And I think that says more about everyone else than it does about Mr West.

The sad thing is, I think you are correct, without even joking. I think he literally needs some kind of help.

I try to keep an open mind always. So a while back he did a Lex Friedman interview, and I listened to it. For anyone not familiar, Lex does long form interviews of an hour or more and gets deep into various subjects.

I got about halfway through before concluding that there is something seriously wrong with West. Maybe he is just stupid (not as an insult, I mean like he lacks any sort of intelligence) or maybe he has brain damage or maybe he is just delusional. But you listen to the guy talk for more than 5 minutes at a time and you wonder what the hell is wrong with him.

For example, he spent a lot of time blaming the ‘Jewish media’ for a lot of America’s problems. Lex repeatedly asked him for specifics, challenged him to call out specific members or leaders of said media for specific actions, challenged him to use his platform to identify bad actors. He had few if any specifics and saw no particular benefit in any specific call outs, in his world it’s all a conspiracy and the whole ‘Jewish media’ and everyone part of it is all one and the same.

Furthermore, he spent a lot of time explaining why we should stop teaching history in schools. Said we should focus on science and technology classes and not waste time reliving the past. Lex tried hard to challenge that, even brought up specific non-partisan examples from history that presented useful lessons for today. It had no effect, West continued to double down on the position that teaching kids history is a waste of time and resources.

At this point I had wasted about half an hour listening to the guy, and decided he was simply not worth my time to listen any further, because he obviously fundamentally misunderstood how the world works, how human nature works, and had little or no facts or evidence to back up his positions. I concluded that any further ideas from West can probably be safely dismissed without much consideration, because his thought process shows no evidence of rational or scientific thought.

Honestly the best analogy I can think of is like going to a mental institution and listening to a crazy person. They will talk your head off for an hour about how aliens infected their brain or whatever, and the only thing you will get from it is an hour older.

This is the answer. Leave a hair dryer blowing at the thing for 5 or 10 minutes. It will heat the bowl, and also heat the air inside, which will expand.

The problem is conceptual.

There are two types of tracker devices.

AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.

The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.

They aren’t even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?

Yeah I’m wondering that too.

I looked at the thread on Reddit and I can’t find one single user who says this is a good idea.

I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

Eventually, we will just have to accept that photographic proof is no longer proof.

There are ways that you could guarantee an image is valid. You would need a hardware security module inside the camera, which signs a hash of the picture with its own built-in security key that can’t be extracted and a serial number that it generates. That can prove that an image came from a particular camera, and if you change even one pixel of that image the signature won’t match anymore. I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Not mainstream at least. There are one or two camera manufacturers that offer this as a feature, but it’s not on things like surveillance cameras or cell phones nor will it be anytime soon.

I’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.

I don’t think there’s nearly as many as you think. It’s a perception bias, the few that there are stick out a lot because they are hilariously stupid so you read about them a lot and it seems common.

Keep in mind that in the US, about half the households are armed. And the half that own guns own enough guns to arm the other half. There’s more guns than people in this country. If they’re truly was a significant overlap between very stupid people and gun ownership, the nation would be like a roadrunner cartoon with Yosemite Sam type a shootouts and people firing into the air on every street corner. That is seriously not the case.

They generally are.
Problem is there is a tiny little overlap in the middle of that Venn diagram, and that tiny overlap seems to be responsible for a great deal of problems.

To expand on this- In general you must comply with the laws of any jurisdiction where you have a business presence. This for example Meta is a USA company, but they have offices in the EU and they sell advertising in the EU from EU offices so they have to comply with EU laws for EU users. They can’t just wave off and say ‘we are a USA company, EU regs don’t apply to us’.

Lemmy is not a corporation. There is no business presence in Texas, unless an instance admin lives there or hosts the server there. So Lemmy, both as a whole and as individual instances, can simply give Texas the middle finger and say ‘we aren’t subject to your laws as we have no presence or business in your state. We are in the state of California (or whatever) and are subject to the laws of our home state. It is not our job to enforce Texas laws in California on servers hosted in Virginia.’

Thus Texas trying to enforce their laws on a Cali company is like Hollywood studios sending DMCA notices to Finland.

Mainly conflicts with mDNS. However it’s shitty IMHO that the mDNS spec snarfed a domain already in widespread use, should have used .mDNS or similar.

There’s actually a really good explanation for this.

This is a mixing pump. It mixes ethanol into the fuel. Because the mixing happens before the part of the pump that measures how much is being dispensed, you need at least a few gallons to fully flush things out and get somewhere close to what you’re actually buying.

Nobody is going to come arrest you if you buy 2 gallons of gas. But the gas you get me not be the mix you wanted.

I’m strongly in favor of laws restricting how many 1-3 family homes a company can own. I think that limit should go up and down the chain of corporate ownership including parents and subsidiaries. There should be exceptions for things like worker housing, but single family homes should not be an investment opportunity for large corporations. All that does is drive up the prices and makes it harder for average people to own a home. There is no overall benefit to society.

Squatters should have civil rights. Rights to the property that belongs to somebody else which they are squatting in should not be among their rights. If you are squatting on a property and that property owner wants you gone, you should be removed immediately.

I would agree with something like this, but focusing on residential properties. I also think there should be limits to how many residential properties a single company can own. I don’t mean like apartment buildings, I mean like single-family or two / three family houses.

1 to 3 family homes are a resource that should be for the good of the American people. I’m not against somebody making money as part of that, but when the opportunity for investing starts pricing people out of the market then we need to have a hard think about whether the investing market is more important than the people or not. I don’t think it should be.

Where the hell are you getting that from? I didn’t say anything about immigrants.
This has nothing to do with race or nationality or citizenship. I am saying if you have no rights to a building, as in you don’t own the building and you don’t have a lease there, then barging in and locking the door behind you should not automatically grant you any sort of special treatment. You are an illegal intruder, and the police should go in and arrest you. I think that should apply in situations like this and it should apply in situations even if the owner of the building hasn’t been around in a month.

Where the hell are you getting any of that from what I said? I am saying that if you don’t own a building, and otherwise have no rights to that building, just because you barge in and lock the door doesn’t mean you should own the building or have any rights to that building whatsoever. The police should go in and arrest you.

Hopefully this starts to shed some light on the travesty that is ‘squatters rights’. Squatters shouldn’t have rights.