dhork
@dhork@lemmy.world
- Comment on First he stole his number 72.. and then he stole his rookie lap. All around dick move 1 day ago:
Must be about this
- Comment on Is gender affirming care for cis people a thing? 4 days ago:
What about Truck Nutz?
- Comment on Can you open up an unmanned store in the US and will it stay in business or close down? 5 days ago:
I don’t think there is any legal issue with it. Go take a drive out in the country and you will find farmers with a little stand outside where they put produce out for people to buy every day, and they leave a box got people to put cash into. (And just today, I saw one that took Venmo …)
The real issue might be that it would be impossible to get insurance in some places without an employee minding the store.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 5 days ago:
Terraforming Mars to escape climate change is as dumb as a bag of hammers.
I think the people who advocate for this feel that once we have the technology developed to terraform Mars (and put in the effort to do so), we will also have the political and social will to not make the same mistakes we made on Earth.
But every plan I have read about relies on also harvesting the resources of the remote site. So how sure are we, really, that we can not ruin the next place, too? Seems like a lot about Human Nature has to change first.
- Comment on Nintendo Wins $4.5 Million Judgment Against r/SwitchPirates Mod 'Archbox' * TorrentFreak 5 days ago:
According to the article, he didn’t respond to the complaint at all (even though there is evidence he hired a lawyer at one point) so this is a default judgement. I doubt a single penny gets paid out. He may not even be in the country anymore (if he ever was).
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 5 days ago:
I can think of a few reasons.
First, there is a school of thought that says that the planet is ultimately doomed, and if we want to survive as a species, we need to get off of it. The first step is setting up an off-world base and maintaining it. The Moon is the most convenient place for that.
But from there, we also need to get to other places in the universe. The gravity on the moon is significantly weaker than Earth, and it would cost much less fuel to launch to other planets (and beyond) from the moon than from Earth. Of course, that advantage is negated if all that fuel needs to come from Earth, so the space nerds would need to learn how to make rocket fuel out of lunar materials, which they are working on. (A moon base could also allow us to mine passing asteroids for raw materials with much less fuel.)
There are also definite scientific benefits. We are currently launching remote observation satellites from Earth into the Lagrange points so they can point outward and be shielded from emissions from Earth. But we can put a much larger manned apparatus on the dark side of the moon and get all sorts of data that those remote telescopes alone can’t gather.
Finally, there is the simple competition between nations. The US will try and establish a moon base first, to try and call “dibs”. Eventually, we may end up sharing scientific endeavors there, like we “share” Antarctica. (Actually, the Antarctic situation may be a good analogy for how we will eventually manage the political situation on the moon…)
- Comment on Why are games priced in € (EUR) quoted the same as $ (USD)? 1 week ago:
Do EU prices normally include VAT? US prices cannot include Sales Tax, because the tax can vary widely by State (or even by local government).
- Comment on Someone accidentally topped up credit (prepaid) on my second SIM, and paid for unlimited mobile data. Carrier's tech support doesn't care, should I consider it divine intervention? 1 week ago:
Yup, that’s the best possible outcome. In the unlikely event the transaction gets reversed, the company has a record of your call and could, possibly, eat the bill instead of sticking you with it.
- Comment on Someone accidentally topped up credit (prepaid) on my second SIM, and paid for unlimited mobile data. Carrier's tech support doesn't care, should I consider it divine intervention? 1 week ago:
I’m a bit confused. They topped up the SIM, but also turned on an unlimited package which (presumably) costs money per month?
If you don’t want the unlimited data, seems to me the path forward is to just turn that off. Leave the credit in the account. The support agent never directly implied it wad a cash transaction. If it happened to be credit, then there is likely a charge back already in flight, which may result in that credit being taken back after all.
I would insist that the service terms be restored to what you had before. Just let the credit ride for a fre months, if nothing happens to it consider it to be your formal notification to the Universe of “no backsies”…
- Comment on What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec? 1 week ago:
Simply put, “Fungibility” is the ability of a thing to be just like any other thing. Like how a dollar bill is just like every other dollar bill, even though it has a serial number which makes it special.
