Opening and searching people’s mail was very illegal up until the last decade or so. Now there seems to be a big push to let the RCMP do whatever they want.

They’re claiming that forking their open source code and using the user agent in it unchanged is “impersonation”. And the only reason that might be an issue is because Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to break any digital lock, even if it’s a shitty one. Whether this even counts as a lock is up for debate in my opinion, but that doesn’t stop people from getting sued and owing lawyers money.

Look at me, streaming this file straight from my device for the whole world to see!

This whole blog seems extremely pro-AI and their entire site is full of articles supposedly debunking why data centers aren’t actually bad after all…

This specific article has some pretty crazy conclusions about Benn Jordan’s own double-blind study. They’re saying it wasn’t double blind because he might have noticed water shaking, but in the actual video he explicitly says he threw out any of the data points where he knew if the sound was on. The results seemed pretty conclusive to me.

The other thing is it talks a ton about wind turbine infrasound, and how dangerous levels are thousands of times louder. But the actual measured level of sound ARE thousands of times higher. Measurements have been taken at 96dB, which is significantly higher than the 50-75dB this article is referencing as safe. If the 96dB infrasound is loud enough to shake a glass of water as above, it’s not “imperceptible” like the safe levels.

As with all loud sounds in general, exposure time is a factor. A brief burst above 100dB won’t damage your hearing, but extended exposure will. I don’t see why the same wouldn’t apply to infrasound. All these studies are 72h or less of exposure, but there’s people living next to these datacenters 24/7.

Personally I’m waiting for more research to be done. There’s not enough data to be calling things fake or debunked here.

Just like his actual Casino! Who could have predicted this?

Are you blocking Cloudflare at an IP level? Or just when they do that “Are you human?” thing? So much of the Internet goes through Cloudflare for DDoS protection, and blocking AI bots, I’m surprised there’s anything left.

My solution is take a screenshot and then open the file in a separate QR reader app that can open files.

The best color I’ve seen so far has been gloss black because it kinda hides the shape.

It’s hard to tell when they’re all the same color.

The article was written by someone who doesn’t understand the difference between power and energy. It’s an extremely common mistake to mix up Watts and Watt-hours, or assume they’re the same thing.

I just backed up all my repos and plan on fully migrating to selfhosted Forgejo. GitHub is rapidly going downhill. Recently they had a bug that was silently corrupting people’s main branches, and they’re getting more trigger happy on the ban hammer.

One of my friends just had their entire 14 year account history wiped without any warning for supposedly misusing GitHub Actions (most likely an AI false positive), and they’re just getting all their tickets immediately closed.

Most servers you rent are only going to have 1Gbps internet speeds too unless you’re paying extra, so if you’ve got symmetrical gigabit at home, you’re 100% good to go, except for maybe higher downtime than a datacenter. My fiber at home seems to go out for a bit overnight occasionally as they’re doing maintenance.

Sounds like my homelab has better redundancy than these guys, and my monthly bill isn’t much different than their new one. I only pay for power and networking, since I own my own hardware. I’m colocating in my city, so my latency to home is about 1ms, and I’ve got a full mirrored server in my house. Certain files are further backed up elsewhere for proper 3-2-1 backup (+ each server running raidz2 with disk encryption). Even if my home Internet goes out, I still have full access to my files at home, and all my public services stay running in the data center. If either server fails, it’s all set up with containers so it’s easy to spin up each service somewhere else.

One thing that’s tricky to get right with disk encryption (especially with encrypted /boot) is having a redundant boot partition. I was able to hack this together by having sofware raid duplicate my boot partition to a second drive. Now if I remove either OS boot drive it falls back to the remaining one. To prevent breaking EFI boot, you need to use the Version 1 RAID format so the metadata is stored at the end of the partition, not the front where EFI reads.

Cops don’t follow you with a radar gun 24/7 like the data the car manufacturers are collecting.

License plates don’t report your average driving speed and number of hard braking stops etc… to your insurance company.

personal information vacuum

Introducing the new Dyson vacuum! Maybe this is what they mean when they say it’s got a digital motor.

That’s a terms of service/use for Amazon.com (so your account and purchase history), none of that applies to goods sold. This is entirely different than a purchase agreement that says they get to keep any government refunds.

That’s a geothermal battery system with solar water heating as the input. But what’s really cool about Drake Landing is that they can store energy from the summer to heat the homes in the winter, and they even hit net zero a few years ago.

Edit: No idea what the downvote is for… There’s more info about this project here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community

It’s a little disappointing to learn it was decommissioned, but the technology for seasonal energy storage is really interesting.

I’m curious… what legal documents would these be? You don’t have to sign a Terms of Service to buy a physical product. The unjust enrichment claim is just as valid/invalid unless stores like Walmart are going to start making you read a terms of sale agreement before entering the store.

I’m going to say you’re technically correct because the wording is “recovered” and not “profited”. They’re recovering it twice, and profiting once (when they should be at net zero)