tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Birmingham 20mph limit: 'Life saver' or 'war on cars'? 31 minutes ago:
I think that there’s a fair point that a lot of the road layout in a lot of cities was designed before cars. There are properties without setbacks, with doors that open right onto the street. Blind corners. No sidewalks. Unless one is expensively going to raze a huge amount of property, one can’t rebuild that road network any time soon. And if people drive on that kind of infrastructure at optimal-for-cars speeds on it, it creates costs.
But I also think that there’s a fair point that people need to get around, and that slow transport imposes a lot of costs on society.
I think that if one is to slow traffic in an area, it should be coupled with efforts to build out higher speed alternate routes, like bypasses that route through traffic around villages, rather than straight through their old city center.
- Comment on It’s OK to fight for a foreign army (as long as they’re our friends) 1 day ago:
It’s been quite a while since the UK was in a sticky situation and on the receiving end of volunteers, but:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Squadrons
The Eagle Squadrons were three fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force (RAF) formed with volunteer pilots from the United States during the early days of World War II (1940), prior to the United States’ entry into the war in December 1941.
My assumption is that the author doesn’t object to this.
- Comment on Olive Branch MS mayor refusing to lower flag for Dolly 4 days ago:
If I flew a flag, I wouldn’t personally lower it for Dolly Parton.
But I also wouldn’t be upset if someone else did (or if someone else chose not to do so).
I also wouldn’t lower such a personal flag for Donald Trump’s death, and US Flag Code does specify it on the death of people who have served as president. I don’t feel that he’s earned a salute of respect from me. That being said, I understand and would expect federal institutions and such that do follow US Flag Code to do so.
- Comment on When every candidate you supported loses the election 1 week ago:
The older stickers should also have more wear and tear, I’d think.
- Comment on A fine dining restaurant served a quadriplegic woman a desert that read "happy birthday wheelchair" 1 week ago:
There’s an infamous incident in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, near the end of World War II.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_world_wonders
The world wonders" is a phrase which rose to notoriety following[a] its use during World War II when it appeared as part of a decoded message sent by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Admiral William Halsey Jr. at the height of the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944.[2] The words, intended to be without meaning, were added as security padding in an encrypted message to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis, but were mistakenly included in the decoded text given to Halsey. Halsey interpreted the phrase as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke, and as a consequence dropped his futile pursuit of a decoy Japanese carrier task force, and, belatedly, reversed some of his ships in a fruitless effort to aid United States forces in the Battle off Samar.[3]
When Nimitz, at CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, saw Kinkaid’s plea for help he sent a message to Halsey, simply asking for the current location of Task Force 34, which due to a previous misunderstanding, was unclear:[7]
Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?
With the addition of metadata including routing and classification information, as well as the padding at the head and tail, the entire plaintext message to be encoded and transmitted to Halsey was:
TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS[9]
U.S. Navy procedure called for the padding to be added to the start and end of the message, which were vulnerable to cryptanalysis due to the use of common phrases and words (such as “Yours sincerely”) in those sections.[10] The words chosen for padding should have been obviously irrelevant to the actual message, but Nimitz’s enciphering clerk used a phrase that “[just] popped into my head”.[11] Historians note similarity to Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” about the eponymous battle, which was also fought on October 25[12] (of 1854), as the poem twice contains the phrase “All the world wonder’d”.
While decrypting and transcribing the message, Halsey’s radio officer properly removed the leading phrase, but the trailing phrase looked appropriate and he seems to have thought it was intended and so left it in before passing it on to Halsey,[2] who read it as:
Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.
