cassetti @ cassetti @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I'm pretty sure it's length of time. If you're on a train next to someone, you won't be for more than an hour or two. Not two days.

When the device follows you constantly for multiple days is likely when it'll make the alert.

no no no, they don't want you to use google. They want you to use Reddit search instead, because it's so awesome!

Yup! That was another thing - since I had Wednesdays off, I scheduled my appointments and errands for that day so I didn't have to run out of the office to get stuff done during the week. It really did make me a more efficient employee.

Alas, that's too progressive for boomers to even think about. They'd rather us work 7 days a week without any breaks!

I've told this story before, but about a decade ago I had banked enough PTO days that I was able to take off every Wednesday in the summer (with my boss's permission, natch). So I effectively worked no more than two days in a row for four straight months. Off weekends, work monday/tuesday, off Wednesday, then back to work Thursday/Friday.

The first month went about as expected - "yay! Wednesday off!!". But I wasn't expecting to experience what I did by the second month of my experiment: my mental health and attitude towards work had changed. That "Monday blues" you get was gone. Every work day felt like a "Thursday" or a "Friday" to me - because the "weekend" was no more than a day away. The dread of Sunday evenings knowing work was starting the following day disappeared.

By halfway through my experiment, I was happy to go to work because there was stuff I wanted to accomplish and thus was more efficient at my job. Nobody ever complained that I was gone every Wednesday for four months, my work always got finished on time (or ahead of schedule).

But I really was shocked at how my mental health improved by NOT working five days in a row.

I fully support a four day work week and wish everyone has the opportunity to experience what I did.

There is already a bluetooth device you can purchase that works with most any smartphone - it allows you to subscribe to a text messaging service which uses satellite communication (only a few messages per month if I recall correctly). I forget the brand but it hit the market like a year ago.

Lol I'm not talking about dispensary businesses. I'm talking about online shops selling hardware like glass pipes and stuff. It's dumb, but it affects many small businesses in the USA.

Sadly there is no simple way to install a virtual ATM for payments on an online store

The messed up part is that while you can't do tobacco product sales using Paypal in the USA, if you're outside the USA paypal will totally take your business. As I've been told directly from Paypal's representatives - they want our business, but it's VISA putting down the rules about what merchant services can work with tobacco/firearm/cannabis sales - and there aren't many in the country (Paypal, Square, etc are not on that list).

So real talk, VISA isn't much better - if you have a business selling tobacco, cannabis, or firearm related products you have a really hard time taking payments online. Most big vendors (like Paypal, Square, etc) won't work with you once you hit $5k to $10k a year in sales (for small businesses starting out you'll slip by for a few months until you grow big enough to get manually audited).

Then you need to find special card processing banks who are approved by VISA to work with tobacco/firearm companies and go through all sorts of review before your store will be approved for processing payments.

And that's just selling hardware like pipes and accessories. I'm not even talking about the raw material itself.

This sucks, but it won't stop anyone, they'll simply switch to another service. I bet VISA's stock will pop tomorrow because of this news if it hasn't already haha

Not just Canada, I know that also happens in the USA at some shops

Not just in Canada, I know that exists in the USA as well

Ahhh that takes me back to 2012, back when I was too poor to afford a $1000 Prusa Mendel 3D printer kit. So instead I tried to build my own printer from scratch using plans for an alternative RepRap printer ("Ecksbot") and used a work's Makerbot Replicator to 3D print parts for the printer.

Phew was that a mistake - I printed everything in ABS and the parts were extremely weak due to my poor skills at 3D printing at the time (RepetierG didn't have the best slicing software lol). It was such a mess - the printer couldn't really print correctly, the carriage for the extruder was loose. And it took me forever to figure out how to calibrate esteps because I was completely new to all of it and documentation was extremely limited back then.

After that failure I tried to build another kit printer (SeeMeCNC Rostock Max Delta 3D printer) only to give up calibrating the printer (dang injection-molded push rods had seams that needed to be precisely sanded down for smooth movements and a bunch of other headaches).

Ultimately I decided that unlike you, I loathe tinkering with 3D printers. I just want to design models and print them without any concern "will they print correctly". So I splurged on a factory assembled Prusa MK3s and haven't looked back.

God I hate those no-contact temperature sensors - people use them on literally every surface without realizing there's something called thermal emissivity - different surfaces reflect and radiate heat differently. A glass or metal surface will reflect heat much differently from wood or drywall surfaces.

These cheap no-contact temp sensors usually are set to measure the heat from surfaces found in home construction - drywall, wood, painted surfaces, etc. Some of the nicer ones can have adjustable emissivity but most people never tinker with that setting.

Now if you're using a nice FLiR thermal camera, you absolutely need to tinker with emissivity to get a good image.

