Spyke

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One of Reddit’s biggest communities is suggesting users move to Discord

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Yeah, I actually hate that forums are being abandoned in favor of Discord. Especially since a lot of the moves are for tech support. Discord serves an entirely different function than a forum. A forum is for someone 10 years ago to ask a question, get it answered, and then have that question pop up as a search result for the next decade whenever others have the same question. You didn’t need to create an account and start your own thread to get your question answered. You just googled it and found it.

Discord acting as a replacement simply means that people constantly ask the same “how do I [x]” questions all day every day. It’s exhausting because every single question needs to be answered with it’s own reply, instead of simply having the answer ready to go as soon as the user googles it.

I get it. You’re a startup tech company. You don’t want to pay for server space for a forum. And Discord is free, so you might as well just start a server there. But that means your admins/mods are going to spend all day responding to every single “how do I update”, when it could simply be a google search instead.

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Texas power use hits record high as heatwave lingers

If only the power companies had been repeatedly warned that this would happen, and given millions of dollars of taxpayer money to increase power generation potential.

Oh wait… They were warned of this? And they were given taxpayer money? And they illegally used it for stock buybacks instead? And nothing was ever done to prosecute the illegal spending? Yeah, that sounds about on par for Texas.

piracy

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FitGirl call for donations

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I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

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Not an employee.

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My favorite way of doing that was asking them when I could expect HR to send me the new employee paperwork so I can sign onto the health insurance. Because if they’re going to treat a contractor like an employee, the least they could do is offer employee benefits. And if a manager thinks they’re about to get called into HR to explain why they hired an additional employee without permission, you’d be surprised how quickly their attitude changes.

games

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John Riccitiello is stepping down as CEO and president of Unity

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Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave. He was going to be the scapegoat with a golden parachute, allowing the company to keep the unpopular changes while disbursing the bad publicity. It’s exactly what he did with EA too.

Basically reddit’s Ellen Pao plan. Bring in someone unpopular to make the unpopular changes, then let them go with a massive payout while keeping the unpopular changes.

But then Unity realized that the companies weren’t going to forget about the unpopular changes and it wasn’t going to blow over. Companies started bailing left and right and switching to other engines. At that point Unity realized that the smoke was actually a full blown fire, and started doing whatever they could to try and regain some trust. But by that point it was too late, because companies had already seen the potential for abuse. And as the saying goes, when someone tells you who you are, believe them. So now companies are unwilling to go back to Unity, and Unity is grasping at straws.

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Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian

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It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.

xkcd

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xkcd #743: Infrastructures

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Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.

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Modern blocks of C4 explosive come with the warning “poisonous if eaten” on the packaging

There are plenty of (likely apocryphal) stories of new Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) recruits being fed C4 and chased around with a stun gun. The old timers tell the new recruit that electricity will cause C4 to detonate. In reality, it’s a potent laxative and will give them the shits in a matter of minutes. So the recruit is stuck running away from a taser that they think will make them explode, while desperately trying not to shit themselves.

news

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Typo sends millions of US military emails to Russian ally Mali

That’s what we in the cybersec business call an “oopsie daisy I made a little fucky-wucky”.

For real though, this isn’t a problem yet. The TL;DR is that Mali has a top-level domain “.ml”. Just like “.co.uk” for the UK. And the military uses the domain “.mil”. So lots of emails accidentally get sent to “[Military email]@[Military email server].ml” instead of sending to .mil.

So a bad actor could simply set up an e-mail server with .ml domains that mirror the military’s .mil ones, and start collecting all of those mis-addressed emails.

So why isn’t it an issue yet? Because we had a contract with Mali to manage their domain. They literally signed administrative rights for the .ml domain over. So the US was able to basically set up their own .ml mirrored sites, to capture all of those mis-addressed emails. They have captured thousands throughout the years, because military members keep misaddressing their emails. Supposedly containing all kinds of sensitive data. Everything from medical records to troop movements and equipment inspection reports.

But that contract ends this week, so Mali could 100% start registering their own domains when that contract expires and domain registrations begin expiring.

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Oh, he actually posted it

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This is actually a tactic listed in the official CIA “Simple Sabotage” handbook. Basically, if you can’t overtly sabotage things by blowing them up while maintaining your cover, work to sabotage things from inside instead.

Get a job in middle management, and do everything in your power to live up to the term “middle manglement”. Do your job as poorly as possible while still maintaining plausible deniability. Make it difficult for people around you to do their jobs. Give other managers bad info. Sow division via gossip. Divert employees towards busy work so they can’t focus on important tasks. Waste budgets. Ensure deadlines get missed, while demanding unreasonable deadlines for other teams. Et cetera…

And I can guarantee that generals will be well aware of this fact. Plenty of them got into their spots by being war dogs, but they won’t be stupid.

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Arthur C. Clark once said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". What technologies do we have today that would look like magic to people from the past?

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It’s not even sound, because it doesn’t vibrate air molecules. If that were the case, it wouldn’t work in space for communicating with things like GPS satellites.

They use light. Because wifi/radio/Bluetooth/etc are all just electromagnetic, which can be converted directly into light that is outside of the visible spectrum. The same way that a lightbulb works. And it only works because in higher bands most solid objects just sort of look like they’re made of glass. They don’t block those bandwidths, so the light is able to pass through them like a window. That includes things like your body. They’re just shining light directly through you.

It’s akin to your phone and router flashing Morse code at each other with invisible flashlights.

memes

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If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.

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There’s also the fact that a bunch of instances immediately closed registration as soon as the Reddit refugees started arriving. They couldn’t handle the sudden extra load, so they all closed their registrations. Which is their right as owners, but it also meant that virtually all the new users were funneled to the instances that were willing to expand, with Lemmy.World being one of the only ones.

Hell, I still haven’t received registration emails for most of the “we’re filtering our registrations. Click the link in your email to verify you aren’t a bot” instances I tried to register with.

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Life Hack

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Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

196

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collar(ule)

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If you’re an artist struggling to get off the ground, one of the best and easiest ways to start making reliable money is to draw smut. If you become known as a smut artist who takes commissions, money comes pouring in left and right.

And if you’re willing/able to do furry art, your rates just quadrupled, because furries will pay lots of money to get their fursona drawn doing various degen things.

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looking back, I didn't appreciate the "Thug Shaker Central" incident for how wacky it truly was

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I just asked GPT4 to write a modern late-stage capitalist version of the pledge:

I pledge allegiance to the Free Market of the United States of America, and to the Corporations for which it stands, one Nation under Profit, indivisible, with liberty and justice for shareholders.

I could 100% hear this being in the background of some midwestern emo song rofl

memes

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We live in a public transit hell

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Yeah, my “Public Transit” option on google maps is entirely greyed out. This is my daily commute to work:

It’s always entertaining to see the Europeans go “lol just ditch your car, it has to start somewhere” like it wouldn’t require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…) Like I don’t even have the option of taking public transit, because there are no connecting lines between my home and my job. Literally none. The nearest bus stop is almost as far away as my job, and it’s in the opposite direction.

And to be clear, that 2+ hour walk would be on a highway with no sidewalk. I’d be dead on day 1. If I wanted to avoid the highway, the walk would be closer to 4.5 hours; The highway is the only direct path.