The structure tagging (the 'RR’s) should have made clear that the phrase was in fact padding. In all the ships and stations that received the message, only the decoder on Halsey’s flagship, USS New Jersey, failed to delete both padding phrases.[13]
The message (and its trailing padding) became infamous, and created some ill feeling, since it appeared to be a harsh criticism by Nimitz of Halsey’s decision to pursue the decoy carriers and leave the landings uncovered. “I was stunned as if I had been struck in the face”, Halsey later recalled. “The paper rattled in my hands, I snatched off my cap, threw it on the deck, and shouted something I am ashamed to remember”, letting out an anguished sob.[14] Rear Admiral Robert Carney, Halsey’s chief of staff (who had argued strongly in favor of pursuing the carriers), witnessed Halsey’s emotional outburst and reportedly grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, shouting, “Stop it! What the hell’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together!” In Halsey’s recollection, he called it an “infernally plausible” message, saying “I was so mad I couldn’t talk. It was utterly impossible for me to believe that Chester Nimitz had sent me such an insult. He hadn’t, of course, but I didn’t know the truth for several weeks.”[15] Recognizing his failure, Halsey ordered his fleet south, however the chase north had exhausted the fuel of his light escorts and more time was wasted refueling while Taffy 3 (Task Unit 77.4.3, commanded by Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague) was fighting for its life. Halsey returned to Samar with his two fastest battleships, three light cruisers and eight destroyers, but he arrived too late to have any impact on the battle.[16]
- Comment on Digital tags have to go. 1 week ago:
Honestly, the real problem is that ragebait works. Like, if that’s what people decide to engage with on social media, then that’s what’s going to show up, whether it’s skimmed highly-scoring Reddit content or not.
You could try to produce “no-ragebait” communities.
You could try to introduce a recommendation algorithm that uses heuristics to try to identify ragebait and let users who don’t want it filter it out or simply recommend based on their scoring.
- Comment on ASDA can fuck right off 1 week ago:
Halfway to the point of being able to just leave them up year-round!
- Comment on A fine dining restaurant served a quadriplegic woman a desert that read "happy birthday wheelchair" 1 week ago:
Hmm. Could be.
searches
www.msn.com/en-us/…/ar-AA2aMzua
A spokesperson for Blu On The Hudson sent CBS News New York the following statement:
"We at Blu on the Hudson are aware of the recent video circulating on social media, and we are deeply saddened by what occurred. We sincerely apologize to the guest and to everyone who was hurt or offended by this incident which took place on June 20, 2026. Treating every guest with dignity, respect, and care is fundamental to who we are as a company.
"We want to provide some context regarding what happened, not as an excuse, but to explain how this unfortunate mistake occurred.
"Our standard operating procedure is to use table and seat numbers on tickets to identify where each dish should be delivered. In this instance, the word “wheelchair” was used as a reference to identify where a birthday dessert with a candle should be delivered. Unfortunately, that notation was misunderstood and was written on the plate itself. There was absolutely no malicious or disrespectful intent behind the notation. However, we fully understand how seeing that word written on a plate could be deeply hurtful and upsetting.
"Since the incident, we have reinforced with our team the importance of following proper ticketing and communication procedures and have taken steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. We have also made an attempt to reach the guest directly to personally apologize, although we have not yet been able to connect with them.
"We understand that an apology cannot undo the hurt or frustration caused by this incident, but we sincerely hope it conveys how deeply sorry we are. Blu on the Hudson is proud to be a part of the Hudson County community, and we are committed to being a place where every guest feels welcomed, respected, and valued.
“We are deeply sorry for this occurrence, have learned from it, and are committed to doing better moving forward.”
- Comment on A fine dining restaurant served a quadriplegic woman a desert that read "happy birthday wheelchair" 1 week ago:
If I had to make a bet, there’s some note about what dish is supposed to go to whom and the waiter let it merge into the note about what text was supposed to be there.
- Comment on New Delhi - during lockdown vs now 1 week ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_Delhi
Air pollution in Delhi, the capital of India, was found to be one of the most lethal of any city in the world in an August 2022 study of 7,000 world cities by the US-based Health Effects Institute.[2] Air pollution in India is estimated to kill about 2 million people every year. India has the world’s highest death rate from chronic respiratory diseases and asthma according to the World Health Organization.[3] In Delhi, poor air quality has irreversibly damaged the lungs of 2.2 million children.
