Spyke

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I learned how to fix my itchy scalp

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Out of curiosity, do you have super thick hair and only towel dry it after getting out of the shower? Reoccurring dandruff means you have a fungal infection, and they tend to prefer warm damp environments. Blow drying may prevent it, because thick hair tends to trap moisture and take a while to dry. Which allows the fungus to multiply in the meantime.

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Wa wa wa

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That’s Miss Rachel. She’s an expert on child development, an outspoken advocate for human rights, and an extremely popular child entertainer. She’s basically this generation’s Steve from Blues Clues. If she’s doing it a certain way on purpose, it’s probably because it makes it easier for kids to pick up.

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The paradox of tolerance

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Exactly. The “paradox” part disappears as soon as you start viewing things through the lens of a social contract. The intolerant are intentionally and repeatedly breaking the social contract, and are therefore not protected by it.

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I finally bought a thinkpad

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Because there is very little overlap between “programmers who design the systems to be as efficient and reliable as possible” and “UX designers who consider elegance and ease of use, even if it means the install is a few extra MB in size”.

Tons of FOSS UIs tend to fall into one of three categories:

  1. CLI. Maybe a third-party GUI exists.
  2. Laughably horrendous monstrosities that make early 90’s websites look good
  3. A direct ripoff of a paid software that has actual UX designers.

It’s because the people designing the FOSS aren’t UX designers, so they either make their best guess at it (the laughably horrendous choice) or they just copy whatever paid software they’re trying to replace.

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Frozen berry recall classified under FDA’s highest-risk level

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Exactly. Well-functioning agencies can point to statistics over long periods of time… But politicians don’t like boring “funding education caused crime to drop by {x}% ten years later” statistics because they aren’t sympathetic nor inflammatory. They’re also hard to attribute directly to the agency in question, because there could always be confounding factors that have skewed the numbers.

It’s like the difference between fire code/building regulations, and a fire department. Builders and real estate developers hate fire code regulations, because it’s expensive to comply with. Fire code prevents a lot of fires from starting, (and ensures buildings can be quickly and safely evacuated if a fire does occur), but it is seen as an expense. It’s something the real estate developer is required to pay for, and they resent it. But everyone loves their local fire department. Fire department funding is seen as an investment. They’re big, flashy, loud, and everyone knows when they work. And notably, the fire department only has to respond when something isn’t prevented by the local fire codes.

If your electrical system quietly works for 50 years without causing any fires, (because of your local building codes requiring the wiring to be done in a way that avoids fires) your fire department never needs to respond to a fire in your building. So the building owners tend to go “why do we even need all these expensive fire regulations, if there hasn’t been a fire here in 50 years?” There isn’t any way to point at the fire code and go “look at all the fires that these regulations prevented in your building,” because the fires never existed in the first place.

In reality, the two (building codes and the fire department) are working in tandem to keep people safe. But one is much more visible, so it’s the one that people tend to focus on.

And importantly, the conservative mindset is entirely focused on direct cause and effect. They’ll never look at larger systems. Criminal does crime, police catch criminal. Cause, effect. Sex causes unwanted pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy leads to abortions. Cause, effect. My building is on fire, fire department responds. Cause, effect.

They’ll never go more than one step away from a given system, because that would remove the direct cause and effect that they’re focused on. They won’t look at why the building caught on fire, or we could prevent it from happening again in the future. Which is why we would see them push to deregulate building codes, while simultaneously pushing to fund the fire department. Because they’re focused on the direct cause and effect. And as far as they’re concerned, anything slipping past the existing regulations is enough to prove that the entire system is ineffective. Because again, they see the cause (whatever slipped through the regulation) so they know what the effect will be. Never mind the fact that the regulation prevented a whole lot of other things from happening. They see a building on fire, and go “well I guess the fire codes are a waste of money. Might as well fund the fire department instead.”

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Frozen berry recall classified under FDA’s highest-risk level

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Even cooking the food isn’t enough in many circumstances, because some food poisoning isn’t caused directly by microbes, or is caused by microbes with spores that can survive being cooked. Microbes multiply in the bad food and produce toxins as a byproduct, or they use hardy spores to multiply instead of dividing. Even if you thoroughly cook the food to kill the microbes, that doesn’t eliminate the nasty toxins or spores they left behind.

