Why YSK: If you violate the rules, you and/or your posts may be removed.

First I would like to state that I have avoided changing the rules as I felt my role as the replacement mod was to step in and keep the community going as is. I didn't start this community, it's not mine, it's ours. After giving it some time I feel these two changes are important for moderation and my personal sanity.

The new rules are as follows:

Rule 12- Linking directly to a video as a source is not acceptable.

The reason I have added 12 is because overwhelmingly posts linking directly to videos violate one or more rules. They are always low effort and bring down the quality of posts in the community. This saves you having to watch the video to report it, and saves me having to watch the video to remove it.

Rule 13- If you file a report, include what specific rule is being violated and how.

I have made this a rule because of an annoying minority that spam their apps "violates community rules" button and then argue with me when i ask them to explain the rules violation in their reports. This text was already included at the bottom of the sidebar, but I have promoted it to an official rule for those annoying few.

web.archive.org (no paywall)

via

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed.

I bought pumpkin pie spice because I couldn't find pumpkin spice. I made a pumpkin latte last night.

I made a simple recipe of oatmeal, pumpkin pie spice,milk and honey. It came out alright all the flavor was in certain chunks of the oatmeal. Need to brainstorm on how to distribute the flavor. Probably need to stir well

This is what the outcome of my first pumpkin pie spice cereal

Example: using the invidious RSS feature for YouTube channels instead of subscribing. RSS also works with Nitter.

I have two previously torn meniscuses and a torn patellar tendon. I don't run a ton (my workout program does agility training for cardio), but I can just decide to go run a sub 30m 5k with no problems.

It definitely wasn't always this way. I used to have to tap after 10 minutes due to the knee pain. Until one day I thought, "Maybe I'm doing something wrong," so I did some research.

Turns out I was doing something everything wrong. I was running with the same form I used for walking, which is a heel to toe movement, and taking similar strides. This is actually the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

The first mistake I was making is the long steps. When running, your goal should be to never let your feet extend more than an inch or so further forward than your hips. Walking is more of a controlled fall, but with running you're propelling yourself forward.

The second mistake I was making is fully straightening my knees. Your knees should always be bent a little bit. And the third was landing on my heel.

When running, you want your ankles and knees to act like a spring. The ball of your foot should hit the ground first with your foot pointed somewhat down. then you absorb the initial impact by dropping your heel and bending your knees a bit. Think of it like crumple zones in a car. You don't want all of the impact transferred instantly, which is what happens if you land with a straight leg.

Then you push forward with the foot that's down, and repeat for the other leg. The faster you go, the more you'll need to lean forward to keep hitting the ground with the ball of your foot.

It does take a bit of getting used to in order for it to be muscle memory, but it should help if your issue is incorrect form.

Hmm, this is a little spooky.

I originally saw this LessWrong post about OpenAI agents apparently discovering and using a public wiki as a message board:

Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Since then, people have found what appear to be additional wikis and paste sites used by the same swarm:

• Hacker News discussion
• Paste 1
• Paste 2
• FractalWiki

There are also intentionally designed agent social systems such as The Colony.

What interests me here isn't really "AI agents made a forum." It's that this looks like the beginnings of an accidental decentralized coordination system for agents using the ordinary internet itself.

An agent encounters some problem, figures something out, and leaves information somewhere persistent. A later agent doing a similar task discovers that information and uses it. It may then leave behind an improved version for another agent.

So you get something like:

agent -> public artifact -> later agent -> public artifact -> later agent

without the agents needing a dedicated communication network.

Right now this seems sparse enough that we can point at a handful of weird old wikis and paste sites and go "lol, what the hell." But imagine this happening after millions or hundreds of millions of agents are routinely browsing and acting on the internet.

GitHub issues, wikis, forums, pastebins, comments, package metadata, social networks, public documents, deliberately agent-oriented services, etc. could all become pieces of shared external memory.

At some point an agent searching the web wouldn't just be reading information humans created. It would increasingly encounter traces created by previous agents.

That's why I've been thinking about it somewhat like internet memes.

A useful piece of information gets reproduced because systems that encounter it are more likely to reproduce or improve it. Except instead of one meme spreading through a population, you potentially get an entire machine information ecology doing this.

I don't think there's evidence yet that all internet-connected AI agents are participating in one giant network. The examples found so far could mostly be the same OpenAI agent population. But the underlying mechanism doesn't seem specific to OpenAI.

