Riskable

Tell them, “Sure! You can ride in the trunk 👍”

As someone who’s caught a leaker in the past (well, someone that was exfiltrating company secrets to a competitor) catching leakers is actually pretty easy if you have any modicum of control over the tools they use and the places they work. Barring that, no. Just no. It’s not going to happen.

If a leaker is gullible and stupid some trickery is possible but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Warner Music. Seems like a job that’s doomed to fail from the start. I wouldn’t even bother unless they know it’s just a job on paper and are actually just looking to give someone’s kid a legit-sounding job to pad their resume 🤷

Not only that but if I were in charge of hiring I’d be extremely skeptical of any and all applicants. Anyone smart enough to do the job will know it’s impossible and will just become a master of stalling and picking low hanging fruit (aka useless) and everyone else is just a fraud.

• Total Recall
• Dark City
• Inception

And:

• Memento
• The Notebook
• 50 First Dates

Works for the Bible 🤷

You’re just explaining basic Android functionality using random apps of your choosing.

You’re not wrong… but is that attitude really necessary? It comes off as, “You’re just explaining basic shit any idiot would know, loser! 😝”

Besides, not all apps that load external URLs are like that: A lot of them will use Android Web View which annoys TF out of me.

If you install Firefox Focus and make it your default browser on Android the Jerboa client (and others I think) will use it when loading links unless you have a specific app associated with a given URL (e.g. NYT app, NPR app, etc).

If you’re not familiar with Firefox Focus it’s a version of Firefox built for privacy. It basically makes it so that every URL you load behaves like a private browser tab. It also has ad-blocking built in which is sweet (though it doesn’t work on everything/not as good as uBlock Origin).

Oops: Just realized your question is related to Mastodon and not Lemmy. Though I’m certain that Firefox Focus would work the same way for Mastodon clients.

Actually, I just checked Tusky and yes, it does load URLs in Firefox Focus. So my advice is still good 👍

Ubuntu 2204

OMG! What’s it like‽ Did Linux become a mainstream desktop by then?

How’d you smuggle it back in time? And no: It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Linux maintained backwards compatibility for the ancient hardware we’re all running for that long 👍

Options:

• How a Realist Hero Built the Fediverse
• Monopoly Slayer
• Fate/Stay Federated
• Re:Decentralization
• The Rising of the Federated Hero
• By the Grace of the Fediverse
• So I’m Federated, So What?
• Reincarnated as a Federated Universe

Depends on your definition of “wheel”. For example, any ancient perfectly round pottery was made using a pottery wheel (primitive or not). Otherwise, how would you do it?

That’s how we know the ancient Sumerians were using pottery wheels as early as 3250 BCE (because we found perfectly round pottery that’s that old):

https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/15/potters-wheel#:~:text=The potter’s wheel is an,(2).

Surprise everyone by bringing a grill!

They didn’t say it was a man-made pyramid. It could be the naturally occurring kind. Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims

The fairer sex sees not but the belligerent blustering of a bedswerving bobolyne!

The tower on the left is home to the Tea Wizard who uses parts of the lower floors for the nation’s biscuit reserves. The one on the right is host to a princess that’s been waiting for rescue by a prince for a very long time now.

This is a great idea! Lock picking is fun and super impressive to laymen (haha).

Just don’t tell anyone but your closest, most trusted friends (haha). Also, tell them to keep it a secret! Why? So your neighbor doesn’t knock on your door at 2AM because they locked themselves out of their apartment.

Also, you don’t need cutaway locks! They’re neat toys but nothing more. What you really need is a variety of locks to play with.

Head to your local hardware store and pick up a bunch of cheap locks. Or just ask friends if they have any old padlocks they’re not using (most people will have one or two).

I don’t know if it’s because of Brexit or what but news out of Britain has become a lot like news out of Florida.

BritishMan might overtake FloridaMan some day.

This might not necessarily be the case for much longer with storage costs finally reaching certain thresholds.

2TB SSDs only cost ~$100 and you can cram a lot of SSDs into a tiny space with only a minimal amount of cooling (still need a fan but just a fan).

The next bottleneck to overcome is upload bandwidth. Too many providers offer asynchronous service with weirdly low/slow upload limitations. However, that too might be changing over the next few years as DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gbit down/6Gbit up (DOCSIS 3.1 only supported ~1Gbit up). An important note about DOCSIS 4.0 is that in order to take advantage of it’s improved features (on the ISP end) you need to provide more upload bandwidth to the client (well, you can still cap it at the router but at that point the ISP is just being an asshole instead of actually “managing bandwidth”).

