I am fairly sure this is a mix of plotlines from several different movies.

Those drones are still very inaccurate compared to other weapons that we use today and are basically just terror weapons. It is an automated killing machine, sure. It doesn’t target anything other than a coordinate.

It’s the decision by a machine to target something specific that is the moral conundrum. If you give a machine the ability to “decide” to kill one person over another, there isn’t anyone to blame for the death. There is a ton of randomness introduced into neutral networks (AI) and any decisions are non-deterministic in nature. You can jam in as many guardrails as you want, but if the ultimate decision is to kill or not to kill, the guardrails do not matter. This spawns a ton of questions about giving machines the intelligence to kill. Even though there is randomness in any conflict, we can get away with calling it “collateral damage”.

If a machine decides that a book looks like a gun and hoses a classroom of 5 year olds, there isn’t really any accountability if the machine was approved by law. Again, there isn’t anyone to blame, which is a huge part of how humanity works, unfortunately. (Side thought: This would get even more complicated if said machine was supposed to fill the role of a protector or guardian.)

Even with the most complex weapons today, they are just following specific directions to hit a coordinate at a specific time. There isn’t any real thought behind it even if it is extremely accurate. Once the trigger is pulled, weapon go to destination and the trigger person is responsible.

Edit: I made a fuck ton of edits to add clarification. Sorry if you were an unfortunate recipient of a draft.

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the masses.” -Major General Smedley D. Butler.

I would try and light it outside, but with a long stick (like a wooden skewer). There is a high chance that those are O2 bubbles, if you were trying to make some Sodium Percarbonate which is a common additive to laundry detergent anyway… It’s supposed to be equal parts mix, but I suspect the excess of hydrogen peroxide is intentional as to have the best chance to convert all the sodium bicarb and still have plenty of liquid to soak something in. (Just a guess. Chemistry can be a weird science sometimes and I think there were a few reactions that could of happened here.)

Consumer grade hydrogen peroxide is dirt cheap, and so is the baking soda. I dunno if you saved money and a made a more effective solution for what you are trying to accomplish. A spoonful or two of regular laundry detergent may have masked smells a little better. Dunno. I like science but I also like efficiency, so whatevers! (Experiments are fun.)

Flags have always been poorly standardized outside of system apps and tools. Generally, -u should equal --update (and depending on how the app was written, may warn for --up: “Did you mean --update?”) Single tick flags are generally combinable: -ua or -ls. I have seen long single tick flags somewhere, but can’t remember where. (Your -update example.) Various python libraries than handle flags have helped a ton with getting people to use the same patterns, so that is nice.

You just summed up my first experience with systemd many years ago.

systemctl != sysctl. Both somehow got wedged into the same index in my brain and took years for me to correct. On top of that, <service> <action> was reversed to <action> <service>. (Or was it the other way around?)

I was convinced from my first experience with systemd that the person who wrote it was the purest form of evil. (It’s leveled out a bit over the years, so it’s tolerable to use these days. Still not a fan though.)

Not really a fan of any argument that turns any bias to 11, but whatever.

Efficiency is really the winning point though as combustion engines are horrendously inefficient. Investment cash is better spent improving electric motors instead of squeezing more out of traditional engines. Even if the dial moves from, say, 90% efficient to 91% efficient for electric motors, that would be significant. If we could magically create a “heat battery” that stores heat captured from combustion engines, that would be nice. There are plenty of uses for captured energy like that, but I don’t see that as anywhere near practical for daily use vehicle ls.

Battery recycling still likely needs more improvement, but unfortunately, that will be driven more by future resource limitations. To my understanding, we are still finding new ways to extract lithium and still developing better battery chemistry. That is good, but doesn’t really provide more incentive to improve recycling. (There is are cost/benefit factors in play, I speculate.)

If there is a darker underbelly to EVs, it’s the batteries. They have their own set of long-term problems and mass adoption would be problematic in that regard.

Charging stations need to be at every gas station and just as convenient to charge as it is to fill up. Our power grid is likely not supportive of that quite yet. Having had to stop at a number of sketchy gas stations in the past, having to stay at one of those longer than needed is not usually high up on my favorite things to do. Still though, getting a just enough charge to get to a nicer place could still be a good option. Availability of charging spots needs to be improved. (It’s good now in most busy areas, but poor in some other places.)

I drrive a hybrid now, only because I like the option of carrying around my own charger. It’s not perfect, but it is a decent intermediate step as I will eventually get an EV in the future.

Saying that EVs are just as bad or worse is just a bad argument and doesn’t really need to be countered with what is basically a rant. The benefits and efficiency isn’t really debatable with well manufactured vehicles.

As far as I am concerned, modern EVs are still emerging technology and need several more generations of improvements before I fully convert. They are neat, but not neat enough for me at the moment. I’ll coonvert soon enough, but not quite yet.

Billionaire Island, Issue #1

Trash app. If you actually want to see all of your data and have it recorded accurately, just switch to the Garmin ecosystem. Garmin isn’t without their own set of issues and problems, for sure. However, if you actually want data and not AI slop summaries, stay a far away from Google Health.

Simply put, it’s designed for people who think that wearing a fitness tracker will improve their health and want a chat bot that will make them feel better about that.

I did. All the important things have time to gracefully shutdown now. (Except my for my rack of 4 DL360’s, which need something a little more robust than a Walmart UPS. They aren’t critical and only exist to handle weird one-off projects anyway.)

