tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on How can England possibly be running out of water? 3 hours ago:
UK households use more water, mostly on showering and bathing, than other comparable European countries, at about 150 litres a day per capita. For France the average is 128, Germany 122 and Spain 120 (although in Italy its 243 litres a day).
Meh. I’m sure that we use more than that in the US.
kagis
www.epa.gov/…/understanding-your-water-bill
The average American uses around 82 gallons per day per person in the household.
So 310 liters, over double the British average.
www.arizonafuture.org/…/water-use/
It looks like people in Phoenix, Arizona average something like 150 gallons/day for residential stuff, almost twice that again, and they live in a desert.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 hours ago:
I feel like this is a really bad way to think of Puerto Rico
It’s correct. Incorporation is the process via which something becomes part of the US. If it hasn’t undergone incorporation, it isn’t part of the US yet. It’s just administered by the US.
They’re US citizens
Yes. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. (Note: in contrast, American Samoans are not, and are just US nationals, an unusual status related to American Samoa reserving the right to run its own naturalization system.) But Puerto Rico the territory is not yet part of the US.
- Comment on VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power 10 hours ago:
This is an environmental disaster.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_ID.3
The lowest MPGe I see for it is 129, the highest 141.
The Ford F-150 is the most-popular vehicle in the US.
www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/…/2025_Ford_F150.shtml
It has a combined MPG rating of between 16 and 21.
- Comment on VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power 10 hours ago:
German car industry has one foot in the grave.
I think that all or close to it auto manufacturers have some form of subscription service now with monthly fees. It’s not something specific to German manufacturers.
randomly picks from this list of auto manufacturers
Buick.
www.buick.com/ownercenter/onstar/learn
OnStar One Super Cruise
for vehicles with Super Cruise
$64.99/mo.
Save up to 16% by choosing this plan
OnStar Connect Plus
-
In-Vehicle Wi-Fi® Hotspot
-
Music
-
Podcasts
-
Audiobooks
-
News
-
Video Streaming (if properly equipped)
-
Games (if properly equipped)
-
Internet Browser (if properly equipped)
Safety & Security
-
Stolen Vehicle Assistance
-
Safety Services
-
OnStar Guardian App
-
Roadside Assistance
Super Cruise
-
Hands-Free Driver Assistance Technology
-
Turn Signal Activated Lane Change
-
Automatic Lane Change (if properly equipped)
-
Hands-Free Trailering (if properly equipped)
-
- Comment on We’re Suing Minecraft in a Class Action Lawsuit 11 hours ago:
He could install Luanti and mod to his heart’s content.
- Comment on VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power 13 hours ago:
According to a survey from S&P Global, some customers may be put off by the cost of in-car subscriptions for features such as connectivity, or by basic functions being split into paid tiers.
I don’t have any particular objection to that. They can choose whatever pricing model they want, and it’s just another number for the spreadsheet in valuing whatever they put on offer. However, I rather suspect that whatever DRM they have on this ties one more-closely to maintaining an Internet connection between the car and auto manufacturer, which I do care about from a privacy standpoint.
And I wonder what happens to one’s subscription if one’s car is no longer able to talk to current cell towers and thus the car can no longer validate that the user has paid the bill this month. Cars that relied 2G cell network connectivity in the past lost their network connectivity when the cell networks took that down in the US. Maybe the feature is just gone forever. Maybe the manufacturer decides to be nice and just perma-unlock the functionality. shrugs
- Comment on VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power 13 hours ago:
I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).
If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:
www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/2005/
2005 Toyota Camry pricing starts at $4,091 for the Camry LE Sedan 4D, which had a starting MSRP of $20,515 when new.
That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.
A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700.
Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.
- Comment on VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power 14 hours ago:
What’s to stop someone just hacking it and unlocking it?
I assume that they try to make that fairly difficult.
I mean, modern cars are Internet-connected, have cell radios. If the vendor can maintain access to the car and can provide the initial trusted hardware, they can make it pretty unpleasant to modify the thing.