On 25 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India expressed their sentiments on the pollution in Delhi, saying “Delhi has become worse than narak (hell)”.[4] Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra remarked that it is “better to get explosives, (and) kill everyone.”[5]
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in India, the air quality in Delhi significantly improved.[6][7]
India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences published a research paper in October 2018 attributing almost 41% of air pollution to vehicular emissions, 21.5% to dust and 18% to industrial emissions.[8]
If it’s mostly vehicle emissions, I wonder how far people there typically go. Like, if it’s people who are only driving around the city, that might be a good candidate for EV use.
- Comment on Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors. 1 week ago:
I’d kind of like to have a monitor with an ambient light sensor that has the ability to adjust display brightness the way smartphones and some other devices often do.
There are a few projects for Linux that let one run a daemon and some kind of attached ambient lightness sensor, but I’d prefer it to operate regardless of whether or not the OS is running, like in the BIOS and bootloader and such.
- Comment on California colleges bought everyone ChatGPT. No one knows what to do with it. 1 week ago:
If it weren’t for the fact that the Internet is cheaper and readers aren’t as universally-deployed as they were wirh floppies, SD cards being mailed could have been kinda neat.
- Comment on California colleges bought everyone ChatGPT. No one knows what to do with it. 1 week ago:
The era when companies sent out physical floppies, which could actually be usefully reused if you didn’t care about the content on them, was a lot better than the physical CD era.
- Comment on Firebombs thrown at supercars outside Birmingham wedding venue 1 week ago:
Yeah, I was kind of wondering whether the firebombers were right-wing, and racial, or left-wing, after wealthy people.
I will say one thing, that either way, the property damage probably is covered by insurance, so it gets paid for by slightly driving up British insurance premiums.
- Comment on Demo now available for Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter 1 week ago:
TiTS 2.
- Comment on Opinion: I’ve cycled through red lights. But Britain’s traffic laws are to blame, not me 1 week ago:
I normally approve of anarchy. There is too much regulation everywhere. The great Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman boldly advocated “shared space” in cities. He wanted kerbs, road markings and traffic signals minimised and replaced by “human discipline”. All road users should navigate urban space by watching out for each other all the time.
Um.
I think that there should be serious consideration given to rolling back traffic laws, where there’s a specific argument in favor of doing so. Inertia can be stifling.
In the US, for a long time, right-on-red was illegal. (Right-on-red permits someone to turn right at a red light as long as they come to a full stop first and yield to other traffic.) There were (plausible) arguments that this would be dangerous. A few states tried it, and it worked all right, and today, essentially the entire US permits it (New York City being a notable exception).
If you had asked me to just guess whether it was safe without empiricial testing, I don’t know if I’d have gotten the answer right.
But there’s a big difference between “being open to trying out specific rollbacks” and “eliminate all of the rules en masse on philosophical grounds”.
- Comment on Opinion: I’ve cycled through red lights. But Britain’s traffic laws are to blame, not me 1 week ago:
I liked this bit:
Traffic lights can now be rendered sensitive to queues waiting at them
Smart traffic lights probably have all kinds of technical challenges, but if you can do them well, traffic lights can finally catch up with human-directed traffic—you never need to wind up with a situation where intersections are empty and users are still blocked.
It’d be especially nice at night or other low-traffic times, where there’s more of that.
I’d cost more, but I think that a lot of people would be okay with more cost for better throughput.
I’d also add that they could even change before vehicles reach them — don’t need to wait for a queue to form.
- Comment on The Diamond Industry’s Old Guard Wants You to Buy ‘Natural’ 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Wildfire phone alert was 'entirely appropriate', government says 2 weeks ago:
The problem I have is that I think that the alerting feature has cases where it’s really important.
