I like this idea. You just have the keys scattered around the house. The V key is under the bed. The W is in the medicine cabinet. E is next to the lightswitch. K is under the sink. You'd have to carry the modifier keys around in your pockets.
An escape room where you have to find not only a password, but also individual one-key keyboards hidden in drawers and under and behind things, and you have to co-ordinate as a team to type it out quickly.
Ctrl and Alt keys on a belt clip that just pair to whatever computer you sit in front of.
@timixretroplays @phooky ooh, that makes me think of the idea of a wearable computer that tracks you, so it works for whichever computer you're closest to.
I was briefly concerned, but it turns out older group buy boards from the bad old days are just about in that range. The Cannonkeys satisfaction75's first run was 7.76usd/key before shipping, switches, and keycaps!
A new White House executive order says the exhibition is an example of how the Smithsonian portrays "American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive."
All I know is that a famous Pub in one of the two countries has a secret standing "Buy One Get One Free" offer on all draft beer if you say the secret phrase:
"Manchester United Sucks, but Trump Sucks More".
I can't remember the name of the Pub though. Sorry.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will lay off 2,765 employees across multiple locations in Maryland on May 30, 2025 as indicated in a WARN.
An Equality Texas study shows many LGBTQ+ college students have considered leaving their schools — and the state entirely — since Senate Bill 17 went into effect last year.
An Equality Texas study shows many LGBTQ+ students have considered leaving their schools — and the state entirely — since Senate Bill 17 went into effect last year.
"5 reasons I stopped dual-booting Windows and Linux on my PC" rightly. The only feasible place for #windows is **inside** a #VirtualMachine, not the other way around!
Still, our "pet hoover" or whatever it's called, sucks the paint off out of or rug. I find it difficult to steer it around our living room (since my dearest claims I am the strongest person in our tiny household) (she's the smartest, obviously).
My newest plan is to aim it at Mars and get myself drawn towards the only bigger sucker than me.
Ask yourself this: will fares in self-driving cabs be cheaper? Will subscriptions to vibe-coded SaaS cost less? Will tickets to see model-generated movies be a fraction of the current price?
Or do all these technologies just solve the problem of having to pay people, with no benefit to anyone else except shareholders?
And then ask yourself this: if nobody's getting paid, who's hailing the taxis, using the SaaS and watching the movies?
As somebody who has devoted much of their working career lately and not inconsiderable technical expertise to the work of building a robot taxicab, I think about this question all the time. And the answer I give to that every damned time is that this technology will only ever pencil out financially when it matures to the point where the service is operated by highly regulated public utilities and government agencies. There isn’t a functioning technology research and development program in my country anymore, and the only way such technology can be developed anymore is the way I’m currently employed to do so, and the only way you’re going to get the gay luxury space communism of abundant and cheap robot taxicabs everywhere is by appropriating it from its owners against their considerable and probably violent resistance.
Content warning: Rant about "free speech" for Nazis
Nazis have literally called for people like me to be gassed. They don't even see me as a person. Why should I extend them even an ounce of my sympathy?
Content warning: Rant about "free speech" for Nazis
"communists and fascists are morally equivalent"
No they aren't. There were communists who opposed Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao. Many communists of the modern day have learned from these atrocities, and either embraced anarchist communism or a non-ML form of Marxism.
Meanwhile, all the fascists unanimously united around genocide back in the day, and still do. The Nazis want a second Holocaust and say as much.
Keep the pressure on! Popular protest prompted Cory Booker's speech. I'd like to see every single democrat pull a corey booker. More sand in the gears.
But the democrats won't save us. We can't go back to what was before. It never was america to all.
I feel like I should talk about why declaring yourself a Nazi is very specifically different to declaring yourself almost anything else seen as political. Because there is a difference, and it’s really important, and I don’t think people get that, and it has real-world ramifications.
Walk with me.
There are a lot of terrible things you can declare yourself, politically and otherwise. But we’ll stick to politics for the moment.
You can declare yourself as Stalinist, for example. That’s real fuckin’ bad, bad to the point that a lot of people would say that there’s no difference between declaring yourself a Stalinist and declaring yourself a Nazi.
And I can see why they say that. The death counts are pretty similar, historically. The oppression and evil are both truly remarkable. The misery, as well.
But even between these, there is a real difference that sets Nazism apart.
Stalin murdered millions, just like Hitler, but that was never the theory. The idea. The goal. The goal was a material paradise for everyone, at least on paper. The real goal was an economically powerful industrial society, but even that was in service to the idea of a society of abundance. It may’ve been “if people would just” writ monstrous, but it was there.
Nazism kinda promises that… but only for some. And not many. Just members of the Master Race. For everyone else, Nazism promises either slavery or genocide. Explicitly. It says so, right on that label, right on the tin.
And that’s what makes Nazism distinct. It’s not the only political movement which makes that promise – White Nationalism, I see you drooling in the corner, pissing yourself – but it’s the most famous, the best known of them.
(There are reasons so many White Nationalists are fond of Hitler. It’s because the core idea – enslave and murder millions of people – overlaps.)
Are there other ideas besides genocide in Nazism, and in the other fascism variants? Sure. They have names, too – names which aren’t “fascist” or “Nazi.”
For example, there are people who have interest in the economic theories of the Italian fascists. If you’re into that, you can call yourself a Syndicalist in clear conscience. Mussolini followed a branch of syndicalism, which actually predates fascism entirely. The Italian version was intended to solve class struggle. It doesn’t, but as goals go, there are worse.
