when i ran a fediverse server for myself and 3 people, but allowed public signups if someone came by; it was very easy to ban people, and very easy to null-route entire swaths of the fediverse, because i didn't want their content on my service.
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
right, and you have other users on fediverse that notice that server leaking, and if the content is bad enough, report the service to an authority. Having all of the pedophiles and other creeps on a tiny subset of servers, isloated islands of them; well, that ought make enforcement easier.
It also makes it relatively easy to avoid, as server admins share blocklists. I know a dozen servers offhand that i'd block if i ran another fediverse server.
Fosstodon fediverse server doesn't have this issue, for example.
I replied this way because the way you wrote it, it sounds like an indictment of a system that's designed to avoid advertisers getting user profiles, over all else.
The problem is the people who participate in this (the illegal and immoral), and not "the network."
I voted for Ralph Nader a few times, until he stopped appearing on ballots for whatever reason. For this reason, and many others. I don't remember any negative press about him, either. maybe he got out when mudslinging became defacto in elections.
Emergency Department^ doctors, what do they make? give people who have to review the worst humanity has to offer and pay them that. and while we're at it, ambulance personnel should get a huge pay bump. Take it from nurses' pay.
^ i originally said "triage doctors" but i meant the resident ER doc.
> If calories in, calories out was useful advice rather than a banal statement of physics
it's also wrong, or at least imprecise. fat and bone and muscle all weigh different amounts, at the same volume.
the only way i've been able to explain the science to laypersons is thus:
if you and a friend both weigh 200lbs, but you once weighed 250lbs and your friend has never weighed more than 200lbs; all else equal: you must ingest less calories than your friend to maintain 200lb body weight.
your body will try to "outlast the famine" if you had to lose a lot of weight (or lost a lot of weight for any reason).
That absolutely does not comport with "calories in, calories out". It's also why the people who were never fat have no problem "just eating a donut."
no, i won't cite, this has been published many times in the last decade, 13 years.
Eh, it totally does comport with calories in, calories out. We just don't hook people up to metabolic carts in day-to-day life, but that's really the only way to measure the calories out part.
The physics of CICO are undeniable. Humans don't photosynthesize. The biology of CICO is useless.
- former fat guy. I'm deeply, personally aware of how useless CICO is as dietary advice.
up until very recently, the only units that made it even remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon."
Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".
I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits!
is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day.
the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.
So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.
> is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it does not form something "to build more complicated units out of".
For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as corresponding volume unit?
Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e.
10^-3 km = 1 m = 10 dm = 100 cm = 1000 mm = 10^6 µm = 10^9 nm = ...
vs
1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd = 15840 ft = ...
we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain is because i have one, but that's specifically to measure land against a plat map. Every location in this country is based off common reference locations (there's a literal marker on the ground), with only chains and angles to delimit things (generally).
Read that last part again, because they use GPS to determine if the marker has moved, and that takes X minutes to quiesce. you can't take X*Y minutes to check each chain mark and angle.. not all land is rectilinear. we have a bit less than ten million km^2 of land in this country.
I'd reckon that maybe 1% of Americans know what a league is, as in the definition. Less for "furlong", less for "chain".
This is how these conversations go, usually. It's completely pointless, most of the people here will never interface with something where this matters. I'm a few decades old - 2.25 score years old, to be accurate. My wife knows what a score is, and how many feet in a mile, which i can never remember; by the by, it's about 5300 feet.
like Celsius, the metric measurements don't "mean" anything directly to a human. a meter is how fast light travels in 1/speedoflightinmeterspersecond. water boils at 100 and freezes at 0. compare to ~100F "roughly median body temperature", "roughly the length of an adult foot", and "roughly the length of the middle bone in your thumb".
yes, for "science" using units that convert is great, one of my favorite things to read is the Frink language unit file for that reason. Metric is cute and ostensibly "well-defined". great, use it.
you're not getting ~400,000,000 people to switch, potentially ever. The sheer cost is astronomical. a speed limit sign, just the sign is ~$22. The total cost of install could be from $500 to $3000. Per speed limit sign. There's at least 10,000 speed limit signs on interstates alone. [nearly] Every single mile of every single highway and interstate in the US has a reflective sign stating what mile it is - except for mile 420, i'm not sure why, that'll be missing but there will be a 419.7 mile marker. weird.