I remember a story a while back about a German town that flooded after severe, unexpected rains meant that an upstream dam was at risk of failure and had to release large amounts of water.
The authorities knew that the flood was coming and had a small amount of time to warn people, but didn’t reach many people. As I recall, they didn’t the “alert everyone in an area system” thing, but used mass-sending SMSes and similar, whuch take time to go out and don’t have the same audible alarm. Many people did not get the alert.
searches
theguardian.com/…/german-villages-could-be-left-w…
German flood alert system criticised for ‘monumental failure’
Questions raised over lack of warning as death toll passes 150 and villages are left without drinking water, power or gas
The head of Germany’s federal office of civil protection and disaster assistance appeared to shift the blame to local authorities. “The warning infrastructure as such wasn’t our problem, but the question of how sensitive the public authorities and the population are in their response”, said the agency’s president, Armin Schuster.
Schuster told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that digital warnings, such as through warning apps, text messages or emails, did not always reach all those at risk. Instead, he called for an investment programme to increase the number of flood-warning sirens in areas that could see more floods in the coming years.
Now, that is a legitimate example of where I very much want to have the government have the ability to reach me via pretty much any way possible. This is the sort of thing that such an alerting system exists for. The alert has immediacy, and must be dealt with now. It is important to the individual recieving it, provides new information that they will very probably want to have, and could not act in the absence of. Alternatives are not nearly as good.
The problem is that for this sort of system to work, it requires that the authorities exhibit great restraint in use of their power to interrupt everything, everywhere in an area, immediately, and seize phone owners attention.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
Really depends on location, because it’s dependent on how people in an area act. If they’re plugging things into it, then it can have a ton of data.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
There’s OpenStreetMap. I’m not saying that it’s as suitable as Google Maps for you, but it’s a possible option.
The’re not a commercial service, and the database backing it is freely distributable, so it won’t get cut off.
- Comment on Wildfire phone alert was 'entirely appropriate', government says 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think that using this is a good idea unless there is a substantial probability that the owner of the phone needs to take action or be personally impacted. A tornado or flood warning, maybe.
Nagging at people to be on good behavior just pisses them off.
I remember during COVID-19 when my county health department (in the US) decided to keep sending sporadic alerts reminding people to social-distance. And used a robocaller to hit landlines with the same message. I was pretty disgusted. If there is a major regulatory change that affects everyone, okay, maybe then. If you’re just repeating a message reminsing pwople to social-distance for the fifth time in the hopes that more people will comply, that just makes me think that the alerting system needs to be taken out of your hamds.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 2 weeks ago:
We live on an island surrounded by water on a planet that is two-thirds water. If you want to make water a commodity to make profit then you have to intstil the idea that there’s scarcity of water.
So, I agree that there is plenty of water available to the UK. But…you can’t just wave away distribution and processing costs, either. Those are real. And it’s in those services that there is scarcity, thst there is cost to bui’ding out capacity.
Most people are after freshwater rather than saltwater, so you’ve either got to desalinate saltwater or draw from freshwater.
And most people care about the location of their water. Like, they want to turn the knob on their tap and have it come out there, not have a bunch of water at the beach.
If you want to go to the beach, you can collect all the saltwater you want, without restriction. And if you transport it home and want to desalinate it, you can run a small electric still yourself (not the most cost-effective way to desalinate at scale, but just to demonstrate that it’s possible at an individual level). More or less, just an electric kettle plus a condenser. They’re on Amazon in the US, and I expect also the UK.
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 2 weeks ago:
IIRC, some substantial construction on new reservoirs did happen recently, after a long—heh—drought.
goes looking
premierconstructionnews.com/…/holcim-uk-awarded-s…
Holcim UK Awarded Supply Contract for UK’s First Reservoir in Over 30 Years
Holcim UK is delighted to announce its appointment by Future Water MJJV Ltd to supply essential materials for the construction of the UK’s first reservoir in over 30 years – Portsmouth Waters’ Havant Thicket reservoir. The reservoir is an environmentally-led project that will help to safeguard internationally rare chalk rivers in Hampshire by providing an alternative, sustainable source of water.
