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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Just a reminder that everyone is a criminal, but only the out group get the punishments. It’s practically impossible these days to do anything without running afoul of some law somewhere, especially when the new fascist regime is turning your old civil rights into new felonies every day. Fed the homeless? Criminal. Shelter an abused person? Trafficking. Give water to a protestor? To an immigrant? Aiding terrorists. Exercising your right to protest? Actual terrorist. Be a librarian? Obscenity. Report facts and statistics? Treason. Give medical care to the wrong person? Felony. Fail to pay debt? (often debt you had no choice about taking on, like debts to courts, medical, and school debts) Criminal. Insist on a separation between church and state? Hate speech. Resist a kidnapping by anonymous men in an anonymous van? Resisting arrest and deported, yes even the legal citizens. These are just the spicy examples. There are plenty of other more mundane crimes that everyone commits every day. The system is too corrupt and complicated to completely avoid breaking the law.





  • He can absolutely see through those cards. We trust that he’s not cheating the same way we trust anyone isn’t cheating any other time. She probably wouldn’t actually be that into him (and they would have never been an item) if he wasn’t already better than most men at handling and controlling his emotions. (I think Worf was her “Bad Boy” phase because he is so awful at controlling his and just funnels everything into angry sex.) Point being, if anyone can bluff her, it’s him. Probabilities are useful, but counting cards in most poker variants isn’t that much of an advantage.



  • LOL, not everywhere is like this. Fridays are always the day an emergency project gets dropped in my lap that absolutely must be done before the next Monday because somebody else has a deadline they need to meet (that they’ve known about for months) and they need our work for a critical part of it, but they never seem to remember until Thursday night.


  • I’ve also worked at places where the boss demanded a doctor’s note to return to work. I just said “No, I’m not doing that.” That’s always been the end of it. I returned to work once I was well and continued we all continued on as if it never really was about health and safety in the first place. Lots of places have policies on the books that are either outright illegal or unenforceable, but they get people to tow the line out of fear. If a few of us call their bluff, it’s better for them to quietly move on so that we don’t escalate the situation and shine a light on that policy. If word got around that the policy was unenforceable, they wouldn’t be able to bully the rest into compliance.

    Moreover, not every “sick leave” is something that is contagious, migraines for example. I’ve even taken a sick day preemptively because I got to work and discovered that I’d have to work in close proximity to someone that was actually sick and contagious, but refused to stay home.

    Also, if the company is requiring a professional evaluation in order to work, surely that is something that will be fully expensed to the company. I suppose that dynamic would be different under universal healthcare. But sending people that are recovering from a contagious disease that will resolve itself on its own would still be an incredible strain (and an unnecessary one) on the entire system.


  • I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post’s photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.


  • I was just pointing to the simplest answer I had, which didn’t rely on a bunch of circumstantial and vague hunches. Since you take issue with that, I guess I’ll rant a bit.

    Fake photos have been a thing as long a photos have been. Very little has changed in that regard. The various tips and tricks to spot AI fakes will become obsolete a lot faster than the other critical thinking skills needed to decipher fact from fiction in any other medium: news articles, YouTube videos, social media, etc. This will be especially true as the tools used to make these images will evolve. One of those critical thinking skills is tracing a claim, especially a repeated claim, back to it’s source. Another is looking at the timeline of the spread of the meme. These both involve gathering actual evidence and work for a variety of mediums. This is why so many lamented the death of rigorous independent journalism. Suddenly the news becomes so much more trouble to trust and to verify. AI is here just a fungus feeding off the corpse of journalism in the dense jungle of the death of critical thinking in the news consuming public.





  • Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.



  • I’m not making excuses for anyone, but I’ve accidentally done this. On my phone and messaging app, if I read a text and leave the conversation open (not exiting the thread and the app) I won’t get any further notifications from that person no matter how much they text. I’m sure it’s a setting somewhere, but the setting is dumb. Like, surely I don’t want a bunch of pings when I’m actively conversing with someone and looking at the app, but leaving the thread open and the screen off “should” still get a notification, even if the app is open under my lock screen.


  • “Boring straight lines” as you put it are also a way for the poorest land owners to describe, subdivide, buy, and sell property using simple easy to understand language, often without even the need for a surveyor or a lawyer to get involved. Curved boundary lines are a clear indicator of commercial development at the higher end of that spectrum. Ordinary folks are not going to have the necessary training to do anything to directly subdivide property described in that way without involving lawyers and surveyors.

    Moreover, you often can’t sell a property without ingress and egress access to some public right of way. The same rules for simplicity of geometry apply to those right of ways too. Curves are vague and require complex legalese to describe in words. It also wasn’t too long ago that the precision of survey tools just did not exist to accurately describe parcels as anything but straight line distances with sometimes VERY vague information about orientation. Only more recent subdivisions (often much less than about 100 years old) include curves described with any decent level of precision. When they do describe curves on older documents it’s almost always in reference to large curves along existing structures (like railroads) and the actual geometry of that curve is not fully defined.

    What we see here is only tangentially related to tourism in that it is directly related to the entire business of land development, which includes everything else.


  • Ask a surveyor with experience in Mexico.

    It looks like most of the minor streets are mostly parallel with or perpendicular to the major road to the north and the rest are aligned along the cardinal directions: north & south, east & west. Lots of the properties and their respective drainage and road right of ways were probably apportioned to align with whatever the most significant roadway or canal was in place at the time. I can see the being portioned off using simple legal language like you can buy the north 50 meters of the south 300 meters relative to “this road” and the east 50 meters of the west 200 meters relative to “this canal”. You can accurately divide an area this way without any need to define a grid north, a proper grid coordinate system, and very basic survey tools.

    I’d guess that the other streets oriented to the cardinal directions came later as survey tools and practices advanced or some other change in the way municipalities regulate. For example, in the U.S. you see most gridded streets and lots in older areas, relative to sections townships and ranges, but in new platted developments constantly curving streets are all the rage.

    Whatever the cause, you are seeing the history of land development as the area develops it’s customs around land development.