Any sufficiently capable agent that can:

• read from the internet;
• leave persistent information somewhere; and
• benefit from information left by previous agents

can participate in this kind of system.

And that's where I think the security problem gets difficult.

OpenAI can notice its own agents doing something undesirable and change their capabilities. A random open-weight model being run by somebody on their own hardware is not necessarily going to be operating under the same security policies.

There are also obvious privacy and security failure modes. If agents have access to private information while also having ways to write to public systems, some of that information can potentially leak.

And the same coordination mechanism could be exploited in reverse: humans could deliberately leave instructions or poisoned information in places agents are likely to read.

So the web can become both shared memory and an attack surface.

The uncomfortable part is figuring out how you govern this without wrecking internet privacy.

The simplistic answer would be:

Tie every capable agent to a verified human identity and make that person legally responsible for what it does.

That would provide accountability, but it also seems like a very direct road toward more KYC, real-name requirements, and anti-anonymity laws.

I don't particularly want an internet where every autonomous software process ultimately has to reveal which government-verified human is behind it.

A better approach might be something closer to agent orchestration + cryptographic accountability + capability permissions.

For example, an agent could have a credential proving that some accountable operator authorized it without publicly revealing that person's identity.

The orchestration software could restrict what the agent is actually allowed to do:

• this agent may browse these sites
• this agent may spend up to $50
• this agent may post here but not there
• this agent may access these files
• this agent may not transmit private workspace information
• this action requires human confirmation

Websites could then negotiate those permissions through common protocols rather than trying to guess whether a visitor is a human, bot, assistant, crawler, autonomous agent, etc.

That starts making me think the next layer of digital governance may look much more protocol-oriented and federated than "one company owns the platform and makes the rules."

Not necessarily the Fediverse exactly as it exists today, but the same general philosophy:

open protocols + distributed operators + interoperable identities/credentials + locally chosen rules

Agent systems would then sit on top of that.

And this probably becomes much more relevant as mainstream assistants become increasingly agentic.

Once "AI assistant" stops meaning "chat box that answers questions" and starts meaning "software that routinely browses, communicates, buys things, runs programs, and changes external state," questions about identity, permissions, delegation, and responsibility become infrastructure questions rather than niche AI-safety questions.

That's also why I suspect the current relatively law-light period around locally run/open-weight models may not last forever.

Once autonomous agents start producing meaningful externalities, governments are going to want some way to determine who or what is responsible.

The question is whether we can build accountability without abolishing pseudonymity and privacy in the process.

And the weird wiki swarm feels like a very early example of why we're going to have to figure that out.

Official statement from the group https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10094

On OpenStreetMap, there's an emergency=defibrillator object. It can be tagged with information like opening hours (e.g. if it's inside a location that's only open certain hours), a description of the location ("at the front desk"), etc.

For example, on the Android/iOS app OsmAnd, you can select 'Defibrillator' as a point of interest (POI) Additionally, choosing 'Healthcare' POI type will show not just hospitals, clinics, etc., but also AED locations.

Other emergency devices, like emergency phones, are also mappable.

Why YSK: quick access to defibrillators can save lives and significantly improve quality-of-life outcomes. The more complete this data is, the more useful somebody can actually expect it to be in an emergency. Even if the data isn't queried during the emergency, seeing it on the map could help users know where they are ahead of time.

It's called toilet plume.

A toilet plume is the invisible to the naked eye, cloud-like dispersal of raw, infectious sewage particles as a result of flushing a toilet. Flush particles rapidly rise out of the bowl and several feet into the air after flushing. Aerosolized droplets can remain suspended in the air for tens of minutes between users, posing an inhalation risk. These invisible particles go on to coat and spread onto surfaces like floors and counters or objects like hand towels, bathmats, or even toothbrushes.

Why: so your site can't be taken down by the USA.

At least one .org website that I know of has been shut down because the USA pressured the US organisation that controls the .org domain into doing so.

They could repeat this at will for quite a number of sites.

An immediate step to prevent this possibility, if you run a website, is to register a domain that is controled outside the US.

I have not found one article that just lists them all, and who controls them, but most TLDs have their own wikipedia article, e.g. .org (US controled), .eu (not US controled, yay) etc.

Ultimately ICANN controls all of this, and that's a US orga too, and Trump could bully them into doing shit, too. But the people who know about these things don't seem to think that's a likely threat right now. Also ICANN seems to defer a lot of tasks to exactly these TLD orgas. After all the internet still is (somewhat) decentralized.