The reservoir, which is being delivered by Future Water MJJV Ltd, a joint venture between Jones Bros Civil Engineering UK and JT Mackley & Co Ltd, is expected to be completed by the early 2030s. It is estimated to take approximately three years to fill and will have the capacity to hold up to 8.7 billion litres of water, playing a crucial role in enhancing water security for the region.
gov.uk/…/government-steps-in-to-build-first-major…
Government steps in to build first major reservoirs in 30 years
New reservoirs will supply three quarters of a million homes and unlock the building of tens of thousands more as part of the Plan for Change
- Comment on Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought 2 weeks ago:
I’m kind of curious how it compares to some of the cities here in the US.
:::spoiler Thames Water, London, UK
www.thameswater.co.uk/help/…/metered-customers
We’ll send you a bill every six months. Your bill will show charges for every cubic metre (m3) of water used.
One cubic metre equals 1,000 litres which is an estimated 25 quick showers. It costs £2.7346 per m3 for clean water and £1.4721 per m3 for wastewater as of 1 April 2026.
Fixed charges for 2026-27
Once we’ve calculated your clean water and wastewater charges, we’ll add fixed charges. These cover our essential costs, such as pipe maintenance and bill and payment processing.
Type Fixed charge Fixed charge with surface water drainage rebate Water £66.87 Not applicable Wastewater £128.13 £80.43 :::
:::spoiler San Diego, California: a city located in a semi-arid region which depends partly on desalinated water.
www.sandiego.gov/…/water-billing-rates
Each HCF equals 748.05 gallons.
The monthly charges for a typical single-family domestic customer are:
Base fee: $35.53
0 - 10 HCF used are billed at $8.51 per HCF.
11 - 22 HCF used are billed at $9.50 per HCF.
Each HCF used after the initial 22 HCF is billed at $11.89 per HCF.www.sandiego.gov/…/sewer-billing-rates
Single-Family Residential Customer
Base Sewer Fee for Two Months $22.56
Sewer (rate per HCF**) $5.92Maximum Fee: Base + Sewer (fee capped at 20 HCF/month) $259.36
:::
:::spoiler New Orleans, Lousiana: a city located at the mouth of the Mississippi, as London is located at the mouth of the Thames:
www.swbno.org/…/RatesFeesAndCharges
These guys charge a fixed fee based on the size of the meter. It looks like residential meters normally are either 5/8 inch, 3/4 inch, or 1 inch.
Water monthly fixed fee:
Meter Size Rate ($) 5/8 8.69 3/4 10.64 1 13.50 Water usage fee:
Usage level Rate per 1,000 gallons ($) First 3,000 gallons 5.80 Next 17,000 gallons 9.87 Next 980,000 gallons 7.76 Over 1,000,000 gallons 6.50 Sewage monthly fixed fee:
Meter Size Rate ($) 5/8 24.87 3/4 35.40 1 50.38 Sewage usage fee:
Per 1,000 Gallons: 8.66
:::
At a current currency conversion rate of $1.3565 for £1, and with a cubic meter being 0.35314667 HCF and 0.26417205 thousand-gallons:
Six month residential water cost:
Source Fixed Six-month Water Fee (£) Per cubic meter (£) Thames Water 66.87 2.73 City of San Diego (starting rate) 78.58 2.22 City of San Diego (maximum rate) 78.58 3.10 City of New Orleans (lowest rate) 38.43 1.23 City of New Orleans (maximum rate) 59.71 1.27 Six month residential wastewater cost
(for Thames Water, taking into account the rebate, and for San Diego, disregarding the limit that may be charged a customer):
Source Fixed Six-month Wastewater Fee (£) Per cubic meter(£) Thames Water 80.43 1.47 City of San Diego 49.89 1.54 City of New Orleans (minimum rate) 110.00 1.69 City of New Orleans (Maximum rate) 222.83 1.69 So, looking at that, a few things stand out. First, London is an old city, and I’d vaguely imagine has a lot of elderly sewers and such that might cost a lot to maintain. Going into this, I had guessed that infrastructure was maybe where any major Thames Water cost was coming from. But actually, the fixed sewage costs aren’t that much higher than San Diego (a relatively-young city), and are considerably lower than New Orleans’ fixed sewage costs.
