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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • evranch@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyz🐛🪲🐞
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    9 months ago

    I wouldn’t even say “before relatively recently” as it depends where you are. Up until my daughter was like 5 or so she was just fully naked or in a swim diaper at the beach and like you say nobody considered that to be “nudity”.

    But we’re in rural Canada where we don’t have the pedo paranoia that seems to have taken over America, and we just let our kids run free like we did.

    Though it’s growing in the cities and small towns now, not long ago in a nearby town there was a Facebook panic over a man in a white van driving slowly around town. Unsurprisingly he turned out to be a plumber looking for the right address.





  • This would work but assumes the primary use of the machine is Windows and derates your performance under Linux significantly due to USB speeds. Even if you’re storing your data on the Windows HDD, NTFS drivers are dog slow compared to EXT4 and other *nix filesystems.

    Also some BIOSes are a pain to get to boot off removable drives reliably so it really depends on what your machine is.

    I’ve used Linux as a primary dev system for well over a decade now, and with the current state of Windows I’d really recommend just taking the leap, keep your Windows box if you need Windows software and build a dedicated Linux workstation.



  • That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.

    So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.

    A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.

    Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!


  • My type is a dying breed too, the guys who do their best to write robust code and actually trying to consider edge cases, race conditions, properly sized variables and efficient use of cycles, all the things that embedded guys have done as “embedded” evolved from 6800 to Pic, Atmel and then ESP platforms.

    Now people seem to have embraced “move fast and break things” but that’s the exact opposite to how embedded is supposed to be done. Don’t get me wrong there is some great ESP code out there but there’s also a shitload of buggy and poorly documented libraries and devices that require far too many power cycles to keep functioning.

    In my opinion one power cycle is too many in the embedded world. Your code should not leak memory. We grew up with BYTES of RAM to use, memory leaks were unthinkable!

    And don’t get me started on the appalling mess that modern engineers can make with functional block inside a PLC, or their seeming lack of knowledge of industrial control standards that have existed since before the PLC.



  • evranch@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzSardonic Grin
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    11 months ago

    Been using one of these apps to try to identify the many wild plants in my native pastures. Mostly just out of curiosity and conservation. Likewise it helped identify some trees and shrubs the previous owner planted around the yard.

    They are far from perfect but are a good starting point as you get lots of pictures to compare to your mystery tree, you finish the job yourself.


  • Great to hear this story of success. That plus

    $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

    Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

    Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.


  • Right, but the problem is that anarchy by its nature isn’t “enforced”. So it exists in an ecosystem alongside other ways of living.

    If others choose to accumulate resources and use them to destroy their anarchic neighbour to seize their resources, the anarchists will obviously have to defend themselves.

    How do you defend yourselves against such a threat? To do so you are forced to accumulate resources. And thus anarchy ends up progressing to feudalism. While I like the concept of anarchy and believe it works on a small scale, in practice just about every society that is in conflict with others has followed the same path from anarchy->monarchy->democracy->oligarchy, almost as if it’s forced by game theory principles.

    I feel like anarchy does work, but only in isolation from competition.


  • evranch@lemmy.catoAnarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comHow Anarchy Works
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    1 year ago

    I agree that this is the end state of our current system. Megafarms raking in vast profits and everyone working on the land is a “hired man” which is just a serf as you say. I’m just unsure if there’s any way to stop it.

    The problem I see is that once again without a state to enforce that non-ownership, there’s nothing to prevent groups from organizing to take resources from others. Instead of being slowly bought out, you’ll be run over by a warlord and slaughtered. This tends to happen in 3rd world countries, you have a period of peace and cooperation, a building up of little farming communities until the power vacuum attracts men with balaclavas and AKs.

    Resource accumulation always leads to power, and that seems to be a fundamental weakness of anarchy. It works great in a society of small players with small goals, but how do you deal with those that would own the entire world and the followers they accrue?


  • Where I live out in the remote countryside functions very much like one of these anarchist societies. However it’s hard to imagine doing away with the fundamental concept that keeps peace, the ownership of land.

    The megascale farmers are always chewing at the borders of “the hills” and snapping up anything they can get. They used to ignore our rocky and rough land but their greed knows no bounds, and they already own everything else. Without the law to enforce our ownership we would be quickly run over by their much greater resources.

    Aside from that all of us small farmers work together and share and help each other only because we can and for the benefit of all.

    However I did get called out on a visit to a friend in the city as a “Vault dweller” who would acquire the things I need, return home to my little society, roll the door closed and continue to watch the rest of the world slowly collapse. I feel like anarchy really only works for this sort of small isolated community and unfortunately in a world of 8 billion, it’s simply not workable as organized states will simply run over any group that doesn’t collect taxes to maintain a military or other means of projecting power.

    Without that “vault door” to protect you I just don’t see an anarchist society surviving in today’s environment.



  • evranch@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzshrimp is bugs
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    1 year ago

    I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.

    It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.

    We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.

    It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.

    If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.



  • evranch@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzshrimp is bugs
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    1 year ago

    Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.

    I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird. Example: shrimp, lol.

    Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).

    It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.

    Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.