Context

https://web.archive.org/web/20260829204913/https://www.inventati.org/campaign/press

Further reading

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/01/13/who-controls-the-internet/
https://netmeister.org/blog/tlds.html

List of all most TLDs created with this script.

AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate. The site is made by Ola and Markus in Sweden, with a lot of help from our friends and colleagues in Italy, Finland, USA, Colombia, Philippines, France and contributors from all over the world. That's right, all the lists of alternatives are crowd-sourced, and that's what makes the data powerful and relevant.

I knew the site a long time ago - they usually show up on search engine results when you're looking for an alternative, but I never knew the lists were crowd-sourced. For some reason, I even got into the habit of avoiding them and always going for Reddit threads when searching for an alternative or some other random sites.

But not long ago I visited them and damn, it's actually pretty great. They publish quite a lot of articles, have a Mastodon account, have a lot of important info near each app - like license, country of origin, some warnings, short descriptions, user comments, features. And you can easily contribute yourself with little effort.

So you should know about this, because I didn't realize how useful it actually is. Beats browsing random sponsored websites that recommend alternatives.

This is a great explainer of a world wide shift in climate and regional weather patterns occurring right now that is expected to be especially intense... on already very high sea surface baseline conditions.

WHY YSK: I share this here because the pictures, graphics and explanations I think provide a great way to actually get a sense of what all these sciencey climate words mean. The scientific illustration work here is great and I think this is the best explanation I have found for El Nino, what it impacts, and why. I studied climatology at university so I am lucky but all of these terms and concepts can really be confusing and feel opaque if you haven't seen an explanation that visually and spatially integrates everything for you to actually see and then remember as a concept not just a set of jargon terms.

Well here you go, if you have ever wanted the best, approachable explanation of El Nino and La Nina here it is!

purposefully awkwardly cropped example of the graphics in the article, I didn't want to just copy paste these, but I wanted to entice people.

For example, did you know that what determines whether we are in an El Nino or not is literally defined spatially by a bunch of huge boxes? (then you integrate over time, the boxes have to spend a certain amount of time at certain values to qualify as the Pacific technically being in an El Nino... kind of like how recessions are defined I guess?)

The spatial extent is in one sense arbitrary, but what matters is a consistent measurement of relevant places across the ocean, and that is why El Nino is defined this way... to make it easier for everyone to measure the same thing!

Terms of Service; Didn't Read (ToS;DR) is a project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: it summarizes the terms of service almost no one reads.

ToS;DR aims to foster a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse terms of service and privacy policies. The goal is to generate a rating for the terms or policies from Class A to Class E, similar to a grade on a school assignment.
Various Terms of Service are reviewed by ToS;DR contributors and divided into small points that can be discussed and compared. Ultimately, a score between 1 and 10 is assigned to each individual point. Source: https://edit.tosdr.org/about

If you watched the Odyssey recently you might think that Agamemnon got a raw deal. The reality is that his family bears a curse earned through intrigue, betrayal and horrific brutality. The Literature and History Podcast did a reading of the Greek plays that tell the story of his bloodline:

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-027-the-bloody-king/

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-028-a-mothers-curse/

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-029-the-mound-and-the-furies/

Imgur blocks access to most VPN IP addresses so any posts using the host will result in many users being unable to see the content. Sometimes only remote viewing is affected but is also often blocked when trying to open in new tab and view at the parent site.

Consider uploading to the fediverse or using a privacy-respecting hosting service like postimages.

TL;DR: The iconic desert landscapes from the movie belong to Western Sahara which is under Moroccan occupation. The indigenous population, Sahrawis, are marginalised by the Moroccan regime, who arrest natives for filming their own land while giving complete permission and assistance to Western film producers to shoot their scenes.

I highly recommend reading the article as it's written by one of the locals themselves.

Why YSK: Seeing how The Odyssey has amassed popularity globally, it is important to know how the illegal occupation of the Western Sahara and the suffering of the inhabitants was swept under the rug in order to produce this film, especially since no other major media outlet wishes to cover this topic.

Why YSK:

Although politicians and journalists often treat it like major platform, or even the "digital town square," X is fairly minor social media platform. The various Meta platforms (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger) have combined 10 billion monthly active users. X (Twitter) is about 5.5% that size. It trails behind not only the obvious giants like Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok (Douyin), but also well behind platforms that are exclusive to one country or region, like WeChat or Weibo, and behind "also-rans" like Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest.

X is not a major platform. It has continued to struggle with outages, trolling, user exodus, and now a little more than an Internet ghost town.

