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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

    Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

    Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

    Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?




  • God that sounds awful in headline form.

    Pride month is absolutely not an excuse to say “current homophobes will never get better, so they all need to blah blah”. Their current behavior is intolerable, but through continued exposure and humanizing influences, the people can be reached. It’ll go from hatred to extreme discomfort to mild discomfort to … something more normal.

    Unfortunately I’m a crappy communicator and I can’t figure out a way to reduce that to a headline without making it some kind of division-promoting reductionist garbage. Sigh.






  • I’m not sure I follow. Why would a needle be reused? That’s never ok to do.

    The pictured injector is single use. The weird workaround would never be ok’d by any doctor, and even if it was, a clean needle would be used to withdraw and administer medicine from the hypothetical medicine ampule for each dose. I’m not qualified to measure loose liquid medicine, and she’s on the second highest dose anyway.

    A better design would be more like the pen used by the original senaglutide medication this is related to, ozempic. Screw on a disposable pen needle, dial your dosage on the twisty knob on the other end, inject, dispose of needle. But instead they deliberately designed this thing, with a latching device that starts squirting medicine with no way to stop it. If the user is not familiar with needles and jerks away, the needle comes back out but medicine is still squirting.

    It’s a good medicine, except supply issues are making it difficult. My wife’s refill at the hospital pharmacy has been pending since end of February. It’s a weekly injection but her last dose was 15 days ago as of this morning.


  • My wife is on Wegovy. That injector pictured above is a special kind of perverse design. There’s a plastic donut-shaped trigger the needle has to pass through. Once the trigger starts the flow of medicine, it cannot be stopped. No way to, for example, pay for a higher dosage and use a little at a time, if you were prescribed the 0.25 mg starter dose but only 1 and 1.7 are in stock anywhere. (Without, say, milking the pen like a poisonous snake and using a needle and syringe.)






  • Even old HP printers aren’t safe. I have a two-generations-back HP Color LaserJet I got from a tech recycler for $300. (MFP M477fdw) It can be optionally configured to enforce or not enforce genuine toner. I can get a four-pack of CYMK high-capacity cartridges for $70-80 on Amazon. Prints wonderfully, toner is cheap, so I’m in the clear, right? Safe from this BS?

    Turns out that wear items (intermediate transfer belt, for example) within the printer have chips with versioned firmware. And the printer will throw error codes if different firmware versions within the printer aren’t mutually compatible.

    I’m sure the moment they believe they can get away with it, replacement ITB assemblies, fixers, document scanners, etc will include a shrink wrap license and firmware that requires you to update everything else to match - and the matching firmware will make official toner no longer optional.

    Definitely Fuck HP. The moment any of that comes to pass and disables my own printer I’m re-recycling this printer and buying another brand immediately.



  • Agreed. They are deliberately taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how autopilot is actually used in aircraft.

    Sure, the most pedantic of us will point out that, with autopilot enabled, the pilot-flying is still in command of the aircraft and still responsible for the safe conduct of the flight. Pilots don’t** engage autopilot and then leave the cockpit unattended. They prepare for the next phase of flight, monitor their surroundings, prepare for top-of-descent, and to stay mentally ahead of the rapid-fire events and requirements for a safe approach and landing. Good pilots let the autopilot free them up for other tasks, while always preparing for the very real possibility that the autopilot will malfunction in the most lethal way possible at the worst possible moment.

    Do non-pilots understand that? No. The parent poster is absolutely correct: Tesla is taking advantage of peoples’ misunderstanding, and then hiding behind pedantic truth about what a real autopilot is actually for.

    ** Occasionally pilots do, and many times something goes horribly wrong unexpectedly and they die. Smart, responsible pilots don’t. Further, sometimes pilots fail to manage their autopilot correctly, or use it without understanding how it can behave when something goes wrong. (RIP to aviation Youtuber TNFlygirl who had a fatal accident six days ago, suspected to be due to mismanagement of an unfamiliar autopilot system.)




  • Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

    If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

    • statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it

    • value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.

    • actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

    With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

    Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.