And modern followers of these ideas don’t call themselves Nazis, because they aren’t interested in the thing which sets Nazis specifically apart, which isn’t even just a threat of violence against entire peoples, it’s a promise of murder against entire peoples. It’s an explicit and specific statement:
If we take power, we will kill you and everyone like you solely for the crime of your existence. Your original sin was being born, your criminality is existing at all. And there is nothing you can do to change that other than die.
We will kill you when and if we can.
We have laws against that, you know. You threaten someone with violence – particularly murder – and you mean it? That’s called terroristic threatening, and it’s a crime. You don’t have to be specific about when, or where, or how, or anything like that – it just has to be credible. It’s not real easy to get convictions, but it is an undisputed crime.
If someone calls themselves a Nazi, if they specifically invoke Nazi symbolism, if they specifically parrot the Nazi salute, Elon, if they’re out there saying Hitler had some good ideas, they are making not just a threat but a promise of mass murder.
Their targets are both specific and clear, and they’re doing it on purpose.
They don’t have to label themselves a “Nazi” to support syndicalism. They don’t have to label themselves a “fascist” even to be a nationalist or even an outright imperialist. They don’t have to praise Hitler to hate people. None of that’s necessary. At all.
So when someone does do that that, they are making a choice. They are choosing to make a promise of mass violence and mass death.
And what’s the point of all this, you might ask?
Because that promise is what makes it okay to punch Nazis.
If you are any of their targets, they have promised to murder you. They have said if they can, they will. They have – by donning that uniform, by taking on that label, by throwing that salute – threatened your life with a violent and brutal end at their hands.
History shows that their threats are entirely credible. They will do it, if they can. They promised to kill you; they meant it; it’s only a matter of time and opportunity.
And what’s that do?
It makes punching Nazis into reasonable and proportional self-defence.
Yeah. It does. Maybe not from a legal standpoint, no. I’m not arguing that. You won’t have the law on your side.
But from an ethical and moral standpoint?
A punch to the face in response to an explicit, repeated, and credible threat of murder?
Yeah. That seems fine.
Hell, as far as I’m concerned… that’s getting off light.
in 2021 NASA issued the first of two interactive comic books/graphic novels] depicting young women dreaming of - and then training for - a future that would comprise the so-called "Artemis Generation."
I saw this image on "What does it mean?" so my answer was, "See if your municipality has an Active Transportation map. Overlay the last image on it, and then you'll understand."
“As he neared the record Tuesday evening, Booker noted that he had long been troubled by Thurmond’s place in Senate history and saw his own speech as an opportunity to reclaim the record. ‘To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand,’ Booker said. ‘I'm not here though because of his speech. I'm here despite his speech. I'm here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.’”
“From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity—33% more than Los Angeles—85% of which came from fossil fuels. We estimated that 1.9 million Americans were exposed to ≥0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution from Bitcoin mines, often hundreds of miles away from the communities they affected.”
The paper maps air pollution from power plants supplying electricity to US Bitcoin mines. It finds that 1.9 million people in 2022-2023 breathed toxic amounts of Bitcoin mine attributable pollution, particularly around New York City and Houston.
Does anyone actually understand bitcoin mining? I get that it's a real thing. Bitcoins need to be mined before they have any value. I just am waaaay too ignorant about coding, and the nitty-gritty level of computing, to understand bitcoin mining.
Can someone explain this to me? I've been wondering for years. What is it that Satoshi Nakamoto dropped on us? My brain can't process it, and I'm pretty damn smart. I can grasp most ideas easily.
OK so 2*3 = 6, but given 6, can you find the factors 2 and 3? That's an example of a one-way algorithm, where factoring a number is a lot harder than multiplying the factors. Bitcoin uses uhh the one-way function SHA-256 which takes arbitrary bytes like "foobar" and spits out something like c3ab8ff13720e8ad9047dd39466b3c8974e592c2fa383d4a3960714caef0c4f2.
The trick is, starting from that second thing (a hash) can you get back to foobar? Lots of things result in any given hash, but the goal of a Bitcoin miner is to find something (anything) that does. What they do is say "I expect hash 12345" in block 0, and then block 1 has to have something that hashes to 12345, which itself says "proof: [something] I expect hash 54321". To get the next block you have to try random data until you get the 54321 hash and so on.
Anyone ("anyone") can prove that a bitcoin is legit, by comparing the hash of its proof to the hash expected in the previous block, then checking the previous proof on the previous previous hash, all the way back to the very first hash. That's the blockchain, getting up to terabytes in size these days, so good luck processing all that data. Can't verify a bitcoin as legit without doing that though.
There can be multiple chains that lead back to the 1st bitcoin, since multiple proofs can hash to 12345 for instance. Bitcoin deals with that by uh... look over there, a distraction! (flees)
But that's basically what miners do. Burning their CPU solving a difficult math problem, trying to beat everyone else to the solution.
Thank you. That's the closest I've ever come to understanding it. I thought of it as a logarithmic thing, with an English major's understanding of logarithms. I knew it was reversing a complicated math problem, which I thought of as similar to compression algorithms writ large.
This: "Bitcoin deals with that by uh... look over there, a distraction! (flees)" I think really helps me grasp what I previously didn't.
The logarithm thing comes in with how they let you cheat at brute forcing a SHA-256. It's (virtually) impossible to do that, so they say like "OK it can be any hash as long as it ends in 1234" which is much faster to find an answer for. The longer the blockchain gets, the more of the hash has to exactly match, with the idea that eventually it would be too hard to compute new blocks, and Bitcoin would be "uninflatable" like gold and silver.
Instead people are losing Bitcoins, making them a diminishing resource, and other people are cooking the planet to JUST... MINE... THAT NEXT BLOCK.
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in reply to Neil E. Hodges • • •≠ is ignored
The class war is always the poor versus smarter people
Gas the poor
Neil E. Hodges doesn't like this.