dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Iran’s leadership is still solely comprised of repressive religious authoritarian buttmunches. There are no good guys in this war, only two bad guys and a bunch of Iranian civilians standing in the crossfire. Remember that their own people were already staging mass protests against the Iranian government before this all started, during which Iran’s own government admits to killing 3,117 people (probably more in reality) while “cracking down.”

There’s a bell curve. Consoles become hyper cheap a year or two after the Next Big Thing that replaces whatever it is comes out, and people start feeling like they can’t even give their old and busted machine away. Then some years after that nostalgia starts kicking in and the available supply of non-fucked examples is dwindling, so prices rocket into the stratosphere.

The Wii went through this but the poster child at the moment is the Gamecube. Gamestop was at one point (back when they still sold video game shit and not just Rick and Morty merch and meme stocks) selling complete refurbished Gamecubes for $20 USD. Complete with two controllers, IIRC, all the cables, cleaned, tested, ready to go. Bare Gamecubes are now going for $100-$200 on eBay which is absurd.

…I have like four of the damn things. I have at least two Wiis, possibly three, and a whole extra front loader NES sloshing around I’m not doing anything with above and beyond the one that’s hooked up in entertainment center. I keep telling myself this is part of my retirement fund.

Do you drive around with no license plate on your car, too?

That only lists 18 states…

My own state requires it despite that list implying they don’t. Thus I really don’t think that chart is completely accurate. If you have ANY warning lights on your dash at inspection you will be failed here.

By “aren’t hard to remove” you actually mean requires dismounting the tire from the rim, remounting it, and then balacing it. This is far beyond the capabilities not to mention equipment of the typical layperson. Plus, your state is likely to conveniently fail your car on its next inspection for a nonfunctioning TPMS system, same as your check engine light.

If you’re going to go the distance anyway, get your tire shop to mount aftermarket Autel sensors in your rims. Using the readily available diagnostic tool, you can occasionally reprogram those (wirelessly!) with a set of random IDs and then also program your car to use them. You’ll be a lot tougher to track if your signature is different every week.

I’m not about to do this just yet, but I do have the tool for more mundane purposes and I only paid around $200 for it several years ago.

I have no idea. There was some dweeb on this very instance going around spamming a Krita related thread complaining about it.

I imagine it’s related to how some neckbards on the internet are apparently extremely salty that Krita currently has a “furry” as a mascot, created by Tyson Tan.

Random aside to rant about consumer OCR.

Recently for my work I had to do some OCR stuff to get some numbers out of a document that the vendor in their infinite wisdom refused to provide in an editable/selectable form. I.e. they just slapped a .jpeg onto a page and saved it as a .pdf. (This is a separate thing that infuriates me.)

Anyway, what I’m actually here to complain about is the baffling phenomenon that every single piece of OCR software I tried ranging from open source to trials of commercial programs, to the thingy that came with one of our all-in-one printer/scanners, and everything in between is that it’s somehow still exactly as crap as the lousy OCR programs we were all struggling with in the late '90s.

I have absolutely no idea how this facet of technology in particular has utterly and categorically failed to make any forward progress whatsoever in literal decades. I’ve personally worked on machine vision driven pick-and-place machines capable of accurately determining the orientation of densely printed cosmetics tubes, among other items, and placing them all face up in a box several times per second. Yet somehow the latest and greatest OCR transcription algorithms still can’t tell a 5 from a 6 or ye gods forbid an S, or an L from a J, or an M from a collection of back and forward slashes, all despite being handed crisp high contrast seriffed text that’s at least 60 pixels high.

Given the incredibly low bar for performance here given that apparently every single programmer involved just walked away circa about 2001, I can’t imagine that the current slop generation machines fare any better…

You don’t have to read the release notes. It literally puts it front and center in your face the first time you launch it after this update is applied.

I approve of this message.

What you described as impossible to find is how basically every security DVR system has worked for decades. I have two Lorex branded boxes at work and a Night Owl one at home, and neither of them require anyone’s “cloud.”

They’re remotely accessible via your browser or a smartphone app although, yes, you do need to know your public facing IP address and poke the appropriate hole in your firewall for it.

Every X seconds is pretty generous. My Subaru only seems to poll the sensors every few minutes, and only when the wheel speed is above 35 MPH or so, at least via what I’ve observed with my diagnostic tool. The sensors are battery powered and I suspect the low refresh rate is a deliberate gambit to conserve battery life.

You are correct on the ID point, though. They can contain up to 16 hexidecimal digits as far as I’ve seen, and while there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for truly enforcing uniqueness the chances of an ID collision are so low that you may as well consider it impossible. Some aftermarket sensors can be wirelessly reprogrammed with an arbitrary ID, though, which may be of marginal utility for the truly paranoid. (My diagnostic tool can do this, too. The intended use case is cloning the ID from an OEM sensor for a car whose TPMS relearn procedure is more trouble than it’s worth.)

Regardless of your vehicle’s polling frequency, most sensors can be woken up any time by a specific radio pulse, which my diagnostic tool can also do, and the range is surprisingly long. Just my car’s own BMS where the receiver is (above the rear left wheel well) can pick up the sensors in my snow tire rims even when said rims are sitting in their storage rack inside my garage, about three car lengths away.

Some of them certainly are. You can also get air rifles with built in “moderators” (i.e. suppressors) that are surprisingly quiet. Precharged pneumatic air rifles can be very powerful and also extremely accurate. I have a relatively cheap Hatsan that can, provided I’m using pellets that it likes, repeatably put pellets through the same hole in my target from as far away as I can get from it in my yard (probably about 20 yards) and do so about 30 times in succession before I have to pump it back up again. Its built in moderator makes it quiet enough at the muzzle that the sound of the hammer hitting the gas valve is actually louder than the report from firing.

Watch out: Researching this type of thing may send you tumbling down the rabbit hole of big bore air rifles and entice you to spend a lot of money. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

So in other words, what else is new?

The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.

It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.

Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.

Prusa or Qidi. Avoid Bambu.

Poorly. According to a random Wikipedia query, commodity lithium ion is ~270 Wh per kilogram. So this is around 20% of that, according to the above.

“Excellent” may be in comparison to other byzantine specialty battery chemistries, but lithium ion remains resolutely enthroned.

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

Hey, man. I am four stars at least.

“Everything I don’t like is terrorism.”

What is this, 2001 again?

I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.

They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.

However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.