Botulism is a good example. Botulism is caused by the botulinum bacteria, but the bacteria itself isn’t harmful. It’s only because the bacteria produces a potent neurotoxin that causes paralysis. Cooking food that was infected with botulinum isn’t enough to eliminate the risk of botulism, because heat doesn’t destroy the neurotoxin.

Or hell, there are microbes that can tolerate temperatures that most food safety standards would consider safe. For example, there is a microbe found in starchy foods that causes something called Fried Rice Syndrome. The spores aren’t killed at boiling temperatures, (which is the temperature you cook rice at), so they can multiply even after the rice is fully cooked. It’s called Fried Rice Syndrome because it’s most frequently seen when people order Chinese takeout for dinner, leave it sitting out on the counter, reheat it a day or two later, (thinking that the heat will kill any microbes and make it safe again), and then suddenly their liver is fucking shutting down. Because the spores weren’t killed when the food was cooked, had time to bloom while sitting out on the counter, and have now thoroughly infected the food.

That’s part of what makes food safety standards so important. They aren’t just focused on what is safe after cooking, because they can’t trust that all foods are cooked well enough to be safe.

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I finally bought a thinkpad

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You can limit your battery charging, so it doesn’t charge to 100% by default. It’s better for your battery life, because Li+ batteries lose more capacity when they’re fully charged and discharged. So keeping them somewhere between the 30-85% range will dramatically extend the life of the battery.

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Viral De-Flock America campaign urging people to destroy AI cameras on Halloween night gains momentum

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Only the most dastardly vandals would leave their phone (and all other Bluetooth devices) at home, plugged in charging, auto-lock fully disabled, on their home WiFi, with YouTube set to auto-play a playlist. That would create a watch history that the vandal could later use to prove that they were active at home at the time of the crime. Again, you definitely shouldn’t do that.

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Viral De-Flock America campaign urging people to destroy AI cameras on Halloween night gains momentum

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And this is why calling them “license plate readers” is hugely disingenuous, to the point of being straight up propaganda. The term vastly downplays what they can do. They don’t just scan license plates. They scan nearby devices’ Bluetooth and WiFi signals. They scan faces. They scan gait to determine specific limb proportions. They scan tattoos and birthmarks. They scan bumper stickers, dings/dents, etc… If you walk in front of a camera, it will use every trick in the book to try and figure out who you are specifically.

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Viral De-Flock America campaign urging people to destroy AI cameras on Halloween night gains momentum

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The unlicensed suppressor will get you into just as much trouble as destroying the camera. Plus, suppressors don’t eliminate sound. It’s not like in the movies where you get a quiet “thwip” noise. The suppressor simply takes the gun from “almost guaranteed hearing damage without proper PPE” to “was that a firecracker? Or someone hammering a nail?” Sure, there can be quiet shots with the proper suppressor and ammo. But if you’re bootlegging it to avoid licensing requirements, you’re probably not using the optimal setup.

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Hey, I'm new to GitHub!

The next generation of script kiddies is going to be iPad babies. It’ll be interesting to see, since the majority can’t use anything in tech unless it’s an app.

We built computer labs in schools, to teach kids how to use computers. Then we decided computers are ubiquitous enough that we didn’t need computer labs anymore. And now we have an entire generation that doesn’t know how to use computers, because they use their phones and tablets for everything instead.

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*Permanently Deleted*

This is him attempting to call the judge’s bluff. Following the order, he also posted calling the judge biased. He’s exploring to see if the judge will let him get away with it. He’ll slowly ramp up the posts until the judge tells him to cut it out again, and then he’ll know where the line is. At that point, he’ll simply toe the line and cry “but it wasn’t a problem before” if she tries to cut down on it later.

He believes the judge is afraid to hold him in contempt, and thus far he has been correct. But this is a direct violation of the judge’s order, and the judge shouldn’t let it slide. If she treats this with leniency, he’ll only take it as tacit approval and continue getting more inflammatory. The only reason I can see for the judge allowing it to continue is to give him more rope to hang himself with. One violation of the order is bad, but if she lets it continue and he racks up a bunch of evidence, she may have better justification to hold him and expedite the trial.

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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?

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*Permanently Deleted*

It’s because an app allows them to collect all kinds of telemetry and usage data that they can’t get from a browser. Browsers inherently limit what kinds of data they can collect by walling them off, while an app gives them full control over what they collect.