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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • From what I’ve gathered, MediaLab bought imgur years ago. A couple weeks ago MediaLab fired most of people behind imgur, because MediaLab is an AI-first company.

    Since then, Imgur has recently started to have lots of outages/glitches/etc. Imgur has also started purging nsfw and political content.

    The combination of the firing, problems, and content purge have upset the user base. I’m not sure what Oliver has to do with it.





  • I suspect that’s just because of Birmingham, and possibly Mobile. They have pretty bad crime rates, and Birmingham is the state’s main “blue city”, at least based on how counties voted in the 2024 election.

    Birmingham had a violent crime rate of 1440 per 100k, making it one the worst cities in the nation for violent crime.

    Mobile had a crime rate of 825 per 100k. Mobile’s county was slightly red in the 2023 election.

    Meanwhile Huntsville (who was slightly red in that same election) had a violent crime rate of 133 per 100k, and has been proudly claiming a 100% arrest and conviction rate for homicide cases. So to answer @[email protected]’s question, I guess Huntsville is an example of a successful “red” city (although it may be less successful in coming years due to Trump’s NASA cuts).

    Rural Alabama (excluding counties that were classified as metropolitan) had a violent crime rate of 248 per 100k, making it less safe than Huntsville but far better than the state average of 494 per 100k.

    I’m not going to actually claim that the crime rate is just from politics, Huntsville has a big aerospace industry and it’s probably more of an education/class thing than anything else. But regardless those are the violent crime rate numbers for 2023, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.



  • As an electrician, it’s difficult to give good electrical advice over the internet.

    First of all, you don’t know how capable someone actually is at doing work. There’s both a knowledge and a technique requirement for quality work. Bad electrical work can easily cause house fires and death, if I tell someone online how to fix an issue, and they electrocute themselves or burn down their house, I’m partially responsible for that.

    Second, it’s hard to give good advice on how something should be done without seeing it in person. Small details that are hard to get from a description or image can change how stuff is required to be done, and the code is complicated and has lots of exceptions and different requirements. Also different areas have different code requirements, and different AHJ requirements, so fully accurate advice has to come from an electrician in your actual area.

    Final thing I’ll mention is that getting qualified as an electrician is hard. Getting a full electrical license where I live requires 8 years of experience (4 years being directly supervised, then 4 years of light supervision). You also have to pass a pretty difficult exam, electricians usually spend 6+ months studying hard and taking training classes for the exam, and then it still has an abysmal first attempt pass rate and normally takes many attempts to eventually pass. Ultimately after all of that (8 years, months of focused study and classes, multiple test attempts), 25-30% of people are never able to pass and get their full license.

    With all that considered, I’m happy to give advice to other electricians online. If they’re already certified I can have some confidence that they have the knowledge and skills to do a good job with any advice given. However trying to give actually good, responsible advice to someone who is uncertified and a complete unknown on terms of skill/knowledge/location with only a partial knowledge of their problems and setup, it’s hard. It’s much easier to recommend they just get a licensed electrician from their area to take a look at it.












  • Plus, if you try to sell the monster at a higher cost than coke, what would stop someone from dumping the coke, and refilling with monster? Paying the lower innitial price, and now getting refills.

    People have been doing that for years with buying water, and then filling it with fountain drinks.

    I suppose you could counter it the same way that some stores handled the soda refill issue. Have the energy drink refills behind the counter, where only employees can refill it. Have a special cup so employees can tell which customers actually bought an energy drink. Also gives employees a chance to intervene if someone tries to get too much and kill themselves (like with the Panera Bread lemonade/


  • One of the Egypt stories involved men following a woman back to her hotel room, and she had to lock herself inside. They continued to come to her hotel everyday, and bang on her door telling her to let them in. She ended up spending the whole trip stuck in that room, feeling unsafe to leave until she finally got an escort to make it to her flight home.

    Unfortunately in cases like that, it really sounds like it goes beyond something you can be adult about and just ignore. I think her main mistake was not doing better research about where it was safe to travel as an unaccompanied woman, as much as I wish that wasn’t a concern.