't even get Biden to stop materially supporting a genocide. If we can't do that in Biden term 1, why would we when he doesn't have to worry about reelection?
@npub1vju…zzwd @npub1dap…2uyr @npub1dyw…2hmh @npub1cj0…u8ja @npub1snp…59h3

2024-05-29 17:20:36

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As others are telling you, it does not. If it did, I would expect it to be people in less privileged positions than yours defending incrementalism. But strangely it's almost entirely old rich white dudes.
I'm also an old rich white dude, and I can see clearly that it's not working. The world is cooking, we're on the verge of WWIII, millions are starving worldwide, the US is facilitating a genocide, and the major American parties are virtually indistinguishable from one another, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and immigration policy.
I used to totally buy into the hype that capitalism and "liberal" "democracy" were great for everyone. That's been gradually changing for a while now, but it was really watching Biden adopt a bunch of policies Democrats had been vilifying Trump for, then hearing crickets from Democrats, was really the last straw.
Then, after October 7, at the behest of a Zionist (now former) friend, I started researching Israel's history. Then I started researching the US's (and other western countries) involvement in oppression around the world.
We aren't the good guys. We're the bad guys. We aren't interested in helping anyone unless it ultimately helps us. And if they have something we want and their government doesn't play ball, we just overthrow their government and install our own. We don't care about "democracy". We tolerate it as long as it benefits us. Otherwise we're perfectly happy to play ball with dictatorships. And we'll install one if necessary.
There's no plan for climate change. It's all about maximizing profit opportunities. Which is why we're focusing on EVs and useless "carbon capture" projects and not public transportation and high speed rail. Our system *cannot* produce those things. No amount of incremental reform will get us there. I know because I've been being told it would since I was a child, and we're no closer today than we were then.
You want to think that you got where you are be cause you deserve it. That's a powerful motivator. You don't deserve it. I don't deserve it. We got lucky. We were born in the right place at the right time, to the right parents. Maybe we worked hard, but not harder than an awful lot of people who are much worse off than we are.
@npub1dap…2uyr @npub1cj0…u8ja @npub1snp…59h3 @npub1058…8yln

2024-05-29 16:57:07

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FOR YOU.
@npub1dap…2uyr @npub1cj0…u8ja @npub1snp…59h3 @npub1058…8yln

2024-05-29 16:49:54

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Good thing we had an old white man to give his opinion! I sure don't hear enough old white man opinions! Especially from old white men who were privileged enough to go to medical school!
OF COURSE you favor incremental change! Heaven forbid we should disrupt your cushy old white doctor life so people who aren't as privileged can have better lives today instead of waiting for maybe their great great grandchildren to have better lives!
JFC go back to Twitter. And take your whole fucking instance with you.
@npub1dap…2uyr @npub1cj0…u8ja @npub1snp…59h3 @npub1058…8yln

2024-05-29 14:22:26

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This is why I give no credit at all to anything that's not closing down profitable fossil fuel extraction operations. More solar panels just means more energy that will get used. Renewables can't displace fossil fuels unless we stop digging up fossil fuels, and there is no commitment or plan to do that.

2024-04-01 19:49:26

Netanyahu is apparently following through with his threat to shut down Al Jazeera in Israel, at least temporarily, because "national security".
The US, meanwhile is "continuing to make clear the importance of a free press" (paraphrasing, but pretty close to the original wording). Real strong words there, land-of-the-free.
History will remember what we did here, and it will not look kindly on us.
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-04-01-24/index.html
https://retro.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/197/680/468/923/825/original/307e033c95fae3d4.png