solrize
@solrize@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Is it theoretically possible Trump and ICE are killing a very large number of immigrants (like 25% of those detained) and no one knows? 1 day ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin
Blokhin was selected for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926 and led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II.[1] Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.[1][2][3] Blokhin was forced into retirement in 1953 after the death of Stalin and condemned during de-Stalinization shortly before his death in 1955.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Dunno what happened with your subculture but there is a recurring path that isn’t pretty:
- Comment on What's the best free version of word? 1 week ago:
Hardcore nerds use TeX but if I understand your question, you probably want LibreOffice. I’m unfamiliar with OnlyOffice so ok, maybe that’s good too.
- Comment on Should I replace my laptop battery, and are third-party batteries safe? 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t had trouble with 3rd party batteries but there’s a combination of FUD and legitimate scare stories about them. For cylindrical cells, the really cheap ones are crap and this can be detect by X-ray:
hackaday.com/…/lumafield-shows-why-your-cheap-186…
IDK if there’s a similar deal with pouch cells.
Generally, replace your battery at below 50%. At 68% I’d keep using it. Maybe add a power bank if you want to keep going for longer. If 68% isn’t enough to get through your day, then 100% is at best sort of marginal.
- Comment on Should I replace my laptop battery, and are third-party batteries safe? 2 weeks ago:
Laptops nowadays almost always use pouch cells.
- Comment on how to dust properly 2 weeks ago:
How can I wipe the dust in a way so as to avoid just pushing it around so much?
Vacuum it. My friend has a Roomba that does her whole house automatically. I thought those things were ridiculous until I actually saw it.
Also, as someone said, air filtration should get some of the dust out of the air. That is healthy for breathing. If you don’t mind the noise, you can make a powerful air filter from a box fan and 4 furnace filters: look up “Corsi-Rosenthal box” for how to do that. Otherwise you can get a smaller one.
- Comment on Starlink Alternative that can't be blocked 3 weeks ago:
In military systems it’s done with e.g. frequency hopping with encrypted sequences. That’s also how GPS anti-spoofing works (that’s for the military segment of GPS). The idea is say there are 1000 frequencies and you keep switching between them. Since the jammer doesn’t know which one you’re using at any moment, they have to jam all 1000 of them. So that increases their power requirements by 1000x compared to jamming just one frequency.
It’s not feasible for a mass market consumer product like Starlink. Even if it was, it would be thrown under sanctions or military suppression faster than you can say boo. And it would run at quite low bit rates to again maximize the ability to get through jamming. It would be useless for Netflix or transmitting video.
Maybe an activist cell in a place like Iran could put something together for its own members on the quiet, but it would be low bandwidth and would presumably be very dangerous for the users if they got caught.
I wonder sometimes if people overestimate the usefulness of stuff like this. Suppose Iran’s efforts to jam Starlink had failed, so Starlink still worked there. What would be different for anyone? We’d see more video getting out, but it’s not clear to me that it would have any effect other than to stoke up more internet rage. It’s unclear to me if that’s of any help any more.
Starlink was apparently believed to be unjammable until recently, when we found out that it wasn’t, fwiw.
- Comment on The Resistance Libs Were Right 3 weeks ago:
Wait, who are or were the resistance libs? I’m confused. The article quotes several writers who I’ve never heard of.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Air filtration? Lookup Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s an air cleaner you can make from a box fan and 4 furnace filters.
- Comment on Easily available 940 nm transparent films? 4 weeks ago:
You want it opaque in the visible spectrum but transparent to infrared? Unexposed (but developed) Ektachrome slide film works for that. I had a piece of it around here from some years back but can’t find it now. If it turns up I can send you some. It’s from when I was fooling around with the night vision feature on an old camcorder.
- Comment on Climate change has turned Greenland into a target for Trump 4 weeks ago:
Wait Trump says there’s no climate change.
- Comment on Trump Administration Live Updates: President Expects Impeachment if G.O.P. Falters in Midterm Elections 4 weeks ago:
I’d expect Trump’s 3rd and 4th impeachments to go like the first two, i.e. he stays in office. Also, it would be very hard to find charges against Vance as VP.
If Trump did somehow get removed, Vance would take over as President, and it would take him a while to do enough bad stuff to get impeached and removed. And by then, he would likely have gotten his own VP confirmed, who would then inherit the office from Vance. So all this stuff about removing Trump and making things good again is wishful thinking.
- Comment on Trump Administration Live Updates: President Expects Impeachment if G.O.P. Falters in Midterm Elections 4 weeks ago:
It gets easier after the first few times.
- Comment on Trump Administration Live Updates: President Expects Impeachment if G.O.P. Falters in Midterm Elections 4 weeks ago:
He’s already been impeached twice and should be used to it by now. What’s the big deal? Wake up, brush teeth, go to Capitol, impeach Trump, go home, watch TV, sleep, repeat.
- Comment on I’m not saying that I agree with right- or center-wing views, and I do condemn transphobia. However, do you think there should be a distinction between critiquing beliefs held by transgender people, and engaging in transphobia? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t see a question here.
