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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Hear me out. Your car, your phone, and these days, the streets themselves practically track you everywhere you go. They are creating a pattern profile for you, and for everyone else. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but the silver lining is that we know about it.

    Wanna be invisible for a day? Throw your phone in the car and have your partner or friend drive around with it. The logs for that day will show you being a happy little drone driving around like normal. Here is the thing… As the surveillance state gets more and more toys to play with, they forget the important basics, the primitive tools, the personal skills, and the willingness to do the legwork that actually matters.

    If it makes you feel better/differently about the effectiveness of surveillance. Some guy kidnapped Nancy Guthrie, got captured on camera, sent a ransom note, and we still don’t know who the fuck he is.




  • cheap drone flies conductive dust to the air conditioning systems? Like powdered metal dumped somewhere very sensitive, where it can be carried to sensitive equipment by the air pumps? Or fire/smoke at the intake?

    Wouldn’t work. Dust is a major problems for data centers, and they already have pretty strict air-handling controls to prevent it.

    Your main ways of disrupting one is by taking out the power, the HVAC, or the structure. I think out of the 3, the HVAC would be the easiest to disable from the outside. That being said, datacenters are not inherently problematic, so make sure you know what you are trying to destroy before you actually destroy it.


  • The funny thing is… I can see about 6 WiFi networks from my neighbors, despite being in the basement right now. What do you need those cables for again?

    We’d need a routing protocol that can use way more hops. IPv4 only supports up to 255 hops, so if I ballpark the average distance between houses at 100 feet, I’d only be able to access stuff hosted within 5 miles or so of me. There are some other functional considerations, but I’m sure you could drive entirely across most cities and see WiFi coverage the whole way.




  • Number 2 is an electric vehicle.

    Number 1 is a non-smart TV

    Honorable mention; The Apple Watch SE 2 I bought for my wife so she stops thinking she’s going tachy or having a heart attack 9 times a year. Considering the cost of an average ER trip, and the hit to my sanity when these things only happen at like 3 AM, I’ll gladly upgrade her to the pro version or whatever when the SE kicks the bucket.







  • I think we have to settle with the fact that all oil deposits are going to be extracted and used by humanity. I’d prefer if we used it slowly to grease turbine bearings rather than just burning it all the time.

    Also, until fairly recently, we were using whale oil for lubrication in a lot of things. As fucked up as it is, that shit is renewable. There are alternatives for lubrication that are slightly more expensive than petroleum products.



  • Not really.

    First of all, because we would need the DNA of those animals. Sure, you can cobble some shit together, to make an animal that looks like that extinct species, but it would not actually be that extinct species.

    Another issue is the biome/niche that species lived in. They either went extinct because of changes to their environment, or, they went extinct, and that caused changes in their environment. So if you want to bring the species back, you also need to make sure they have a suitable environment to survive in.

    You also can’t just bring back one. A population needs generic diversity to adapt and survive. So to de-extinct a species, you need to bring back like 25 generically varied examples. Much more work than just creating a single specimen.

    Behavior matters for a species as well. If orcas went extinct in the wild, and we brought them back with a breeding program in zoos and aquarium and just released those solitary orcas into the wild, do you think they would act like orcas? Would they hunt with the same techniques? I think the pack mentality would be gone, their “language” would be gone, and I don’t think they would survive.

    The reality is, extinction is a permanent thing. We may possibly have the ability to bring a species “back” but there will be permanent, population-altering irreversible effects from going extinct in the first place.