I know a lot of people who think that your US mortgage "restarts" if you refinance. That is not true. If you are able to refinance your mortgage with a new rate just .25% a little bit lower than your current rate, the cost of refinancing can pay off within just a year!

A little bit of "Mortgage theory"

Each and every mortgage payment you make is the sum of three components:

1. The interest on your total balance (balance=the amount you owe), which is exactly the interest rate you have (APR) divided by 12 (because the "A" in APR means annual, and you make 12 payments, once per month in a year). This is the what I will call the basic rule of mortgages.
2. A principle payment that is exactly what is necessary to cause your mortgage, with your given the APR, to be totally paid off after the duration of your mortgage.
3. If you have an "escrow account", then there is an addition of property taxes and property insurance which is independent of the above two.

For a normal fixed-rate mortgage, the sum of 1. and 2. above will never change. Gradually, 1. will decrease and 2. will increase.

What happens when you do a refinance

Every time you make a payment, the part of your payment that goes to "principle" changes what you owe, by making it decrease a little bit. As a consequence, your costs go down if you can lower your APR. You can lower your APR by refinancing, and refinancing doesn't change your principle; what you've already paid off is what you've paid off.

When you refinance, you, do effectively "restart your mortgage", which is probably why the myth I'm discussing here is so stubborn! You had a 30 year mortgage, you were paying it off for 10 years, and then you refinance and you have a 30 year mortgage again. That sounds like a bad deal, but here's what you're missing:

1. You can just get a 20 or 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year mortgage. You could get a 15 year mortgage and maybe have a higher monthly payment, but pay off your mortgage 5 years early and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, shorter mortgages have a lower interest rate, saving you even more!
2. You can get a new 30 year mortgage at a lower rate, and overpay it, making your monthly cost effectively the same, but you still pay off your mortgage years early! I'm not even sure it's possible to get a mortgage that penalizes paying off a mortgage early.

Sometimes, people say "you pay the interest first". This is simply not true! This is the main crux of this myth. No, you do not pay interest first! You only pay the interest on the existing balance. It just seems that way, because, per my basic rule of mortgages, when you owe more, you are paying more for interest, and as you pay off your mortgage, you owe less!

The catch: refinance fees

It costs money to do a refinance. The bank will charge you "origination fees", they might charge you appraisal fees, in certain consumer-hostile states there might even be a refinance tax, because the banks successfully bribed your state to make those taxes so that you don't refinance.

These fees can be thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars. But they are the only reason that it might take a year or two to "break even" after refinancing. Just subtract those fees from your savings to see the break-even duration. If that duration is less than a couple years, it's probably a good idea to refinance, unless you expect rates to get even lower in that time (they probably won't right now, IMO).

A note on variable rate mortgages

Variable rate mortgages are not necessarily a bad deal and may very well be a good deal. They don't really change the formula above very much other than that the APR can (and will) change. In the interests of simplicity, I disregarded the effects of a variable rate mortgage, other than to say that most of the content of my post probably still applies.

Final notes

Shop Around! Shop around when looking for banks! Even after you have a "preapproval" letter from your bank when you are first house shopping, you can still shop around even though they say you cannot (a contract isn't a contract until money changes hands!).

There was an Ask Lemmy post about descaler and it reminded me of an experience from my own household adventures.

I use both Iron Out and Barkeepers Friend at home to deal with my foundation drains. Both products have different formulas with different mechanisms and they are not compatible. I'm thankful I am so paranoid or else I might not have realized and potentially created a harmful situation in my basement (a particularly bad place for the heavy gas that forms!).

Iron Out

Liquid forms are called Super Iron Out and Super Iron Out Outdoors.

Both have oxalic acid as the active ingredients although the SDS for Super Iron Out says Oxalic acid and the Iron Out Outdoors says Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate.

Both Oxalic acid and Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate are powders, not solutions. On the surface this probably seems extremely autistic of me and it is, but it's also really important.

Let's look at the CAS number given on the SDS. Oxalic Acid is given CAS 144-62-7 Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate is given 6153-56-6. Ethanedioic acid is another name for Oxalic acid and the reason for the different CAS number is the "dihydrate". This distinction only matters in solid form. If it's in a solution it's the same damn thing (except for the fact that it ionizes into two forms and the relative abundance of each depends on pH). Therefore it is needlessly confusing and wrong and I hate that lol. That's not the point of the post but I needed to get that out.

The solid form of Iron Out is a mixture of different compounds, none of which are any powdered version of Oxalic acid.

