I mean, everyone is already fucked, and that’s what keeps everyone else in check.

Russia has made great efforts to hack municipal systems all over the world, and may actually have some control over Microsoft systems, owing to that credential hack last year that Microsoft still hasn’t confirmed is contained. (Recent Russian hacking campaigns are using malicious signed MSI files, so my bet is no…)

China has all that communication equipment everywhere, with rumors swirling that it’s intentionally compromised. There’s also Tuya, a massive IOT company that produces its own products and also white label products. And there’s all the EV power inverters that can be hacked and used as a botnet to destroy electrical grids. Not that they need to, because apparently they can shut down the U.S. power grid remotely. And who knows what they’ve managed to do with the U.S.’s backdoor access into telecom systems.

The U.S. has its own devices, hacking, and infiltration efforts, although as a U.S. citizen, my awareness of them is decreased due to U.S. media.

But my core point is that there’s basically a digital Cold War happening. And the U.S. is all but surrendering, making successful surveillance, hacking, and sabotage campaigns more likely.
If a situation goes hot at the same time that large parts of U.S. see poisonings or health issues en masse due to tampering with water supply chemical or filtration systems or even the possible destruction of drinking water systems, the explosion of natural gas lines as C&C systems over pressurize domestic lines, followed by a prolonged grid-wide electrical outage, the U.S. will have basically no ability to do anything but focus on domestic issues.

Sleep has always been a challenge for me. Unmedicated I will either not be able to fall asleep until 2-3 in the morning, or will fall asleep around 11-12, and wake up at 4-5 am.

Throughout the years I’ve tried various modifications to my sleep routine, and am no stranger to medications to help me sleep. (Doctor supervised, while paying attention to all side effects and interactions. Do not try to manage your own sleep without significant research. Case in point: Long term use of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) has been linked to dementia.)

I’ve found that of the things in my sleep routine, the melatonin is the best tool I have to facilitate falling asleep, and having an outlet for my energy during the day is the best way to ensure staying asleep.

It’s also useful to note your surroundings. During winter I’m woken up a lot at exactly 4:40 am, because a neighbor uses their remote start, which causes their car to beep 4 times. (It’s very annoying, because they park on the street outside of my place and start their car as they’re walking to it, so it’s not as if the beeping is for a useful purpose.)
Is something else environmental happening?

I went looking for the alt text because, well, I love the Easter-egg nature of the alt text he provides. Got chills as soon as I realized what he’d done.

So much respect for him.

Oh, snap, bringing me the magic I need, but didn’t know to look for.

I’ve been refusing to update because of video station. Looks like I’m saving your comment for later.

No, because there isn’t a single IP range or user agent, and many developers are going to lengths to defeat anti-scraping measures, which include user agent spoofing as well as vpns and the like to mask the source of the traffic.

They say regulations are written in blood.

Elaine Chao is a conservative government official who is famous for not enforcing safety rules or following up on safety complaints and may have violated ethics laws while Secretary of Transportation under Trump’s first regime. While in that role, she rubber stamped a sketchy driver control system implemented by Tesla that later helped kill her own sister (in addition to drunk driving).

Can the lightning bolt of consequences strike twice?

I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.

There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).

The advice I needed and have not been able to find. I could kiss you. Or at least give you a fond nod.

GifOfSnapeSayingObviously.gif.jpeg.exe

See, for me, it’s not that 7*5 is easier to compute than 7*3, it’s that 5*7 is easier to compute than 7*3.

I saw your other comment about 8’s, too, and I’ve always found those to be a pain, so I reverse them, if not outright convert them to arithmetic problems. 8x4 is some unknown value, but X*8 is always X*10-2X, although do have most of the multiplication tables memorized for lower values.
8*7 is an unknown number that only the wisest sages can compute, however.

The same people who regularly give us uninspiring and insipid candidates to run against demagogues and repeatedly act surprised when they lose ground expect to gain control of a White House where the current president is treating democracy as if it’s an optional hindrance – expect to take power?

If nothing else, I admire their optimism.

They’d threaten legal action for defamation and bury it before it was published.

I’m not sure. I suspect that TextSniper predates the feature on Mac.

On Mac (and iOS, too) recognized text is just treated as text. So on Mac, you just get a text selection/entry cursor (the “I-beam”), and you can select text for whatever action (copy, lookup, etc). On iOS it’s same, except no cursor on account of it being a touch interface. It’s sort of annoying on iOS with images that have a lot of text - double clicking an image to zoom has to be done with care, otherwise it selects text instead of zooming in.

I can also do that on my MacBook.

(This comment is not as facetious as it seems. I knew you could copy text from images, but I just tried to test some limitations, and it’s a weirdly comprehensive feature - I can copy text from photos and/or videos in the screenshots app, the Preview app, the Photos app, QuickTime, and even from YouTube videos in Safari (but not Firefox, interestingly enough) - assuming that means it’s an OS-level thing. Quick search says this rolled out in 2021.)

It’s not quite like that. My workplace is surprisingly good on the hours, they just aren’t great on responsibilities or scope.

It’s… a lot of work in very broad specialties, with little backup.

I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.

But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”

Right? It’s a darn fine marketing effort.

I wish I had approximately double the hours in a given day, and also vastly more coding skill to help in meaningful ways.

It seems sort of odd that comments or messages reported for spam don’t offer any tools. Even a simple url pattern match that gives mods/admins the ability to click a checkbox to remember the link and take some predefined action in the future would be a rudimentary but effective option.

I mean, heck, it’s the fediverse. In my fantasy implementation of an anti-spam approach, it would be possible to federate these lists of untrusted links and assign consensus-based confidence scores for links generated from moderator actions across instances. (With options for instance admins to tailor their own trust scores of other instances, so that each instance can choose for themselves who they trust, just in case a couple rogue instance admins try to poison the spam filter.)
Same concept can be applied to banned accounts, although in that circumstance, I’d suggest they find a way to mask the email address when sharing it. Not that folks won’t just spin up a new email. But, you know. Something is better than nothing.

Hopefully that makes sense. I’m losing my mind with sleep deprivation.

Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.

Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.

Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.