rm_dash_r_star @ rm_dash_r_star @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

In February 2021 Texas severely failed to meet power demand in subzero temperatures that lasted around two weeks. Many power stations across the state became inoperable due to these extreme temperatures. Major cities were almost completely blacked out for extended periods. People were burning furniture to stay warm and a good number of people froze to death.

When that happens on the East or West grid, they just grab power from unaffected regions. In Texas all they can do is rolling blackouts. They know this is a vulnerability in their grid because it happened in 2011 as well.

For some reason they won't harden their stations against the cold, but they wouldn't have to if they just got on the East or West grid. So basically they'd rather risk the lives of Texans than either spend the money to harden stations or suck up to the Feds and get on the national grid. Seems pretty stupid to me, but you know a person can be stupid, but it takes a government to be really stupid.

I don't think it will. People generally don't let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I mean look at some of these wild ideologies people believe to be truth. Some ideologies obviously can't be factual, but people believe them as such anyway. Then they use circular logic to justify them. They'll just circle their way out of the fact other intelligent life exists.

I think it's like the discovery of exoplanets, scientists were pretty sure they existed and already believed they existed in numbers, but when it was proven to be true, there wasn't a whole lot of philosophical change in culture because of it. Though it did narrow down one of the Drake variables for the existence of intelligent life.

Yeah I really disliked it, bots were always trying to chat with me (also follow). I finally had to disable it. Direct messages are fine, but if they ever add following or chat here, the first thing I'll do is disable it. I mean if I want to chat (which is rare), I'll just head over to Discord.

I recently watched a documentary about the USA power grid and was surprised to find we have three, East, West, and Texas. How weird is that.

Anyway Texas set out to be independent early 20th century because they did not want to be subject to federal regulations. Unfortunately that leaves them vulnerable. They can't tap into the national grid if there's a deficit, which has happened several times due to extreme weather. Texans just have to go without power and it's always at the worst time. They know they have this vulnerability and are not dealing with it for whatever reason.

Also they can't sell surplus to the national grid because they're not connected to it. I mean nobody can force them to hook up, but if I was a Texan I'd want my state to suck it up for the sake of having redundancy in the system and sparing the catastrophe.

A smart sort would be great. Maybe even some custom settings for it, like weights for community, upvotes, replies, etc.

I recognized the tug part right off. That's a lot of custom bodywork. These days they just CG stuff like that. Back then they actually had to make props. Sometimes they did a pretty poor job, but that one is high end. I'm actually old enough to have seen that show, but I don't remember ever watching it.

Discord is great for real time chat, but really bad for threaded conversation which was what Reddit was good at. Didn't anybody mention the Fediverse and Lemmy/kbin to them?

Of course they are blocking VPNs, but using one to access Meta is more effort than it's worth.

Haven't been there since the blackout, don't miss it. I've always gone there with desktop browser running uBO so I never did see adds there except for inline stuff once in a while. That's one nice thing about Lemmy, looks exactly the same whether the blocker is on or off.

Haha, I'm so old that box would contain a typewriter.

Anyway young people like to think they have some control over ageing, like they can be thirty forever. Sorry to say it's not going to happen. There's things you can do to stave it off, but it will catch up with you. When you're young you don't think about it, you take it for granted. When you get old and feel the loss you think about it a lot.

Age caught up with me noticeably at an age older than forty something, but I'm really feeling it now. Forties are young enough where a health regiment of some kind can improve sense of well being. If overweight just getting down to an ideal can help greatly. I've had to battle my weight most of my life and when I can maintain a good weight it makes a really big difference in how I feel.

As far as not getting modern culture, it goes ten feet over my head now. I wish I could live in the the 90's forever.

As a natural US citizen it took me a while to understand what I was taught about US history in grade school was not entirely accurate. US independence was about corporate interest. The land barons and industrialists did not want to pay taxes to the crown. That was the offense that led to a declaration of independence, everything else was cursory.

