Spyke

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What hobby seems boring to most people but is actually fascinating if you dive into it?

Ham radio.

On the surface, it just sounds like listening to a bunch of old farts babbling on about their enlarged prostates, and tbf, there is a bit of that if you never go any deeper than 2M/70cm voice modes.

But there’s just SOOOO much you can do.

Want to see how far you can bounce a signal off a mirror laying on the surface of the moon? Yup. You can do that.

Want to launch and communicate with your own satellite? Yup. It’s a thing.

Want to remotely control devices from hundreds of miles away without using the internet? Yup.

Want to gps track your car at all times, even when there’s no cell phone service? That’s called APRS.

Want to have a conversation with astronauts on the ISS as it flies overhead? They’ve got ham equipment on board.

You can even play with broadcasting and/or receiving “secret” tv and radio stations - that is, they’re on alternate frequencies that regular TVs and radios don’t pick up.

It just goes so deep.

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GOP lawmakers predict ‘fistfight’ between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert

In the red corner, hailing from Colorado and standing at five foot six, louder than a 12-gauge, dumber than a whole box of Facebook marketplace rifle suppressors masquerading as fuel filters; she’ll knock your socks off just so her husband can sniff your feet (but only if you’re under 16); the undeniably uneducated; universally unloved… Lauren “Ppppppplaaaaan B” Booooooooooebert.

In the other red corner, all the way from god-knows-where-and-we-wish-she’d-go-back-already; she’s got on more makeup than a dumpster full of Sephora customer returns; she’s been evicted from every trailer park in the greater Dalton metro area; the immortal god-Queen of the international association of Karens; Marjorie Taylor “White Trash Barbie” Grrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeen!

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What's the stupidest rule your school ever enforced?

At my high school, the administration banned the color and word “fuchsia” (kind of a purple-ish, pink-ish color).

For some reason, the senior class (year 12, the class one year above me at the time) had become obsessed with the color/word. They had taken to wearing fuchsia shirts with the word “fuchsia” on them. On a given day, you’d likely see a few dozen of these shirts roaming the halls with students inside them.

The ban came because, allegedly, somebody had made up a story about a Mexican hooker named “Fuchsia” (because that’s a Spanish name, right?) that was the supposed inspiration of the color craze.

So naturally, the admins banned the color and any mention of the word. Using the word “fuchsia” in any context, or wearing the color in any way was three days in in-school-suspension (during-the-day detention where you sat in a cubicle with literally nothing to do - you weren’t allowed to read, no schoolwork, or anything — just stare at the wall for 8 hours). Second offense was a week out of school suspension. Third meant you failed your year and had to repeat the grade.

So, the seniors started wearing other obscure colors with the name printed on the shirt. “Indigo” “Chartreuse” “Vermillion”. Every single one of these colored shirts had the name of the color, and the words “You can’t ban all the colors” underneath.

It was by far the dumbest ass rule I’d ever seen.

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Driverless taxis blocked ambulance response to fatal accident, San Francisco Fire Dept. says

Posted this in another thread.

Full time software developer and part-time volunteer first responder here.

It sounds to my developer brain that the car was in “pull over for the emergency vehicle” mode and the presence of the ambulance with the flashy lights and woo woo noises basically stun-locked it so that it just sat there waiting for the ambulance to pass.

As for my first responder brain, In EVOC (emergency vehicle operations course), you’re taught that, when in emergency mode, you should TRY to pass on the left because that’s what people expect and you don’t want them doing unexpected things while you’re speeding, passing, and caring for a patient.

BUT… you’re also taught to use your goddamned brain, and the “pass on the left” thing is a guideline, not a rule. If traffic is stopped and you have a safe path, you take it.

This driver was being overly dogmatic about how they pass traffic, and their stubborn refusal to pass on the right contributed to the mortality of their patient.

However, “stupid” isn’t “criminal”, and there’s no way to say that the patient would have survived even if they had teleported to the hospital - emergency medicine is just a “do your best” situation, and bad outcomes happen. Tbh, though, it’s called “the golden hour”, not “the golden minute and a half”, and it’s pretty unlikely that 90 seconds would have made a huge difference in the outcome. On top of that, care doesn’t begin at the hospital. Care begins when the medic first begins assessing the patient. The medic will be working on stabilizing the patient in the back of the rig even while the driver sits there behind a stun-locked-npc car with his thumb up his ass.