This happens, too. A burst of local brownouts killed an OPNsense firewall of mine once. (The hardware was fine. The data got wrecked.) The firewall would boot, or almost finish booting, and then another brownout would hit. After the third or fourth cycle, the poor thing was toast.

I should thank the power company for free resilience testing.

There absolutely is a darker side to Lemmy, but for the most part, many of those “legacy” instances have already been pruned from the federation that we are in now. (I suspect there are smaller, highly niche, “Lemmy” bubbles that even I wouldn’t want to go looking for that have never federated with the larger group. There are also various branches you can explore via instances that keep their doors mostly open.)

On the surface, and depending on what you consider toxic, the misinformation campaigns that are run on Lemmy seem fairly normal, but can get fairly dark if you understand the sources and start to do broader geolocation estimation of some of the participants.

There are still the occasional DDoS’s and the occasional CSAM posters, both of those are only a degree or two away from the really nasty shit.

The biggest issue now, and probably will always be, is how easy it is to avoid bans. Some seriously troubled users have generated hundreds of accounts across multiple instances just to troll and appear to generate traffic to specific communities. (“you_emm” being one of the worst, but its posts are fairly easy to sniff out still. It will actively search for untagged mentions as well, hence, my obfuscation.)

But for the most part, the bullshit is easy to filter out. When you stumble across a specific niche, they tend to niche themselves super hard, so beware. All-in-all, Lemmy is chill and fairly quiet which is why I still use it.

In most cases, I believe it’s a mix of hormones and traditionalism. Men have generally been more likely to seek grandeur by participating in violent activities, or, violent activities are demanded by their particular social group. Sometimes a mix of both.

I think it also it boils down to how gender roles are taught by different cultures. If men are taught to be the risk takers, it only makes sense that boundaries and laws will get pushed more by men. After all, intentionally breaking a law may simply be viewed as a calculated risk and not as something that should never be done.

Honestly speaking, it seems too easy of an answer to just blame male physiology. The social aspects of this can’t be ignore either.

Booze is a helluva drug.

Domestic borrowing is helpful, but in Russia’s case, they will need to fully control every aspect of their economy as well, from capping prices on all consumer goods to directly propping up critical domestic manufacturing companies.

I won’t pretend to know all the details of how mostly isolated wartime economies function. Still, borrowing from the public is a huge part of this, but most of it based around simply keeping the people thinking their currency has value while giving everyone jobs to manufacture goods for the war effort. (If taxation becomes extreme, then they start manufacturing bodies for the war effort from people who can’t pay or doge.)

Russia still has active trading partners and can still barter raw materials for other things. The gas shortages due to fires at refineries caused by “careless smokers” is really hitting them hard though…

But yeah, like I mentioned before, wartime economies are a thing and they can function for quite a number of years. Up to and during WW2, deficit spending and taxation for Germany was insane. (Most of that debt was cancelled after the war as Germany had no economy left to pay it back.)

They just fake their economy for while, until they can’t. That’s an extremely simplic way to put it, but for idiots like me, it’s easier to understand.

Simply “printing more money” doesn’t work and the “real” economy becomes mostly goods, services and guns. Extreme inflation will drain bank accounts naturally, I speculate.

Feel free to completely correct me here, but there seem to be way to drain bank accounts without having it perceived as government theft, is my main point. (TBH, currency value makes little sense to me with the ways governments print and burn it at massive rates. It’s just all … fake to me.)

I’ll see if I can find one that doesn’t actually contact the back of the phone, but the trial and error to find one of those may end up destroying the autograph.

I dunno anything about the American Spirit culture wars, but it is a much more dense cigarette and does taste a little more “natural”.

TBH, anyone that smokes them thinking they are any safer because they are supposedly more “natural” needs to learn how marketing works. Less “chemicals” doesn’t matter much in the context of doing something that stilly anyway. (ie: if you decide to jump off a cliff, it doesn’t matter how much you weigh because the end result at the bottom is exactly the same.)

There probably isn’t a way around removing the battery, after more thought.

Eventually, unless the battery is properly managed, gas buildup may eventually win and turn it into a forbidden pillow. Controlled battery destruction/ventilation sounds like a fun, but lengthy science project for this problem, IMHO. Gasses need to escape the battery, but phone shouldn’t go boom in the process. Deep discharge + adding vent holes after may work in some way.

Lithium batteries mainly explode and cause fires mostly because of any stored energy and gas buildup that deformes the battery causing a short circuit and thus, fire, to my knowledge. The lithium isn’t as reactive with water because it isn’t pure lithium? My knowledge is extremely limited on keeping lithium from exploding. (I think I remember videos of lithium batteries being unrolled that still explode in water, charge or not.)

It’s a sharpie, and I speculate it may have been specially for fabric (if there is such a thing), further adding to the preservation conundrum.

But anything alcohol based (or is a substance that has molecules around the same size) would melt a sharpie really quick.

You got me thinking about this differently now, specifically about different solvents that would have been in your spray primer. Acetone is common in epoxies and primers, and it will aggressively remove sharpies as well. (Water is also a solvent, and smaller than acetone or isopropyl, but something something polar/non-polar, or something. Sharpie ink is naturally hydrophobic anyway, but not completely.) Other, equally effective solvents exist to remove sharpie and also, well, act as a solvent for other uses.

So, point being, you just eliminated what is likely to be a fairly large range of possible coating options to choose from, which is a good thing. (I completely forgot solvents are a huge thing to consider, as did a few others here.)

It’s on the phone itself, unfortunately. The case is off in this pic.

That’s tight. I would keep that around for a while, for sure.