Cryptocurrenties were designed to be fungible, even though all they are is really large random numbers protected cryptographically by other large numbers. The NFT folks realized that you can add context to those random numbers to make them “one of a kind” - Non-Fungible. Kind of like how some Pokemon cards are more expensive than others (of the same rarity) because of what’s printed on them.
That’s it! That’s all it is. No clue why they got to be worth a thing more than a Pikachu.
- Comment on Joe Rogan thinks AI running the government would ‘stop all wars on the planet’ 2 weeks ago:
Joe Rogan thinks
Doubtful
- Comment on PTA went way too hard on the AI flyers. This was the fifth in just over a week. 2 weeks ago:
I’m in the camp where I’m not gonna instantly shit on this, since whoever is making the PTA flyers is probably a volunteer and will use whatever tools at their disposal to get the job done quickly…
I especially like that several of them mixed up the middle school’s mascot with the high school across the street.
… But that’s no excuse to make an obvious mistake like that. And the fact that AI means these are so easy to make should also mean they are easy to re-make so they are correct.
- Comment on Happy 25th Birthday to the Nintendo GameCube! 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Local homeserver suddenly not responsive to SSH but can be pinged 2 weeks ago:
This can sometimes happen if the filesystem has failed or is otherwise inaccessible. SSH needs to read config files and if it can’t, it fails to connect. It would try to write a failure to the log, but can’t.
Things that don’t require filesystem access, and can run totally from processes in memory interacting with hardware, would be fine. So your Ethernet stack works, and so does ping. A serial port would probably work. SNMP would work, too, for anything that doesn’t need to get a metric from the filesystem. I bet if you had a remote syslog server, you would get the logs that are falling out of your filesystem.
- Comment on Is the census mandatory in the US for both citizens and tourists? 2 weeks ago:
There is a punishment, on paper. You can be fined for not filling it out, or fined more for willfully lying on it. But, they have no enforcement arm, so it would be up to the Justice Dept to press charges, and I doubt they would bother.
- Comment on Is the census mandatory in the US for both citizens and tourists? 2 weeks ago:
The census is mandatory, as others have noted. It is used for determining how many House seats each state gets, so it is important that it is accurate. And the Supreme Court has interpreted it to mean that an actual count has to be gathered everywhere, and that you can’t use statistical methods to derive the actual count.
So, even if they already have the information by some other means, they still need every household to give an affirmative response to yhe form. And if you ignore the form, they knock on your door to ask. While they may have other questions they want you to answer, you are obligated to tell them how many people live there, and their ages.
Visitors don’t need to be counted, but anyone with legal permission to live here does, regardless of citizenship.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
The Technology Connections guy on YouTube thinks so
- Comment on What are you doing for digital estate planning? 3 weeks ago:
When I go it all goes with me.
Not true at all, they’re not gonna bury you with it. Your bank accounts do go through a process after you depart. In many states if you die without a will or any other instructions they go through a long processes to identify your next of kin, and if they can’t identify it then the State takes it all.
You are much better off making a small will and leaving some simple instructions. If you have no relatives you trust with the money, leave it to a charity, like your local animal shelter if that’s your thing.
- Comment on How common were video game scalpers in the 1990s? 3 weeks ago:
The closest things we had back then was USENET (which required you to already have a connection to a provider that hosted a server) and BBS’s (which required you to dial in to connect to a local server, which proabably did not have its own USENET connection). I suppose there was also Compuserve, and QuantumLink/AOL, but they were metered dial-in providers, and when they finally connected to USENET, they ruined it.
There was no concept of a device that was always connected to the Internet in the 80s for most users. Most home computers were islands. Maybe if you were on a University campus you might have access to a computer with that permanent wired connection, but that was about it.
My kids have grown up in a world where everyone is connected, all the time. We’ll see what they do with it.
- Comment on What are you doing for digital estate planning? 3 weeks ago:
#1 thing is to make sure all accounts have beneficiaries. Accounts should have a primary beneficiary (your spouse), and if there is the ability to make a secondary beneficiary, see if they will divide it among any children you have . This is of paramount importance.
I know someone who passed away suddenly, and did not have a beneficiary on his “play money” stock account. His widow had to go through a lot of hoops to get access to it.
From there, I am a big believer in paper. I want those statements coming to the house. I file them all, and my wife knows where I put them. If I were to go poof , I’m sure she (with a lot of help from her siblings) would make sure nothing is missing.