At most half the American population was in favor of independence. Those that spoke against independence were labeled as Tories and terrorized into submission (sometimes horribly). The people with money and influence led a campaign of terror against them. If they had actually held a vote and went with majority rule, it's likely we'd still be a British territory.

As far as the constitution, the authors did not consider other races as equals with human rights. When they said, "Liberty and justice for all." they were talking strictly about men of European descent. Even white women were not considered in the term "all". This is how the genocide of native people and slavery was justified. The people suffering these horrors were considered animals same as livestock. This ideology originated in the major Christian churches of the time which were all run by, you guessed it, men of European descent.

Of course in modern times we know that human genetics are one of the least variant of any species on the planet, but back then they relied on the Church instead of science. You can thank those guys for over a millennia of dark ages and unjust human rights.

Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.

Though they're on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there's a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don't have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They've been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.

I think a problem for new users is failing to understand how the Fediverse works. It's not something apparent and not something you can expect everyone to understand right off the bat. A user may start out on a heavily loaded instance and get discouraged by poor response. They either figure out they need to find a better instance or base their opinion of the whole on that one experience and give up altogether.

Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world can suffer from heavy user load and bog down at times. That situation can be avoided by selecting an instance that's not too heavily loaded. There's a large number to choose from. It may be necessary to shop around for a good one. In technical terms, find a regionally local instance with low hops, fast ping, and good server response. Also admin settings and quality can be a consideration. I actually signed up on four instances before I found one I really liked.

Yeah lemm.ee runs really good, great admin there, also a contributor, but shhh, don't tell anyone, don't want it to get overcrowded.

Penn and Teller, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Musk and Spez

Producers got away with going to non-replaceable batteries because "most" people replace their phone before the battery wears out. Only a portion of consumers have a problem with it.

I'm sure there's a few of us that can comfortably get six years off a phone. In fact the phone I'm currently using is coming up on three years. I could probably get another three years out of it, but I'm going to have to replace it soon because of battery wear.

Non-replaceable batteries are bad for the consumer and bad for the environment. It forces obsolescence putting more financial strain on consumers and increases environmental impact with higher production and waste.

A phone replaced before three years could be sold second hand with a battery replacement. Otherwise consumers could keep a phone twice as long. So they're basically doubling the rate of production and waste to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer. Then there's zero regard for the environment. But you know that's typical of how corporations do business, rape the Earth, screw the consumer. We have to keep a leash on these guys.

It's supposed to be seamless, but there can be issues in federation between Lemmy and kbin. I log into Lemmy and have a number of subscriptions to kbin magazines. I've found it to be less than perfectly reliable. Consider they're two different platforms with two different teams. Development is running at a quick pace making it more likely for something to break. If that happens they're not always directly aware of issues between them.

Also instances don't synchronize all content between all instances. They do it on demand so if you're the first one on that particular instance to subscribe to a particular remote community then the instance will start federating content at that point.

do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?

The thing about BSD is it's fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it's highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you're comfortable with Linux you'll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.

Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it's market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There's been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don't really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won't get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.

There's a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It's probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.

Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.

I think it depends on what you mean by safe. Do you mean privacy of personal data or protection against malicious software?

If you mean safe in terms of malicious software, probably Android is safer since there's more vetting with respect to software installation. On Windows the simple act of downloading and opening an exe file can install malicious software. Most Android apps are installed through the store where programs are vetted. It's possible to sideload stuff on Android (download and install an apk), but most people don't go to the trouble. It's not enabled by default and it's not a trivial process to do it.

If you're talking in terms of securing private data, I'd say Windows because there's more control over the data programs can access. Android programs have a lot of access to data on your phone by default and you have to specifically disable it. Windows programs don't have access by default and you have specifically enable it.

If you want to go full paranoid with respect to telemetry, it's much easier to do that with Windows since you have easy access to low level configuration settings through regedit, also the group policy editor. In other words you can configure a Windows machine to disallow any telemetry and MS even provides a guide for it in their online technical documents.

Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn't realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.

Back then Linux didn't protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I've since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven't tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn't it?