You also don’t need a 100% solution. Just need to make the level of inconvenience high enough.
- Comment on [deleted] 15 hours ago:
I know, he also didn’t understand that Puerto Rico’s population are American citizens.
kagis
It sounds like this might be from an incorrect news story, unless you’re thinking of an unrelated incident:
www.snopes.com/…/donald-trump-puerto-ricans/
Did Trump Say He’ll Revoke U.S. Citizenship of All Puerto Ricans?
“We don’t really need these non-Americans and I don’t need their votes to win the presidency."
Rating: False
There was no truth to this story, which originated with Adobo Chronicles, a fake news website. The article didn’t garner much attention when it was originally published, but the story was eventually picked up by several Spanish-language websites, which then reported it as if it were real news.
While these web sites cited a “South American newspaper,” all of the information they reported originated on The Adobo Chronicles, a site whose disclaimer notes that its content is not meant to be taken seriously: “THE ADOBO CHRONICLES is your source of up-to-date, unbelievable news. Everything you read on this site is based on fact, except for the lies.”
- Comment on [deleted] 15 hours ago:
I guess he could think that it’s an unincorporated territory, like Puerto Rico. That’s a US territory, but unless it becomes a state or an incorporated territory, it’s not technically part of the United States, and it wouldn’t be up for grabs.
On that note, looks like the Russian nationalist crowd is resolutely forging on:
newsnationnow.com/…/russian-claims-alaska-trump-p…
Russian TV hosts say Alaska belongs to them ahead of Trump-Putin summit
(NewsNation) — Russian state television personalities have renewed claims that Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia as President Donald Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage on Friday.
During a recent broadcast of Russia-1’s “60 Minutes” program, propagandist Olga Skabeyeva referred to Alaska as “our Alaska” while discussing a joint Russian-Chinese military patrol that approached within 200 miles of the Alaskan coast, Newsweek reported.
The comment came after State Duma Deputy Adalbi Shkhagoshev mentioned “our aircraft approached the borders of Alaska,” prompting Skabeyeva to incorrectly claim he had said “our Alaska.”
I suppose it’s probably part of this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_payment_conspiracy
The Alaska payment conspiracy (Russian: Аляскинский платежный заговор, romanized: Ali͡askinskiĭ platezhnyĭ zagovor), also known as the Orkney conspiracy (Russian: Оркни заговор), is a conspiracy theory that the Russian Empire never received payment for the Alaska purchase from the United States, and that instead the ship, the Orkney, that carried the payment in gold was detonated for insurance money by Alexander ‘Sandy’ Keith, a con artist and explosives expert.[1][2][3] This conspiracy theory has been debunked in several ways.[4]
- Comment on Nicolas Sturgeon book reignites trans row with JK Rowling 22 hours ago:
The pair - arguably the most prominent public figures in Scotland - have long disagreed about politics…
“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.
Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s “basket of deplorables” moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.
As an American, I principally interpret Scotland’s political environment via analogs to the American political environment, which is what I have the most familiarity with. It’s reassuring to see that apparently the most-prominent public figures in Scotland operate the same way. I can’t be too far off the mark!
- Comment on Data centres to be expanded across UK as concerns mount 2 days ago:
If they’re worried about water cooling, two options.
Looking at that datacenter map, there’s only one datacenter in Scotland, and it’s not on the River Tay.
Most users are probably in the south of England, but it looks like the River Tay is the largest river by rate of flow in the UK:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Major_rivers_of_the_United_Kin…
Another possibility is cooling with saltwater.
- Comment on Um... I'm not even using a VPN... Fuck you reddit. 2 days ago:
It won’t, but you were complaining that Reddit was always the top search result, and this will avoid that, putting other sources up there.
If you want to bypass it, you probably want a VPN terminating in a country that doesn’t have age restriction laws.
