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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • If you were in highschool at the time, really the only ethical thing to do for someone in your position is to delete all the files and shine a light on their bad security practices, but don’t say anything about it to anyone. It’s that last bit that always gets you in trouble. Absolute candor is something adults almost never want to hear from children.





  • This is a failure of the reader, not the literature. It’s science fiction space opera written from the cultural perspective completely alien to most western sci-fi literature. It’s absolutely nothing like H.G. Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge, Herbert, Heinlein, or Niven. The Three Body Problem is almost the antithesis of all of those manifest destiny individual heroes. All of those authors have much more alike amongst themselves than they do with the narrative history we read through The Three Body Problem. Of course a lot of western readers don’t like it, it wasn’t written for their perspective. I don’t even think I could really get into it enough to REALLY enjoy it as much as my “comfort food” sci-fi. But, I could tell their was something there, and it was my own limitation of understanding, not a failure of the literature or the translation.


  • We can’t hold police accountable for murder, what makes you think that a corporation can hold them accountable for this? On what legal grounds would Penske even build that case? It’s not fraud. And Penske can’t got after them for laws the police break while using the rental. So they ban that one guy that signed the rental agreement, so what? What exactly will that accomplish? The only effect would be to cost Penske money and make an enemy of a fascist police state that has made no secret of their eagerness to break the law and abandon due process.


  • He wasn’t “walking around in public”. He was a gardener, walking around with gardening tools, gardening. I have one of those tools. It’s fucking amazing at digging small precise holes under difficult conditions, but as a weapon it wouldn’t be any more dangerous than any of my other tools. It’s absolutely not a knife. It’s just a narrow trowel with edges necessary to cut through roots. Most gardening tools have a sharp edge somewhere. Context fucking matters. And the fantasy your spinning about this scenario is just more pathetic nanny state authoritarian nonsense.





  • Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.




  • I’m not making excuses for anyone, but I’ve accidentally done this. On my phone and messaging app, if I read a text and leave the conversation open (not exiting the thread and the app) I won’t get any further notifications from that person no matter how much they text. I’m sure it’s a setting somewhere, but the setting is dumb. Like, surely I don’t want a bunch of pings when I’m actively conversing with someone and looking at the app, but leaving the thread open and the screen off “should” still get a notification, even if the app is open under my lock screen.


  • “Boring straight lines” as you put it are also a way for the poorest land owners to describe, subdivide, buy, and sell property using simple easy to understand language, often without even the need for a surveyor or a lawyer to get involved. Curved boundary lines are a clear indicator of commercial development at the higher end of that spectrum. Ordinary folks are not going to have the necessary training to do anything to directly subdivide property described in that way without involving lawyers and surveyors.

    Moreover, you often can’t sell a property without ingress and egress access to some public right of way. The same rules for simplicity of geometry apply to those right of ways too. Curves are vague and require complex legalese to describe in words. It also wasn’t too long ago that the precision of survey tools just did not exist to accurately describe parcels as anything but straight line distances with sometimes VERY vague information about orientation. Only more recent subdivisions (often much less than about 100 years old) include curves described with any decent level of precision. When they do describe curves on older documents it’s almost always in reference to large curves along existing structures (like railroads) and the actual geometry of that curve is not fully defined.

    What we see here is only tangentially related to tourism in that it is directly related to the entire business of land development, which includes everything else.


  • Ask a surveyor with experience in Mexico.

    It looks like most of the minor streets are mostly parallel with or perpendicular to the major road to the north and the rest are aligned along the cardinal directions: north & south, east & west. Lots of the properties and their respective drainage and road right of ways were probably apportioned to align with whatever the most significant roadway or canal was in place at the time. I can see the being portioned off using simple legal language like you can buy the north 50 meters of the south 300 meters relative to “this road” and the east 50 meters of the west 200 meters relative to “this canal”. You can accurately divide an area this way without any need to define a grid north, a proper grid coordinate system, and very basic survey tools.

    I’d guess that the other streets oriented to the cardinal directions came later as survey tools and practices advanced or some other change in the way municipalities regulate. For example, in the U.S. you see most gridded streets and lots in older areas, relative to sections townships and ranges, but in new platted developments constantly curving streets are all the rage.

    Whatever the cause, you are seeing the history of land development as the area develops it’s customs around land development.





  • Selfhosting is not piracy because you’re only streaming the albums you already bought and paid for. If you’re not down for buying CD’s or other physical media, or maybe you no longer have a disc drive, then you should be buying the lossless audio direct from the artists or via a service like Bandcamp. I just bought a few vinyls from Bandcamp and I had them to listen as to on all my devices (as lossless CD quality FLAC files) inside of a few minutes after purchase. Plex paired with plexamp on devices for ease of use. Replace with Jellyfish in a pinch. MPD might work, but you’d need to be better at networking than I am, also you’d need a steady internet connection at both ends.

    Self-hosting is not piracy, it’s fair use. Piracy is when a fool that only bought a license to listen instead of buying the actual media decides they want to listen on another device.