The Crypto is a different story, of course. When you can Be Your Own Bank, there are no beneficiaries or contingencies: it’s all keys. I have a bit of crypto in a HW wallet. But, years ago I moved some BTC to Coinbase, and it’s still there after all these years. I am thinking of moving the rest, just to make it easier for people to sell if I do go poof.
- Comment on Why are lemmings so touchy about downvotes? 3 weeks ago:
I only use the report button for obvious spam, and for some rulebreaking posts where the community has clear rules about what can be submitted, like communities that require links (no selfposts).
But most communities don’t necessarily have mods online the same time I am, so if someone is obviously spamming I I block them, too.
- Comment on How does a game server differentiate between multiple clients on the same network? Do they even? 3 weeks ago:
A lot of good answers here, talking about the IP/port combinations used to identify both sides of a connection. But a key thing to understand is that both ports don’t need to be the same. On the Client side, the port number is often assigned just for that connection. (The standards call those “ephemeral” ports.) So, two independant connections from the same IP are differentiated by their client side IP ports.
It should also be noted that NAT works by translating both IP addresses and ports. So if those two connections are coming from behind the NAT and have different internal IPs but the same port, the NAT will translate that to two different ports from the public IP.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It was a pretty unique experiment in Decimal Time
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Yes, when you are comparing times across time zones, you can use UTC time. (UTC is essentially a more modern GMT, there are differences but only the nerds care.)
You will want to use all times in UTC. But be aware that when you do this, any times that are meant to be the same throughout the year will shift one hour due to Summer Time/DST. Not every region does summer time, and the ones that do start and stop at slightly different times. (And Southern Hemisphere countries do it in Northern Hemisphere’s winter.)
If that’s too inconvenient for you, or most of your users are in your country, an alternative is to explicitly state the chat hours in your local time zone, with the understanding that it will shift a hour vs. UTC twice a year, and anyone outside your country’s summer time rules will just have to deal with it.
- Comment on Posted by a school district's official Facebook page in response to a shooting 3 weeks ago:
I don’t have a problem with the sentiment behind this picture. I don’t even have a problem with the AI art style. But don’t people critically examine their work before using it?
How hard would it have been to tell the AI “Hey, please remove the extra hand on the wolf’s shoulder? It doesn’t belong there.” Isn’t that a thing you can do?
The main problem with AI slop isn’t that it’s slop, it’s that so many people think the raw slop is acceptable without any refinement.
- Comment on White House Launches Arcade.Gov, a Minigame Site Where You Catch Immigrants, Build a Tetris Border Wall, and 'Fill Your Kids' Trump Accounts' With Bitcoin 3 weeks ago:
Yes! Sorry for the confusion
- Comment on White House Launches Arcade.Gov, a Minigame Site Where You Catch Immigrants, Build a Tetris Border Wall, and 'Fill Your Kids' Trump Accounts' With Bitcoin 3 weeks ago:
I ain’t clicking on that. I wonder what type of telemetry it’s gathering…
- Comment on Why is USD susceptible to counterfeit in comparison to CHF? 4 weeks ago:
$20 dollar bills are the most common denomination in retail, and ATMs here exclusively hand out 20s. Even with prices going through the roof, you hardly ever see higher denomination bills out in the wild. A shop owner may look at you funny if you hand over a $100 to pay for something (and would definitely get the pen out), but would probably not blink twice when handed five $20s, even though counterfitters target them just as much. (Also note that we no longer make any bills over $100 at all…)
We do have some currency modernization programs underway, but they will not effect the size of the bills. We seem to think it would be a disaster if our currency were like every other country’s currency. We need to think we’re Exceptional, I guess.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi
Since the U.S. state of Mississippi commonly ranks at or near the bottom of such rankings, residents of other states also ranking near the bottom may say, “Thank God for Mississippi”, since the presence of that state in 50th place spares them the embarrassment of being ranked last.[10] The phrase is in use even among state government officials[11][12] and journalists,[13][14][15][16] though occasionally with a slight modification.[17][18][19]
- Comment on The meow technician on duty 5 weeks ago:
Pro tip for AI “artists”: if you want to fool people into believing it’s not AI, don’t out anything in your pictures with actual text, AI gets it wrong every time.