StrangeATractor

Whenever the topic of controlled burns come up lately the (American) Indian angle comes up and they almost always make it sound like some Magical Indian who's in tune with the Earth and knows how to read fire and weather in ways nobody else can, like something from Pocahontas or something.

The cynic in me sees this as a PR move to take a somewhat contentious issue and make it more palatable for people that think "all fire"="bad" or that it's some sort of contrived forest management practice which makes it bad. Most liberals opposed to controlled burns probably don't want to think of themselves as having a colonizer mindset either.

What people really need to be discussing is how the USFS burn practices need to be changed. They like to burn in warmer weather when fuels are drier, because it saves money on personnel. This also makes them more likely to jump containment lines and get out of control.

I usually just pull off at a truck stop for sleep if I'm traveling, but even those have been getting filled up lately. Plenty of exits will just have semis lined up on the shoulder because there's no room anywhere else and they can only drive so many hours by law.

How do you even represent HDR colors? I've tried Googling this and I can never really find an answer. Is it basically just eight hex digits instead of six?

I wouldn't fuck with the FAA, their interpretation of what they say is what's really the law, not what's written in the FAR.

About 30 years ago a pilot in a floatplane was on step as he went under a bridge (he was still in the water, but the floats ride closer to the surface than when it's at near-idle speeds). When the FAA somehow got wind of this, they really put the screws on him because in their interpretation he was flying under the bridge (very illegal), even though he wasn't airborne. Nowhere to my knowledge did the FARs make this distinction between floating and flying. You'd think in a case like this they'd let it go, maybe update the rules to clarify, but they really went after him for it.

The teacher may start off a class with a question like "what is the most efficient way to satisfy this problem given these constraints?" Some people would know the answer immediately but couldn't do a proof for it hardly at all. Others could find a proof in class almost every time, but necer really saw the answer to the problem until they'd sat on it for a while and chewed over it.

Can't really give an example question, it's been well over a decade (closer to two) since I took it.

I have to say re: pipewire that it's one of the few (redhat?) projects of the past 15-20 years that doesn't seem to have generated a ton of hate from users so it must be pretty good all around.

Classes like this were funny. I often found that people who just knew the answer immediately had a lot of difficulty doing proofs, and the people good at doing proofs usually didn't arrive at the solution very quickly or seem to have an intuitive understanding of the problem at first.

Some people are just wired differently.

They tried to blackmail MLK to get him to kill himself. A department created originally to fight the mob started acting exactly like it. There's no way a reasonable person's faith in an organization like that could ever be restored.

Imagine the information that isn't public about their misdeeds.

Honestly every time the FBI is in the news I get confirmation they're a bunch of lying incompent sleaze bags backed and protected by the state.

This is ridiculous and really only happens because the cost of securing your customer (or citizen) data is higher than the cost of losing control of it. If the cost of losing data to hacks was, say three times higher than the cost estimated to secure it, the problem would become much less common very quickly.

As it is, states and corporations externalize the costs of hacks to the victims of their incompetence. They have no reason to take opsec seriously because they aren't held liable in even the most egrigious cases. Data should be a liability.

Great. Let's see what sort of response this gets from the gov't.

At some point we need to start treating data as a liability.

This may be more widespread than you think. My local library is in a city with under 250,000 people which has lax enforcement and tons of services for homeless people, including giving them housing and counseling. The library doesn't really get non-homeless people there anymore. Maybe it was the screaming and shitting in library aisles, or the bedbugs likely brought in by the homeless population that were living in the books people checked out, or the used needles they leave around instead of putting in the sharps disposal container. Who wants to bring their kids there?

Homelessness is really a complicated problem. Money gets thrown at it and it doesn't really get any better.

GP mixed up vim with emacs.

Mag isn't too bad, I believe you also get acclimated to it (haven't taken it in a while).

IME it's not much different from having a fiber-heavy diet.

It's about equally extreme in the level of accountability as well (for better or worse).

Hah, I brought this up here a few months ago and was quickly dismissed.

I wonder if opening GPT and DALLE to the public was partly intended to pollute subsequent data for anyone that gets into AI down the road. Suddenly a lot of publicly accessible data is worth less, leaving only players who've got a hoard of time-stamped data to compete with (like Google, Facebook). OpenAI almost certainly has the hashes of what it spits out too, so they'll be able to sort the wheat from the chaff for a while yet.

The market for data may be getting interesting.

Not even thinking about trying this without source code.

It's a mixed bag. Everything you do IRL gets photographed and uploaded by your friends without your consent for future potential employers to scour through, Twitter becoming the whole world's HR department, your name, address and employer readily available with a Google search, etc.

I basically don't post too many opinions unless I'm on an alt account, and I'm considering tor for that going forward.

or save scum it to get the loot. I got umbra gear not too long after getting out of the sewers in Oblivion by opportune saving.

Great! But I imagine a lot of jobs we'd expect to be gaining will be automated. With the state of AI and robotics this trend will accelerate. We also lose a lot of interdependency which has its own problems.

I'm going out on a limb, but I can't see a downside to making an "ADA for the web". Any for-profit company of a certain size or revenue has to have their content available in plaintext, including audio and videos being transcribed. Content should also be available without artificial restriction (like DRM), so you can use whatever software you like to process the text.

If everything is going digital, this will be necessary for visually impaired people to access critical information.

I'd take this with a grain of salt, NatGeo is garbage nowadays. Most their covers are bible-themed judging from my trips to the grocery store. Of course they'd push a silver bullet to climate change.

...because it breaks vi.

There may be suspicions about drones with unusual flight characteristics which may or may be be detectable with current sensors, and all this seemingly serious discussion from the government about UAPs may make people more likely to report strange things they see. Witnesses (with phone cameras) could potentially provide them with more information than they already have.

That's not so outrageous, Google gives you different search experiences based on your user agent.

If you pay with cash you never get a tip prompt.

I mean, you could be picking up human shit instead.

I want to go to the site of the CP-1 reactor. Not much left but a plaque, but that's where the modern age really began. Apparently you can buy some graphite from the CP-1 as a paperweight, but I'm not sure how legit it is. They say you can buy trinitite too, but the market has a lot of fakes.