And the Thames Water per-usage sewer rates are lower than the rates in both American cities.
Fixed water rates are in-between New Orleans and San Diego. I’d expect that some of San Diego’s fixed costs need to go to things like the San Diego Aqueduct system, to bring water from the closest sources of surface water, which isn’t something that’d be needed in London. But I’d also imagine that London has its own complexities, like older infrastructure.
The per-unit water usage rates for Thames Water, on the other hand, are relatively high — towards the upper end of San Diego’s per-unit usage rates, and as I said, San Diego relies in part on desalinated water, which should be more-expensive as a source than surface water (and which London could certainly hypothetically avail itself of). Thames Water per-unit rates are also much higher than those in New Orleans.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons Officially Have A Pay-To-Press Button 2 weeks ago:
Though that one I suppose can be avoided, as you can use a programmable universal remote instead.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons Officially Have A Pay-To-Press Button 2 weeks ago:
I mean, I wouldn’t personally get a Switch or their subscription service, but I don’t see why this dedicated button is especially problematic. Suppose the same functionality were accessed via chording two buttons. Would that eliminate the objections? I’d assume not.
- Comment on Everytime 🤧 2 weeks ago:
I’m not a huge fan of tomatoes in isolation, but there are a lot of very popular foods that incorporate tomato. Hamburgers have tomato. Chili has tomato sauce. Pizza has tomato sauce. Pico de gallo—what most people in the US refer to when they say “salsa”—has tomato.
- Comment on What are some cool/decent PC games that are not on Steam? 2 weeks ago:
There are a substantial number of non-commercial FOSS games that aren’t on Steam.
Many—though not all—of them are packaged in Linux distros.
Luanti, basically a FOSS Minecraft clone, is one example; that’s in Debian.
A number of older games occur to me that aren’t either in Linux distros or on Steam. They aren’t necessarily the top FOSS games, but people may not be aware of them, if they rely on looking in distro packages or Steam to find things.
Linley Henzell, the guy who did Linley’s Dungeon Crawl, which later became the well-known roguelike Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, had a couple of open-source games that he wrote way back. Overgod looks like it’s been packaged and is in Debian. Lacewing is in Fedora, but not in Debian.
There’s a genre of games based on Paradroid. One of the first games I played on Linux was in this genre—NightHawk. It used to be in Red Hat Linux, but it looks like at some point, it fell out of the package repository, as it doesn’t appear to be in present Fedora, and it’s not in present Debian either today. Not on Steam, either.
I can’t find any videos of anyone playing NightHawk on YouTube.
Abuse is a DOS-era action platformer, heavy on jumpscares, that was open-source and had some of the data files (the ones for the shareware version) put into the public domain. Could use the full game’s datafiles too, if you got ahold of them. I think that that used to be packaged and in Red Hat Linux at one point, but it’s not in Fedora or Debian these days, and it’s not on Steam.
Surprisingly, while Empire—a very early game in the genre—is in Debian, xconq is not, and doesn’t look like it’s in Fedora either. Neither are on Steam. You may have played later hex-based strategy wargames in the genre, like Battle for Wesnoth.
- Comment on YouTube won't let me search for music by musician unless I remove the word "naked" from her name 2 weeks ago:
Do a video search with “site:youtube.com” on the various Web search engines that have a video search.
duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+bif+naked+le…
You don’t need to use YouTube’s search engine to search YouTube.