- Comment on Um... I'm not even using a VPN... Fuck you reddit. 2 days ago:
I know that this is directly opposing conventional search wisdom here, but you can probably add
-site:reddit.comto your query. - Comment on "Unsubscribe" says my internet's not working 4 days ago:
kagis
Ah hah. Thought so.
You’re in luck. It looks like after that post blew up on Reddit, someone went out and actually implemented a commercial Cat Facts service:
Texts to Send Per Day:
- 1 message per day
- 2 messages per day
- 3 messages per day
- 5 messages per day
- 10 messages per day
- 15 messages per day
kagis more
Apparently there’s an entire industry with competing commercial services:
At least one of the developers of the latter service posted to Reddit when he did so:
- Comment on "Unsubscribe" says my internet's not working 4 days ago:
- Comment on Final Fantasy X programmer doesn’t get why devs want to replicate low-poly PS1 era games. “We worked so hard to avoid warping, but now they say it’s charming” - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
- Comment on AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service 4 days ago:
According to this, as of 2022, in the US, only 175k households were still using dial-up Internet service from any provider. That’s not a lot of people.
reviews.org/…/how-many-us-households-are-without-…
Around 175,522 households use dial-up internet at home.
I’m guessing that many of those realistically have other landline options and just haven’t switched.
kagis
The amusingly-named-given-the-context dslextreme.com apparently continues to offer nationwide dial-up service.
- Comment on The train that never came; how maglev technology was derailed 5 days ago:
Maybe. Presently, the savings in human time is not worthwhile, but the value of human time does tend to rise over time, and it’s possible that someone might find cargos for which time savings are more valuable.
- Comment on 17k+ indexed adult games from itch.io on goony.dev 6 days ago:
I dunno if you’re specifically referencing Lawrence of Arabia, but if so, I really like that movie.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvH6PT7I_dI
LAWRENCE: It is the servant who takes money.
AUDA leaps to his feet and backs away from this moral threat as another man might from a physical one.
AUDA: I am Auda Ibu Tayi! (He goes to the edge of the tent and bawls into the darkness) Does Auda serve? Does Auda Ibu Tayi serve? (He faces his persecutors and goes into a furious litany) I carry twenty-three great wounds all got in battle! Seventy-five men I have killed with my own hands, in battle! I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents! I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure. Yet I am poor! … Because I am a river to my people! Is that service?
- Comment on 17k+ indexed adult games from itch.io on goony.dev 6 days ago:
Hmm.
I have to say that as pornographic video game tags go, the tag library that itch.io provides is kind of limited. The goony.dev people apparently scraped the tags from itch.io’s database of tags, which makes sense if their aim is to keep pornographic itch.io games visible. But…if goony.dev aims to be a database of specifically pornographic video games, there’s not a lot by way of relevant tag data to make the games searchable.
Contrast with, say, vndb.org’s tag library; that’s not specifically for pornographic games, but tracks and indexes quite a few.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 1 week ago:
AOL will end dial-up internet service in September
…the end of September
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.
- Comment on AOL will end dial-up internet service in September, 34 years after it's debut — AOL Shield Browser and AOL Dialer software will be shuttered on the same day 1 week ago:
56K (or slower) screeching modem into.
- Comment on Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube 1 week ago:
Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube
As well as:
npr.org/…/australia-social-media-ban-children
The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment
It sounds like, from my quick skim, that their criteria would also apply to the Threadiverse, as I don’t see any sort of size or revenue restrictions on their definition of its scope. Here’s the bill text:
(1) For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:
(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
(ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
(iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
(b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6). Note 1: Online social interaction does not include (for example) online business interaction. Note 2: An age-restricted social media platform may be, but is not necessarily, a social media service under section 13.19 Note 3: For specification by class, see subsection 13(3) of the Legislation Act 2003.Subsection (6):
(6) An electronic service is not an age-restricted social media platform if: (a) none of the material on the service is accessible to, or delivered to, one or more end-users in Australia; or (b) the service is specified in the legislative rules.