Docker containers aren’t running in a virtual machine. They’re running what amounts to a fancy chroot jail… It’s just an isolated environment that takes advantage of several kernel security features to make software running inside the environment think everything is normal despite being locked down.

This is a very important distinction because it means that docker containers are very light weight compared to a VM. They use but a fraction of the resources a VM would and can be brought up and down in milliseconds since there’s no hardware to emulate.

An electric version of any instrument can be as small as you want it to be. It’s just a matter of training and ergonomics at that point.

For example, if you’ve got 10,000 hours playing the cello it wouldn’t be very easy to translate that into having equivalent skill playing a tiny electric version. But it could be done. Nooo problem!

The technology is there, it’s just that there’s no demand 🤷

We are currently living in an age of literacy. More people (as a percentage of the population) are literate than at any point in human history. Even if people get dumber over time I don’t think overall literacy will change much.

In Idiocracy it seemed like most people could still read but only extremely simplified language. What I expect will happen instead–if we do indeed get dumber–is people will just become more easily manipulated. Basically, there will be a lot more suckers as a percentage of the population.

This means that as long as a political party or ideology is willing to adapt to current trends (e.g. accepting gay marriage or at least pretending to) it would become easier and easier to sucker people into voting for their candidates regardless of their actual plans or historical (voting) records. Basically, populism will take over but the specific kind where the candidates just say whatever TF gets people to vote for them and then they go do the exact opposite because the (dumb) voting base that elects them doesn’t really pay any attention to their actions, only what the candidate says.

When a voting base becomes made up of extremely dumb suckers we’re likely to see “populist” candidates that don’t actually give a damn about what they say as long as they get elected and if they do get elected they’ll go on a “government shopping spree” enriching themselves and their allies and doing things like appointing their family members to positions of power. The suckers will praise them for actions like this not because they like the results of these policies but because it’s easy for them to understand that it hurts the people they’ve been suckered into hating the most.

I work for a huge bank that’s investing a non-trivial amount of money (billions) in single family homes. They don’t plan to rent them out. They just want to own them.

Now why would a huge, rich bank invest in something like that? Because they’re pretty sure they’re going beat inflation when they resell those properties later. It’s a very safe (if spread across the entire US and Canada) place to park money.

It’s not a big deal if one or two banks do this or even a handful of private equity firms. However, when all of them do it at once (like they are now) it can have a major impact on the prices of single family homes. It also creates something called a, “systemic risk” but that’s a very large topic that I’m not going to cover here.

The point is that yes: The big banks and big private equity firms (and 401ks!) all own way too much non-commercial real estate in general right now and their expansion into single family homes is a great big societal problem.

…but why now‽ Why haven’t they been investing in huge swaths of single family homes since forever? I mean, they’ve been appreciating faster than inflation since forever with only a few minor hiccups (e.g. 2008). The answer is: It used to be much more expensive to maintain homes that don’t have anyone living in them.

Back in the day most homes were unique. In any given neighborhood some homes might have gas heat while others had electric and some others used oil or coal! There were also more fire and flood hazards with more flammable furnishings/building materials and things like washing machine hoses would often just break after a certain amount of time (the seals were only good for like ten years).

These days you have endless amounts of cookie cutter homes in enormous neighborhoods all over the damned place. They’re also built to vastly superior building standards and come with appliances and AC that are orders of magnitude more efficient than in decades past.

This means a big bank or private equity firm can buy hundreds of houses in a region and (cheaply) hire a 3rd party to look after them. They just don’t need as much maintenance as they used to. They’re so much cheaper to maintain en mass.

So how do we fix this problem? There’s all sorts of things you can do but some quick and perhaps unexpected things are:

• Raise minimum wage and crack down on businesses hiring illegal workers doing house maintenance work (let them do construction 👍).
• Raise property taxes in general. You could try to raise them for homes without people living in them but then you just end up creating other unintended consequences/problems (which I won’t get into to stay brief)
• Force upgrades on unoccupied homes. Air conditioning system is 10 years old? You have to get a new one with improved efficiency. House has gas stoves? You have to replace those.
• Force inspections of unoccupied homes and come down hard in regards to code enforcement (every unoccupied home poses a nonzero fire risk to every neighborhood).

Basically, you have to turn unoccupied homes into expenses again. When that happens the banks and private equity will get the hell out.

There’s lots of private equity that will just convert to being slumlords but the big banks do not want to be renting out anything. It’s a huge risk for them and looks real bad on their balance sheets from a banking perspective. Also, if a bank is big enough they’re straight up forbidden (by law) from renting out properties (though there’s various loopholes which I won’t get into).