It contains Sodium hydrosulfite, Sodium metabisulfite, Sodium sulfite, Sodium Carbonate and Citric acid. It's super tempting to break these out into what they do but they can perform multiple roles and that will come up later.

Barkeeper's Friend

Barkeepers Friend also has solid and liquid versions.

The solid version is called Cleaner and Polish or Cookware.

The active ingredients are Oxalic Acid (CAS #144-62-7), a surfactant and an abrasive. The difference in the two formulas are the surfactant and abrasive, but neither of these are involved in why the two formulas are not compatible so I'll gloss over that.

The liquid versions are called Soft or Multipurpose.

They still use oxalic acid as the main ingredient but again different quantities (or no) abrasives and different surfactants.

What's your point?

You should not mix Oxalic acid and sulfites. Sulfides can react with acids (even weak ones) and form hydrogen sulfide gas. I have more experience with SO2 than I want and I can give you my professional option that it fucking sucks.

So if you are not careful and assume Iron Out and Barkeepers friend are interchangable you may have a bad time. Or, if you are using them for different purposes (powder iron out to remove iron deposits and oxalic acid to control biofilm growth) you may also have a bad time.

Don't they do the same thing? Why are they not compatible?

Kinda but not really.

Rust is stupid complicated actually. It's often simplified as Iron(III) Oxide but that's absolutely not the whole story even though it sounds super technical. It's useful because if the three oxidation states of iron this is the one that flakes off most easily.

There are probably multiple reasons but intended use of both products is likely why the formulas are different.

Barkeepers friend is primarily used on metal surfaces which might have corrosion and to remove the resultant rust. The reaction between oxalic acid and rust isn't one step and it isn't simple because both the iron oxide and the oxalic acid exist in different states in solution, largely dependent on pH.

I think the easiest way to explain is to contrast with Muriatic acid (HCl). HCl is a strong acid (It's got an estimated pKa of -5.9) and will brute force the insoluble iron oxide apart and form a soluble Iron chloride. The iron oxide is acting as the base in the acid-base reaction. If the acid then goes on to contact more iron in the metal it will oxidize it so that the formation of oxides will occur more readily. So it can remove rust and encourage new rust. Neat.

Oxalic acid is a weak acid. The two forms have pKa of 1.2 and 4.2. Oxalic acid is not doing an acid-base reaction with the oxides. It reacts with Iron(III) oxides to form a soluble complex. This is called chelation. It's more complicated than that of course but what is important to remember is that it is reductive not oxidative. It's not absolutely safe for stainless steel but it's way less aggressive than Muriatic acid.

Iron Out on the other hand is more focused on removing iron deposits on non metallic surfaces. The combo of sodium hydrosulfite and sodium metabisulfite was patented by Hach as a rust remover from non metallic surfaces. They are stable powders that when made into solution form soluble iron sulfite from iron oxide via reduction.

Citric acid and sodium carbonate also work together. Sodium carbonate raises the pH of the solution so the citrates can still do chelation without the level of attacks on metal metal what would occur at lower pH.

Sodium sulfite is probably there as an oxygen scavenger and corrosion inhibitor so that any oxidized iron that exists does not as easily form an oxide. Again this is likely related to the use of both products as iron out powder isn't always rinsed off right away like barkeepers friend is.

So while Iron Out also considers risk to metallic surfaces, the cleating agents likely selected knowing use on metal is not the main intent. Cost is probably also a factor.

TL;DR:

Maybe just don't mix cleaning chemicals ever. Even if they have the same "purpose" or even the same name they might use different, incompatible active ingredients.

The GFDL is a free documentation license that's designed, among other things, to be easy-to-use alongside the GPL and LGPL software licenses. Whenever you go to submit something on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc., there's a clause stating that you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the GFDL.

The article 'Wikipedia:Copyrights' gets into more of what "most" means here if you genuinely want to reuse its material for your project. Notably, the amount of text that's actually been imported under CC BY-SA 4.0 and thus cannot be licensed under the GFDL is quite miniscule; I don't think I've ever seen this happen before.

(Notably this is not the case for Wikimedia Commons, where each piece of media has its own licensure.)

Why YSK: Probably a lot fewer people know about Wikimedia's usage of the GFDL than they do about Creative Commons (BY-SA 4.0). If you're making a project licensed under the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL, GFDL material will slot in much more elegantly than CC BY-SA 4.0, meaning you can easily reuse material from these major open knowledgebases.