I’m sure that there will be more discussion on this that will probably clarify it.
For the moment, I’m pretty confident based on past case law that the US legal system won’t consider a US-based Threadiverse instance that isn’t actively doing something like advertising to users specifically in Australia or selling products to Australia to be within the legal jurisdiction of Australia, so the US will not enforce Australian law against it. Australia might block a node but shouldn’t be able to fine someone, so blacklisting Australian IP addresses or the like probably isn’t necessary.
I don’t know what the EU’s position on Internet jurisdiction is.
That might be a much more substantial problem for Australia-based instances, like — to name one that comes to mind — aussie.zone.
- Comment on So glad I suck dick 1 week ago:
They are just trying to be like the CCP, their heroes.
old.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/…/i8dcxjz/
Well, there is a type of censorship I guess. Some apps don’t allow people to post bad words like 卧槽，and so on. So people usually abbreviate the bad words to the first letter of each pinyin. So 卧槽 becomes “wc”.
This isn’t just for bad words tho, there’s many online slangs like xswl which means 笑死我了, and many more.
quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
— John Gilmore, founder, EFF
- Comment on The way two of the usb's are one way while the other is another way 1 week ago:
Orientation:
Traditional USB Type A connectors require that the plug be inserted in a particular orientation.
However, the plug is also symmetrical-enough that it’s hard to figure out, by feel, what the correct orientation is. The result is that when plugging a USB plug into something out-of-sight, like a socket on the back of a computer, it can be very frustrating to get the plug in. If one decides — incorrectly — that a misaligned plug isn’t going in because it’s just the wrong way around and flips it, something quite easy to do, then one faces more fumbling around until one flips it again. Irritation over this has driven a number of jokes.
All USB connectors up until Type C required that a user plug the plug in in some orientation and had some degree of this problem — Type B, mini USB, micro USB — but USB Type A plugs were both nearly identical and often on the back of things, where the socket was out of sight.
USB Type C connectors eliminated the problem by simply making the plug support being plugged in in either orientation.
Speed:
There are different speeds of USB connectors. USB A connectors are (sometimes, though not always) color-coded to provide various information to a user about what they support:
www.corsair.com/us/…/usb-port-colors-explained/
There are a number of colors, but blue USB 3.0 is probably what the parent is talking about. Many computers have some ports that support a higher speed, and are marked in blue. In OP’s picture, you can see some ports that are black (USB 2.0) and one that is blue (probably USB 3.0).
- Comment on Why doesn't the US build a bridge here to connect Alaska to the mainland? Are they stupid? 1 week ago:
In Canada’s defense, that in significant part, handguns. If you keep a long gun with you, as long as it doesn’t hit their 10,000 J (7375 ft-lbs) muzzle energy limit — and if it’s in your glovebox, I assume that whatever you have isn’t doing that — and doesn’t hit their specific restrictions on upper receivers, you’re probably okay.
A NATO 5.56 mm rifle round looks like it has a muzzle energy of about 1.8 kJ.
That’d let you carry an elephant gun.
If you want a semi-auto rifle…goes looking
gunsamerica.com/digest/big-horn-armory-ar500/
I imagine that one of those would be okay. Looks like the ammunition is sold in Canada.
- Comment on UK pornography taskforce to propose banning ‘barely legal’ content after Channel 4 documentary airs 1 week ago:
The Online Safety Act charged the regulator Ofcom with monitoring whether pornography sites are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving …extreme content, such as…necrophilia.
Back when he had started out in law school, the Honourable Judge Hodgkins had not expected to be spending the seniormost years of his career ruling on whether or not a lich queen should be considered dead by British legal standards.
- Comment on I just dont seem to ever learn 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on I just dont seem to ever learn 2 weeks ago:
If the pathway from your coffee maker to your desk has sufficient width and structural support to accommodate a 70 ton tracked armored fighting vehicle, tank gun stabilizers can maintain pretty stable platforms.
