I bear the same name as my father and his father. They both died when I was a young - over 30 years ago. I sometimes still get texts asking me if I’d like to “sell my house at [the address of my grandfather’s house that sold when he died in 1989].”

If the best that data miners can do is text me because they think I’m a 100+ year-old, then Musk’s sloppy efforts are going to be even worse.
Waiting for the day I get arrested for not having paid my own child support.

Yeah, well two days ago I made little ramekin sized cheesecakes with no bake cheesecake, chocolate mousse, and a graham cracker crust as a nice gesture and it had the opposite effect.
So, suck it, you cracker-lovin’ kill-joys!

Hehe. Horny Grahams.

No, because there isn’t a single IP range or user agent, and many developers are going to lengths to defeat anti-scraping measures, which include user agent spoofing as well as vpns and the like to mask the source of the traffic.

It helps because just like all the things Reagan destroyed, the American people will never be able to get those things back. Even when they do vote in politicians that pretend to represent them, the U.S. political system is too easily swayed with donor money to allow in things that truly benefit people again.
And if the government can close or sell facilities by the time sane policies prevail again (if they ever do), then it still benefits ‘them’, because the government can’t just create land and buildings from nothing. The only places they would be able to do that are new towns and rural areas. (White flight areas and conservative areas) So, you know, destroyed government services can’t even be reliably recreated in population-dense areas. (Cities - liberal areas)

I mean, it doesn’t help normal people, but it sure helps all the businesses that trade well-being for dollars. They’re going to do great.

They say regulations are written in blood.

Elaine Chao is a conservative government official who is famous for not enforcing safety rules or following up on safety complaints and may have violated ethics laws while Secretary of Transportation under Trump’s first regime. While in that role, she rubber stamped a sketchy driver control system implemented by Tesla that later helped kill her own sister (in addition to drunk driving).

Can the lightning bolt of consequences strike twice?

Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.

And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.

lol. Nope. Those are getting bought up by private equity and turned into poorly maintained rentals. They’re also being price fixed by a cabal of corporate landlords, so rents will always be maximally extractive!

yay…

GifOfSnapeSayingObviously.gif.jpeg.exe

See, for me, it’s not that 7*5 is easier to compute than 7*3, it’s that 5*7 is easier to compute than 7*3.

I saw your other comment about 8’s, too, and I’ve always found those to be a pain, so I reverse them, if not outright convert them to arithmetic problems. 8x4 is some unknown value, but X*8 is always X*10-2X, although do have most of the multiplication tables memorized for lower values.
8*7 is an unknown number that only the wisest sages can compute, however.

When he said revenge tour, he meant everyone who didn’t make him president in 2020 —including the minority that voted for him.

They’re now using these with drones instead of cargo jets. The drones can plant 100k trees a day!

Nuance is challenging through text - both coming and going.
I’d considered some sort of silliness indicator, but was too tired to find one that matched my tone.
Alas.

(For the record, it’s great work. And my winter project has been to poorly make about 60% of a headboard that is mostly MDF - so I’m clearly not in a place to judge anything.)

I don’t mean to put you down, but instead of spending your whole winter working on this, you could have just bought something with the same build quality and appeal from a master craftsperson for thousands of dollars.

He’s probably just blind in the very center of his vision and doesn’t realize it, because he sees the brightness around the blind spot, and the brain is pretty good at ‘filling in’ missing information.

I saw a video a while ago about a helicopter EMT pilot who got hit with a laser while flying, and he’s blind right in the center of his vision. He doesn’t notice it most days, but he’ll catch himself looking ‘around’ things he’s focusing on to actually see them.

Your colleague probably doesn’t look long enough that he feels the ache/burn of the UV rays, or if he does, he assumes it’s something mystical, like the eyes producing vitamin D.

Boy is he gonna be surprised when he no longer can see the sun.

Unless he was pulling your leg. That’s always an option.

What will happen is that utilities will take about a year to file an IRP with a rate increase, have it under consideration for a year, and then when it’s invariably passed, they will subcontract the work to a corporation the utility owns (at a big markup), complete about 40% of the work, report a massive profit to their shareholders while reporting to your utility commission that they need more rate hikes, citing extenuating circumstances, the economy, the usual “please give us socialism” corporate nonsense.

I appreciate your sentiment. We should all strive to treat each other with compassion and respect, but unserious people get unserious treatment.

It’s kind of weird that you can get 30 years for lying to a credit union once, but only 2 for stealing someone’s identity for 30 years.

If the victim is a federally insured financial institution you get a huge jail sentence.
But if the victim is a person with no safety net, it’s a comparative slap on the wrist.
Skewed priorities.

Same. Until reading comments, I really thought the group was referring to themselves as digital monkeys, and they bullied people online to the point of it being torture.
After reading comments. Well - I’ll still open the article, but I’ll only skim it.

Only when it’s traumatizing.

Things that seem to go well and then later need intervention are the worst.
Suddenly I’m Gandalf: “I have no memory of this place.”