Given the fact that the display on this temp sensor does not display the emissivity setting, I'd assume it's fixed - and not set to accurately read the temperature of that metal surface.

Relevant XKCD comic immediately popped into my mind

For anyone curious, I asked ChatGPT What would be the implications if true, and here was it's reply:

As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there had been no verified room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductors. However, if such a claim were to be validated and a room-temperature superconductor were indeed discovered, it would have profound implications across various fields:

1. Energy Efficiency: Room-temperature superconductors would revolutionize power generation, transmission, and storage. Power grids and electrical devices that utilize superconductors could operate without energy losses due to resistance, resulting in significantly improved energy efficiency.
2. Transportation: Room-temperature superconductors could be used in magnetic levitation (Maglev) trains, making them more practical and cost-effective to implement. Maglev trains already have lower friction and energy consumption than traditional trains, and with superconductors, their performance could be further enhanced.
3. Medical Applications: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines that use superconducting magnets would become more accessible and cheaper to operate. This could lead to increased availability of high-quality medical imaging and improved healthcare diagnostics.
4. Electronics: Room-temperature superconductors could enable the development of extremely fast and energy-efficient electronic devices, leading to advancements in computing and communication technologies.
5. Scientific Research: Superconductors are essential for high-energy physics research, so a room-temperature superconductor would potentially revolutionize particle accelerators, allowing for more accessible and cost-effective facilities for scientific exploration.
6. Renewable Energy: The efficiency of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power could be greatly improved by using superconductors in their power generation and storage systems.
7. Transportation Electrification: Electric vehicles (EVs) could benefit from room-temperature superconductors, allowing for faster charging and longer-range capabilities.
8. Industrial Applications: Superconductors could enhance the efficiency of motors, generators, and other industrial equipment, leading to reduced energy consumption and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
9. Aerospace: Aerospace technologies could benefit from lightweight, energy-efficient superconducting components, making space exploration and aviation more economical and sustainable.
10. Scientific Understanding: The discovery of room-temperature superconductors could potentially lead to new insights into the fundamental principles of condensed matter physics, offering a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics and material properties.

It's important to note that claims of room-temperature superconductors need to be carefully scrutinized and independently verified by the scientific community. If such a discovery were confirmed, it would be a groundbreaking achievement with far-reaching implications for various industries and scientific research.

I've been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.

Back in the mid 90's, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft's Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don't miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don't miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).

Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn't a thing for quite a while.

I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I've used ever since in various careers over the decades.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That's when I noticed a big shift in online communities.

Desantis is vying for political points that he can use nationally. He and his campaign think it'll score them points that might help them prove to be more "Trumpy" than other candidates.

Yeah, I hate to break this to ya, but if you've "seen" Biden's public speeches from twenty years ago, you'd see he still had a speech impediment - one he's had his entire life and spent a lot of work to control. As someone else who has trouble speaking in public, props to him for rising above it.

And the sad part? People are literally mocking his speech impediment to make it seem like he has dementia when they know the truth - that's like making fun of someone for being stuck in a wheelchair. But once again, it shows the class of the people we're dealing with.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/05/politics/joe-biden-stutter/index.html

But let me guess, mocking an orange clown for the makeup they choose to smear on daily would be considered "crossing the line" to you, right?

TOTALLY get it. I've gone as far as blocking ads at the router-level so I don't see ads browsing the internet or using apps on my phone inside my network. Plus I have ublock origin to help catch any extra ads that sneak through the router block.

To say I see no ads is an understatement. The only reason why I know about the "he gets us" ads is because I hear people complain about them. Not once have I seen one hahaha.

After fifteen years, I cancelled my Netflix last year. Don't miss it at all.

I think all these streaming platforms forget that not all of us need to watch their content 24/7. I spend less than an hour watching television a day while eating food and that's it.

Did you know that you can still enjoy Youtube ad-free (or the occasional 10-second skippable ad). How do you do it? By not watching youtube at all aside from the random how-to video. Since I watch less than an hour of youtube a month on average, I see essentially zero ads.

And the same thing is happening with AI. Friend of mine who is a programmer has a few side projects for customers. One of them got impatient trying to get him to fix a bug in their software. So instead they tried to use ChatGPT to fix the bug, and it went as well as can be expected.

Having worked with ChatGPT to program code, I've seen it literally invent fake modules, declare variables, call up this fake module and then never bother to declare the code for that special module (which supposedly does 99% of what you want it to do). And if you ask it to program the missing module, it simply declares that module and calls up a new magical module that still does 99% of the desired work. It's and endless loop that goes nowhere lol

Oh yeah, very good points. Although I'm lazy with my purple pitcher plant. It gets tap water from the hose because I never have enough quality RO water to keep them from drying out and they seem to be doing fine in my climate.

But totally I'm pretty sure my sundews died from not using adequate RO or distilled water.