FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

I love how the best endorsement for a printer is "it's fine"

“Why are you using your governmentsona as your, you know, real name? That's just bad opsec.”
— Dream Ichor

um...

" A more recent study shows that toxoplasma infection prevalence was a consistent, positive predictor of entrepreneurial activity."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31980266/

Let it be a warning story for you, regarding smart home solutions.

Two years ago we have bough a house. Together with the house came a thermostat for controlling the gas boiler. The one from the smart kind.

Since the very beginning it was clear to me, this particular solution is a crap. The only way to control it was by login to the external web page and set the schedule and temperatures there, and the device at home periodically has checked if there is a change to fetch. Also, this particular device has only volatile memory. So, when power is turned off, the device needs to fetch the settings from the server.

I've tried to replace it with another smart solution, but failed at it (and I have wrote a little bit about that as well).

So, I am still using the one which came with the house.

And the servers went down somewhen during last two weeks. So far the device is still working, with recent settings. So, I am not in dire needs. However, the first power failure means I am being left without heating.

And what is the lesson for you? If you want to buy any kind of smart home solution, please make sure it will work decently without internet connection.

The very basic check you can do is to open https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/, find if there is available support for the device you want to buy, and check its IoT class. If this is local push or local polling, it would rather be OK. If this is a cloud push/cloud pulling, then further research is needed, as without the internet (or servers) available, the device's functionality will be degraded. Sometimes slightly, sometimes severely. And it is up to you to decide, if it is OK to be stuck with device having degraded functionality.

PS. To make this clear - I have a backup plan, so no advice is needed. Unless you have a recommendation of a smart thermostat with temperature zone control, which works fully locally. Then I'd be glad to hear.

#smart #smarthome #smarthomes #heating #thermostat #thermostats

they're making cool riffs on your joke and saying lovely things about you in the private qts

Okay, just to be clear;

Tencent/Alibaba/the CCP/whatever has *specific* software targeted at scraping mastodon servers, by hitting the unauthenticated "list posts from user" API endpoint, with *specific* account IDs, that they must've determined to be interesting from some moment or another.

The only way to get those account IDs is to ask the server to resolve them, thats already a step further than a normal scraping bot.

What's more, the IPs and user agents (basically, text which tells what browser you have) all ONLY hit this specific endpoint, meaning this is a targeted, predetermined, scraping operation.

By looking up the account IDs from the last dozen or so attempts that i see here in my logs, almost each of them are some colorful flavour of trans, gay, or enby.

They are specifically targeting us queer folks with this scraping.

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, give a man a bank and he can rob the whole country.

give a girl write access to your git and she will merge a pr documenting that you two are cute

the world is so fucking beautiful!!!

“in this moment, i am euphoric. not because of any phony god, but because, the sky is enlightened by the sun, and this makes me feel my own insignificance”

— aalewis (maybe)

i don't think i can ever get tired of seeing the sky

brb just gonna paint a normal map real quick

https://tonsky.me/blog/checkbox/

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 25 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation", the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. This radiation was created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So it's older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2034.

I saw this online somewhere and I just had to recreate it. This is my coding happy place.

@JessTheUnstill My cynical suspicion is that much like more police create more crime, SWAT teams create excuses to use them for internal reasons. If you have a SWAT team sitting around not doing anything, do they really need all of that budget money? So SWAT teams are motivated to find ways to get used, the more the better (for their budget and prestige).

(Plus this isn't just police, there's a whole pressure on government as a whole to be 'efficient', which often means no idle resources.)

SWATting would no longer be a problem at all if we abolished SWAT teams.

Maybe having an on demand paramilitary strike force that can be deployed by anyone with a phone and a plausible sounding story was a bad idea to start with.

The thing about #tech #layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.

Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.

If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.

I’ve seen that pattern play out multiple times.