So, if I were this crew’s chief or shift lieutenant, which I’m not, but if I were, I wouldn’t fire the driver, but they’d definitely get written up for it. I’d strip the driver of their driving privileges until they went back through EVOC again and wrote “I will be flexible in my operations and not be a dogmatic dipshit on an emergency scene.” 1000 times.

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San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

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Use it on the dumbass ambulance crew.

Full time software developer and part-time volunteer first responder here.

It sounds to my developer brain that the car was in “pull over for the emergency vehicle” mode and the presence of the ambulance with the flashy lights and woo woo noises basically stun-locked it so that it just sat there waiting for the ambulance to pass.

As for my first responder brain, In EVOC (emergency vehicle operations course), you’re taught that, when in emergency mode, you should TRY to pass on the left because that’s what people expect and you don’t want them doing unexpected things while you’re speeding, passing, and caring for a patient.

BUT… you’re also taught to use your goddamned brain, and the “pass on the left” thing is a guideline, not a rule. If traffic is stopped and you have a safe path, you take it.

This driver was being overly dogmatic about how they pass traffic, and their stubborn refusal to pass on the right contributed to the mortality of their patient.

However, “stupid” isn’t “criminal”, and there’s no way to say that the patient would have survived even if they had teleported to the hospital - emergency medicine is just a “do your best” situation, and bad outcomes happen. Tbh, though, it’s called “the golden hour”, not “the golden minute and a half”, and it’s pretty unlikely that 90 seconds would have made a huge difference in the outcome. On top of that, care doesn’t begin at the hospital. Care begins when the medic first begins assessing the patient. The medic will be working on stabilizing the patient in the back of the rig even while the driver sits there behind a stun-locked-npc car with his thumb up his ass.

So, if I were this crew’s chief or shift lieutenant, which I’m not, but if I were, I wouldn’t fire the driver, but they’d definitely get written up for it. I’d strip the driver of their driving privileges until they went back through EVOC again and wrote “I will be flexible in my operations and not be a dogmatic dipshit on an emergency scene.” 1000 times.

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what's something your company did that totally killed morale?

We were looking to replatform our aging e-commerce site.

With management approval, we spent weeks researching and narrowed it down to two possibilities - Magento 2 and Sylius.

We then divided our team in half. Half of us took one possible platform, the rest took the other. Each team was given an identical list of tasks, and the goal was to implement as much of the list as we could in two weeks.

At the end of the period, the Sylius team had not only completed every single item on the list, but had so much extra time they were able to implement some cool “nice to have” features we’d always wanted on the site but never had time for.

The Magento2 team didn’t even get the software fully installed and working much less even start chipping away at the list.

We all met and stacked hands - Sylius was the way we were gonna go. We were a big enough fish that we even got the company that made the software to commit to flying one of their developers out to our office and working alongside us.

Then the company put us all into a room and told us the decision would be Magento2 - now come to that agreement.

3/4 of our team left within 2 months.

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Neuralink’s human trials volunteers ‘should have serious concerns,’ say medical experts

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AH HA HA HA HA

20K above average? Not a chance in hell. For all the reports of how shitty the work environment is at ALL of his companies, coupled with the constant need to push far past whats ethical, or in some cases even legal... no.

Fuck no.

Not a chance in hell.

Now, throw me 500% of the average and maybe we'll talk. But You'd only get a year from me. Two tops. Just enough to pay off my bills. Then I'm gonna tell you to fuck off.

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*Permanently Deleted*

I’m a full time senior PHP/JS developer.

PHP has a bad rap because of a few factors.

1, as you said, it’s accessible. It’s a very easy language to learn with a simple syntax and a simple tool chain. So often, it’s a dev’s first language. PHP holds your hand a little bit, but for the most part, security is on the developer, and when a dev doesn’t know any better, bad practices like interpolating values directly into your sql query seem like an easy way to get the job done, but at the hidden cost of opening up SQL injection vulnerabilities. But I’ve seen the same thing happen in Python code, so that’s not really a PHP problem so much as an education problem.

2, earlier versions of PHP were, in a word, shit. They were rife with inconsistencies, poor structure, half-baked features, and it all ran like dogshit. Even today, there’s still some contention in the PHP world about whether to fix the inconsistencies or not, because so much legacy code would fall apart if they did. PHP <= 4 was a goddamned dumpster fire. 5 was MARGINALLY better and brought in proper OOP. 6 literally didn’t exist for various reasons. 7 was actually getting pretty good, now with optional static typing. 8 is BANGIN’. It’s fast, easy to work with, has a great feature set, and a huge community.