- Comment on Should I get the Measles and/or Mpox vaccines if I had them as a child? 5 weeks ago:
I didn’t realize mpox vaccine had been a thing for that long. Regarding measles vaccine, obviously ask your PCP, but I don’t see anything about getting a renewed vax in the wikipedia article (I wouldn’t believe cdc.gov at this point). I did get some kind of repeat vax a few years ago and half remember that it was MMR but I’m not sure of that at all. Depending on your age you might also get the shingles vaccine (two shots a few weeks apart).
There was apparently a period in the mid 1960s when they gave a killed measles vaccine instead of a weakened one, and CDC says if you were born in that period you should get another shot.
- Comment on People who have eaten since December 31st, 2025, why are you trying to start new shit? 5 weeks ago:
It’s January 1 here now. I’d like a coconut macaroon please.
- Comment on Do I have extreme anxiety? 5 weeks ago:
How long has this been going on? As many others have said, this sounds medical. Tbh I’d try to see an MD first, rather than therapy. They might refer you of course. Have you checked your temperature, blood pressure, hydration and all that kind of stuff? Anyway I have no clue and am just mentioning obvious things. If you had a viral illness recently (flu, covid) that can leave lingering symptoms too.
- Comment on What're your strong opinions from an aged / dead fandom? 1 month ago:
Your post made me realize B5 is nowhere near dead. It’s just resting. Lensman series anyone?
- Comment on What're your strong opinions from an aged / dead fandom? 1 month ago:
What? I have no idea what any of that is. I was thinking of Babylon 5.
- Comment on What’s up with Myrrh being more prevalent? 1 month ago:
It’s mentioned in a well known Christmas carol that is often heard at this time of year. I’m not into it myself. Its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom. Too emo for me.
- Comment on Why do personal knowledge base applications like Obsidian have all these bells and whistles for querying and parsing metadata/frontmatter but nothing similar for the actual content of notes? 1 month ago:
Just use a text editor that can search.
- Comment on Can anyone recommend a logging blood pressure cuff that doesn't require an app or account? 1 month ago:
This looks promising, it lets you collect data from Omron devices. It’s from a quick web search so idk any more about it.
One way this is better than manual logging is that it can run while you sleep. That is, you could have it take your BP once an hour all night or whatever. That’s done in hospitals all the time. It’s uncomfortable so I wouldn’t do it routinely, but it might be worthwhile if you suspect something might be up. Obviously, discuss it with your Dr too.
- Comment on How do we know that the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle is preserved across radius sizes? 1 month ago:
In math, it’s a theorem based on certain assumptions and definitions about the distances between points, and what length means. You start with human-made assumptions and follow them to wherever they lead.
Those assumptions are pretty well justified based on local observations of the real world. Are they true on a bigger scale, say at astronomical distances? People began to wonder this in the 1800’s, in the era of Gauss and Riemann. There’s another theorem that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, and Gauss (an astronomer as well as a math whiz) actually proposed testing that on astronomical observations. I don’t know if hey tried any experiments though. A deviation from 180 degrees would mean that space was curved.
Lo and behold, it turns out that space actually is curved, in the presence of gravitational fields. That was figured out by none other than Einstein, who became world famous when Eddington did an observation during a solar eclipse in 1919 and saw the apparent motion of distant stars when they got lined up with the edge of the sun. The eclipse was needed for the observation since otherwise the sun would have drowned out the distant stars. But, it was quite a sensitive experiment, maybe not possible in the era of Gauss.
Anyway, the “big” answer to your question is that the ratio being constant is in the end an empirically observed fact, but that on a cosmic scale is only a close approximation, and (even Einstein didn’t foresee this) falls completely apart near very extreme ragions like black holes.
Einstein’s theory (“general relativity”) was still an incredible work of genius. As the saying goes, they didn’t call him Einstein for nothing!
- Comment on what was the worst enemy of feudalism? 1 month ago:
This isn’t my area at all but I thought that the traditional picture involved feudalism eroding due to technological development empowering the merchant and industrial classes. In both cases, the serfs or peons didn’t get much of a say, but it wasn’t really an ideological conflict, more of a natural economic shift.
- Comment on Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions 1 month ago:
Wow, wonder if there’s conflict between Trump and Wiles now.
- Comment on California Hires Former C.D.C. Officials Who Criticized Trump Administration 1 month ago:
One is Susan Monarez, a former director of the C.D.C., who was fired by the White House in late August after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to remove her from her position and she resisted leaving. The other is Dr. Debra Houry, a former chief medical officer of the C.D.C., who quit partly in protest over the firing of Dr. Monarez.
I doin’t know anything about either of those, but Monarez was apparently appointed by Trump then fired a month later for resisting RFK idiocy. A good way to go but a not so promising way to enter.
- Comment on should I go back to my old job now that several people, some of them more knowledgeable than me have told me they don't understand my decision to quit it? 1 month ago:
Just be honest about why you quit and what you’re getting out of it, and that the pay at the new job is almost the same. Say you can think about going back if they offer you a big pay increase and other stress relief.
- Comment on How to deploy a satellite and what are the costs? 1 month ago:
Start by joining amsat.org I guess.
- Comment on Once a Gamble in the Desert, Electric Grid Batteries Are Everywhere 2 months ago:
Even with the gift code but now blocks reader mode and tells you to turn it off. Bah. Article is ok though.