I am a Meat-Popsicle

  • 3 Posts
  • 407 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • We have less people, We have a better signal to noise ratio. So far we seem to have been spared the idiot community rules, like the moderators of r/music telling you that you need to go to tip of my tongue to crowdsource a list of songs with a certain theme, well they only accept a very narrow genre of music. Upvotes and down votes don’t absolutely sink or blow up a post, you can say something relatively controversial here and not have it get buried.

    We have some discoverability problems that they’re working on. We’re lacking a lot of niche interests. You’re not going to find a sub here for every trade and game that exists. A significant amount of our traffic is just posts from other places with a minimum amount of discussion.
    Upvotes and down votes aren’t magically universal across every node. Some of the smaller fringe nodes can end up with delays and receiving posts.

    I stopped reading Reddit At the very beginning of the API wars. It’s honestly so much more healthy here.




    1. You care about your baby and your vacation. Being excited to share that with other people is normal, and when you share something you’re excited about with other people, it feels good; you get a serotonin boost and relive it in your mind. That process requires two people. It’s a social contract. The other person is going to get relatively little out of the situation, but perhaps they get a little nostalgia recounting their own experiences and thinking back to their own kids. You should play along and ask questions because it makes them feel good, and later on, when you’re jazzed about something, they might return the favor.

    2. When someone is excited to recount a vacation abroad, it’s a learning experience. Where did you go? What did you like? How were the people? What was hard about it? How much did it cost? Assuming you get to travel, it might give you helpful information that will make you more at ease with making your own plans.

    3. Children: When you have them, most people get rewired a little. You go from OH KILL ME NOW, THERE’S A CRYING BABY ON THE PLANE to, ohh god, she must be miserable scared and confused, somebody snuggle that baby. When I see my coworker’s baby, I get a wave of feelings/memories from when I cradled my own.

    I think I get your frustration, and it echoes my own from years ago. My recommendation is to learn to play social the games. It doesn’t take as long as it feels like it will out of your day to act compassionate. Making those connections with people and how those people see you is important. It opens opportunities and can give you comfort and give them greater patience with you when you need them to be patient. You might also find that moving through the motions strengthens your empathy.


  • It’s a bit of math, split into two pieces.

    You hand out one piece, that’s the public key. It’s tiny and simple.

    You keep the other piece, that’s the private key. It’s long and complex.

    The public key can scramble data that only the large piece can unscramble.

    The private key can create a piece of data that only the public key can verify.

    In practice, these keys can be kept in a database or a file, and they can be held in a hardware security key (yubi/fido). They can be stored on your phone, in Bitwarden, and just about anywhere that keeps passwords, they’re really just a few thousand bytes of data.

    In many cases, You can store them in your phone’s private password storage, then when you log into a website, it will trigger a popup on your phone to authorize your login, so you don’t even have to keep them on the computer you’re using to access the secured site. Most of the implementations require you to have a biometric component. You need to face scan, fingerprint scan, or, worst case, use a password to unlock/verify the passkey on the device.

    The upside here is that the keys are unique to every site. The public key is completely safe to hand out to everyone, it can’t be reverse engineered. This means that websites can’t leak your login credentials in any meaningful way. edit: Also since you’re using math to change a piece of data, it’s impervious to a replay attack and the communication even unencrypted would be reasonably safe even if someone was actively reading it.

    As far as storing for loss, I’d consider regenerating them. I prefer using a password manager that stores them, that way my phone/computers all have access to the same keys.



  • They put them in all the flashlights because of a combination of minimum features required and cost savings.

    To keep heat at a minimum and improve power usage, LEDs benefit from being run by a driver circuit.

    If you’re going to use a driver circuit you might as well allow for dimming if you’re going to allow for dimming you need to have timed button presses.

    There’s only a couple of companies out there that make the circuitry that does the LED driver / lithium ion charging, so everybody just uses the same chipset.

    If you want to flashlight that just turns on and off and doesn’t have a lot of features try to find one that doesn’t have lithium ion batteries. If you don’t need the lithium ion charger they’re more likely not to use one of them more extensive chipsets.


  • And you feel so incredibly dense every time you run into it and you can’t figure out what’s going on. The crank on my kids bike was out of whack the other week and I kept tightening it down and it kept coming back loose. I was turning the crank one way to tighten it which was pushing it against the lock nut but it needed to turn the other way to be pushed against the bearing before I tighten the lock nut down. If it was all right-handed it would have been clear what I was doing.





  • I have a long involved horror story that led up to me needing a root canal that I decided not to post here because it probably isnt nteresting to anybody but me.

    For the most part, a root canal is kind of minor. They numb your gums where they’re going to inject a numbing agent, then they inject a numbing agent, worst case they go a little nutso and try to inject a few places in there but the pain is there and gone in 5 seconds. If at any point you feel pain they can do a better job of numbing you. Honestly, any pain caused in the numbing process goes away pretty quickly when they successfully do it.

    They poke around, there’s a little drilling, some bad smell maybe heat maybe cold a lot of spitting out little sandy chunks of debris. If the tooth is still in pretty good shape they just pack it back up and you’re good to go.

    If you end up needing a crown there’s a good bit more drilling a good bit more spitting a good bit more smoke. But it’s really just the same thing prolonged.

    It won’t kill you, it will annoy you and it’s marginally unpleasant, The anxiety of being there in the anxiety of not knowing what’s going on is much worse than the actual procedure. Meditate, chill, roll with it you’ll be fine.




  • Back when reddit* was just starting to fall to shit, I had already been dipping my toes in the mastodon water, and while I really liked the instance I was on it did not have enough people on it to properly surface good collections of off node traffic.

    Knowing that Mastodon had the problem, I didn’t dick around with smaller nodes. To be honest it’s still a fight if you’re on a node with only a handful of people, you have to do something to mitigate the lack of community traffic in the face of lacking discoverability.




  • Keeping a close eye and tight rain on bias and fallacy, observation beats word of mouth. A peer-reviewed scientific study is exactly equal to observation.

    Mathematical proof is also observation.

    Lack of observation does not in any way indicate lack of truth. Because you feel or don’t feel some way and have or have not seen something happen to someone else in no way influences whether something actually happened to someone else. Our perception filters are incredibly bad.

    Appeal to authority means very little as single people easily get biased. Discount anything said if the person telling you the truth stands to gain money power or time from it being believed.


  • If you can find landline phones with that feature set, just get them. You can just wire them together and put 20 volts DC in the line. Of course you’re not going to want to do that over your single ethernet run but if you had multiple…

    Telephone services really simple, 18 to 24 volts on hook should pull down to about eight or nine volts when you open the line. If you pulse a 90 volt signal, It will cause them to ring.