> In 2002, a contractor installed just over 50 miles’ worth of markers on I-78 and Routes 22 and 33 at a cost of $230,000, or about $4,500 per mile. Today, [...] $6,500 per mile, said PennDOT spokesman Ron Young.
and
> As of 2022, [...] the Interstate Highway System, which has a total length of 48,890 miles (78,680 km)
and that's just interstates. We have expressways, freeways, spurs, feeders, highways, state roads that use mile markers. Speed limit signs vary in distance, but figure 2 miles per (raelly 1 per mile since they're on both directions of travel, and usually there's 2 per direction, one on either shoulder) on nearly every commute surface. we have ~2,600,000 miles of paved roads, and a bit over 4,000,000 miles of roads, total, in the US - that's 6.437376e+6 kilometers, or 21 lightseconds in a vacuum, or 32 lightseconds in fiber optic cable. 32000ms ping, awesome.
Every house in the US is built with 16" on-center framing for the walls. we're not going to switch to "406.4mm on center", because our sheetrock, plywood, etc are all 48"x96".
every other country that switched did it 70+ years ago, has less people, or is drastically smaller.
like i said, rudely, but now politely, give it up, we're staying with our US customary units.
> we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain is because i have one, but that's specifically to measure land against a plat map. Every location in this country is based off common reference locations (there's a literal marker on the ground)
The same holds for more obscure unit prefixes in the SI system like dam (decameter) or hm (hectometer) in the SI unit system (as far as I am aware, the only common usage of the "deca" prefix is in Austria for "decagram" (dag)).
Nevertheless, even these obscure units fit the regular pattern perfectly:
I forgot one thing. you said "why not have in^2 and in^3" we do, but we don't use that very often. Older American "muscle cars" engines' displacement was measured in cubic inches. every child learns what a square inch is. a "board foot" is 12 cubic inches of milled wood, 12 in^3 - I don't know how to verify this on a Sunday, so this may be wrong, the board-foot. And then, we use square feet; for floor space in a house, say, my house is ~1500 ft^2. We also use cubic yards, yd^3, for stuff like dirt, concrete. when talking about this, like if i need a driveway's worth of concrete, the load is measured in "yards" which is short for "cubic yards."
But all that aside, and with apologies to mods and you for sneering; i wanted to say this in my prior reply but when reading it aloud to my wife i took it out:
Americans can, in general, divide and multiply by numbers other than 10.
yes, we use acres and hectares, too! it sounds better to say i live on 6.5 acres to an American neighbor who asks, than 0.02630457km^2...
edit window closed but i wanted to say that i like that metric units are all related. 1cc of water is 1ml is 1g. that's lovely, and pretty, in the sense that Carl Sagan would use it.
Doesn't mean the USA has to switch for common use.
I've been cooking for something like a quarter century, for multiple people, and i have never once, in my life, used a kitchen scale. I have one for doing METRIC measurements of ratios of liquids for other uses, but not once for cooking.
A stick of butter is a quarter pound. it doesn't matter though, because the butter is marked in "recipe increments". if you melt it, you can use "tablespoons" to measure it, literally.
eta: i haven't even used measuring cups or spoons for anything in like a decade, unless i am making bread or bread-like things.
i wanted to take a picture of my PDR - Physician's Desk Reference tomes, but i gave them to my wife to use at work. But, the publisher stopped publishing the PDR on paper and went to "app-only" and requires payment, now. Used to be you could go to those library "used book sales" or university used library book sales and get ones a couple years out of date.
but no longer.
I didn't even have to look at the (reddit op linked) site or an archive to know that it was going to be wrong, dangerous, a liability, and bordering on unethical.
it can't remix. even comfyui can remix on my desktop. I've used udio, suno, comfyui with the music generation models, and one other site that i can't remember the name of since it was through a friend.
They all kinda suck, you do have to run generation many times unless you're very lucky.