3, it’s a big player. When you’re a huge player, you’re also a huge target. Wordpress is one of the most prolific web apps in existence, and it’s PHP based. Being huge, many more people are writing (shit) code for it, and many more (shit) people are trying to break it. Of course software that’s run on more servers is gonna be attacked more. It’s just numbers.

TBH, today, working in both languages extensively, I’d gladly take a PHP based web app over a NodeJS based web app. Don’t get me wrong, I love node for what it is and the paycheck I get, but JS is a goddamned dumpster fire of a half-baked language.

So tldr, don’t fear the PHP. As long as your software was written by somebody who knows their aaS from a hole in the ground, you’ll be fine.

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Tennessee Becomes the 2nd State to Enact an 'Abortion Trafficking' Law

Jesus Christ.

As a Tennessean… fuck Bill Lee. I’m so sick of this shit.

My wife damn near died a few years ago when an ectopic pregnancy ruptured. It would have been a wanted child. If this happened today, I’d lose a wife and our two kids would lose a mother.

Fuck the Republican Party. Fuck anybody who associates with them. Fuck any loser who spouts “both sides” or “genocide Joe” bullshit.

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Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declares state of emergency over train derailment, chemical spill

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A few years ago, a CSX train carrying acrylonitrile had an axle snap and derailed in my town, igniting in the process, and creating a huge plume of cyanide gas. It was a damned miracle nobody was killed.

The response from CSX was impressive. I have no complaints about how they handled it AFTER it happened. However, and it only recently occurred to me, but that response that was so well oiled, rehearsed, and organized… they’ve CLEARLY had WAY too much experience doing this; way too many times they’ve had to sweep into a town and “handle” things after a derailment of a hazmat train.

Maybe… just maybe they should consider putting a little more emphasis on upgrading and maintaining their equipment. Maybe they wouldn’t have to have so many teams ready to sweep in and manage the medium-sized ecological catastrophes that happen so often.

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What are the most capitalist things you've heard about?

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I live in an area with a subscription fire service.

It’s not expensive - around $200/year. And if you don’t have a subscription they still come and put out your fire or cut you out of the car or whatever needs to be done. You just get a bill for $3000/hr/apparatus that responds.

But I still find it abhorrent. Just put it in my fucking taxes and be done with it. Jesus.

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I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

So, my stepkids (now: boy 12, girl 11) were falling behind in public school and were being passed on to the next grades despite the fact that they were almost a full grade behind in math and reading.

My now-wife decided to pull them out of public school and home school them to try to get them caught up. In our county, we have an AWESOME "public school at home" program where the kids are home schooled, but still go into a school one day a week for socialization and tutoring by licensed teachers. It was a fuck ton of work for her, but in ONE YEAR in the program, not only did the kids catch up, but they're actually almost a full year ahead now.

But... that was with the full support of a county school system and a full-time investment in her kids. This wasn't a "throw a computer at them and let them figure it out" and it certainly wasn't a "summer is different from winter because Jesus said so" program. It was a guided program designed, administered, and overseen by actually licensed teachers. There were performance goals to hit, regular checkins, and available tutoring for things my wife wasn't capable of teaching correctly.

This year, since both kids were so far ahead, we gave them a choice and let them decide whether they wanted to continue the program now that they're caught up. My stepdaughter wanted to go back to regular school. My stepson wanted to stay in the program. He's in middle school as of this year, and middle school begins to be more self-guided. My wife starts nursing school in the spring so she can't dedicate the 8-ish hours necessary to take both kids through the program beginning next semester. So we let them each do what they wanted. My stepson finishes his mostly-self-guided school day in three hours or so then has the rest of the day to do with as he wishes and is still ahead of where he should be. My stepdaughter is miserable because each day is an 8 hour slog and the curriculum moves too slowly for her now, plus the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be). She's considering going back into the program next year when it will be mostly self-guided for her as well.

But this success story is more about my awesome wife and this particular program. It's been a crazy amount of work and a full-time job for my wife to take both kids through this program, and that's WITH the support of a full teaching staff in a county-run program. It's no surprise to me that other programs are more-or-less a joke. If you're not willing to put in the work and/or your idea of education is "It's that way because the LORD said so now stop asking questions and write Jesus on every line," then you're dooming your children to failure and ridicule.