I and my friend wrote 10 albums between 1997 and 2007. we went solo for geographical regions, and i stopped writing music altogether in 2017 or so, only doing arrangements, mashups, mastering.
and now i don't even know if i ever want to get back into music, because i can rapidly generate a "good enough for the moment" track, like when the south korean president tried to coup: https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a... Oh by the way the lyrics are in lojban except for "... and the people were pissed"
the oldest stuff on those three sites i mentioned is all hand written by me over the years.
TCL roku TVs are cheap and you can just tell them you don't have an internet connection (or whatever) on first setup. I have no idea if TCL or Roku have pulled a samsung/sony/visio - i forget which - and connect to "open wifi" to phone home.
I got tired of my TCL Roku taking so long to turn on and switch inputs and turning itself on and off to update. So i factory reset it and told it "no network". works fine.
Sceptre makes dumb TVs, too. https://www.sceptre.com/ - i have been buying their panels for something like 24 years. they're "decent" nothing super remarkable, but they're just dumb displays. at least mine are.
And finally, find a projector that does what you want. they're usually so compact they don't have roku/other smart stuff. I use a wall, we used dark brown or black paint to frame out a 95" screen roughly in between 16:8 and 16:9 aspect. wash the wall or sand lightly and wash the wall, then apply Behr Silver Screen in the matte-est behr base. I personally did three coats, it took less than a quart, so you only need a quart for ~100" with 3 coats. It looks like a movie screen when it's off, and it looks like a TV screen when the projector is on.
observe a random clip of it in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG6VJ9WlLcs note i know there is trapezoid, i fixed that later by ceiling mounting the projector in the middle as opposed to slightly to the side. a more expensive / nicer projector can actually transform the image trapezoid to fix this, and the most expensive can do it on their own! mine has vertical trap but not horizontal.
p.s. if you like this idea use the Ad Nauseam plugin for firefox et al in lieu of ublock whatever. It clicks on all ads it hides, polluting metrics, wasting money.
it also tells you the estimated cost of all ads it's clicked on your behalf.
Perhaps, but for that i use TrackMeNot plugin, which gets a list of headlines then does headline remixes/mashup and googles/searches for them on a set schedule of your choosing. you can choose to disallow words that would be illegal to search for in your jurisdiction.
also, oh no! Coca Cola will think i like latex? Shoot, this ruins my retirement plans.
> oh no! Coca Cola will think i like latex? Shoot, this ruins my retirement plans.
Oh no! Now you didn't get that job because the company farms out their background checks and that company uses these metrics to determine different types of risks (social risks, financial risks (you must really like gambling after clicking on all of those gambling ads), etc). Oh no! Now you're on an extremist list and being investigated. Oh no! Now you're paying more for the same products because you're on a list of people that companies think will pay more. Oh no! Your social score is tanking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Yea this isn't a thing and is just another scare tactic that gets dragged out when Ad Nauseum is brought up as the better solution. It's banned in the Chrome because it works
also good luck doing price discrimination when i'm at a regular store in meatspace. i don't use any apps for any brand or store. If there comes a day where it is possible to "update prices in realtime" in stores, before i get to the register, and it's somehow legal for them to charge a different price at the register than it says on the shelf; then i won't shop at that store.
all stores are like that? doubtful. the farmer's market isn't.
I also don't particularly care if some employer passes me over because of what ads i click on. If any of you work for a company that does this, can you let us know the name of the company?
Also, oh no, not an investigation where nothing illegal happened! What will i do? Oh right, "i don't answer questions unless my lawyer directs me to. you can call him, here's his card"
reply to your "/s" comment below:
it's banned because google is an adtech company that also makes "the most popular browser." I have no idea what strings ublock origin (or whatever they changed the name to this week) pulled to still "technically" be allowed (or was allowed, a few years ago); but ad nauseam uses the same lists as ublock, as well as possibly others.
I don't use chrome, and haven't for like 6 years; it isn't installed on my PC and it isn't my browser on android (when allowed to make the decision.)
But i cannot imagine the thought process that got us here. How did you come to believe all of the things you typed?
That's more what i got from that pull-quote. I know a company that has hundreds of individual forums, and those are all moderated quickly and correctly (last i heard). They're moderated so effectively they often get DDoS by Russian IPs for banning users for scam posts from that country.
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