Badabinski

I was looking for this comment so I can vent my extreme irritation to the world.

God, can this concept please die already‽ If you want to put solar panels where the cars/trains are, just 👏 fucking 👏 put 👏 them 👏 on 👏 top👏

Do not put them on the ground where they will get smushed and covered in dust and snow and dirt. do not. Just make a little roof for the train tracks/road/bike path/sidewalk/game trail/snail raceway and then put the panels on top of the roof and then if you’re feeling fancy angle the panels to point towards the sun and if you’re feeling really quite fancy then you can use bifacial panels to capture the backscatter from the ground and shit and then we can all be happy. solar ground no, solar roof yes, ground no roof yes. do not play the trolley problem with solar panels on the railroad tracks. we have been doing solar energy for decades and have fucking minmaxed this shit so why are they still trying to do this just STOP.

Fuck.

Person I’m responding to, please know that none of this is directed at you. I’m just sour right now and should get off the internet.

LAX is also just the worst fucking airport. I remember feeling shocked the first time I flew to LAX. I thought that a city like LA would have a nice, efficient airport, given how much traffic that airport gets and how much money LA has. It’s been 10 years since I was last there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if LAX was just as dingy and disorganized now.

I’m sure the whole security theater bullshit would occur no matter what airport you flew through, and I don’t know if the experience would have been any nicer anywhere else. I just don’t like that airport, I’m in a bad mood, and I want to complain about things on the internet.

I definitely haven’t been shouted at in any of the European airports I’ve been in (from memory, KEF, HEL, AMS, MAD, BCN, NCE, and BER, so not super representative of the continent), so to me, it seems like an American phenomenon. I haven’t been to Canada enough to know what it’s like there. It’s also somewhat recent. I’ve been flying for 25ish years now, and I feel like the yelling has only been happening for the past, I dunno, 5-7 years?

As others have said, I don’t think it’s that we like being shouted at. We just have a large number of people who are, uh, “ruggedly individual,” to put it in nice terms. Those people don’t really think about others enough, so you have to yell at them to get them to pay attention to the world around them. I’m the type of person that looks up the rules before I leave and makes sure I have all of my shit out of my pockets before I even enter the security line to ensure I don’t reduce the efficiency of the security checkpoint. I often feel a bit exasperated with the people who don’t think about others in those situations.

As a means of dealing with it, I’ve found that smiling, making eye contact, and nodding at the TSA agent doing the yelling makes them less likely to yell at me while simultaneously making me feel a bit less frustrated—expressing nice feelings and trying to show some common humanity with the people I’m interacting with makes it harder for me to feel angry. Not saying that’d work for everyone, but it’s helpful for me.

I really love mine. It’s probably not the hardest wearing material out there, but my shirt held up well. My only gripe is that you’re not supposed to use any form of bleach (even non-chlorine) which can make stains a bit hard to remove. Stains on a work shirt don’t really matter, but I try to keep my shit looking clean if possible. No oxiclean makes that tough sometimes.

EDIT: and yeah, the price really isn’t too bad. There are also frequent sales. Lemme look up what I paid for mine.

EDIT: Looks like I paid $35 for the two shirts I got later on. I paid the full $50 for the first shirt I bought.

I made the mistake of taking on a DIY construction project when the outside air temperature was 105℉ (40 C) and the UV index was incredibly high (no cloud cover, very direct sunlight, and an elevation of 4200 ft (1.2 km)). This meant that I was sweating like fucking crazy, which is bad for sunscreen. I got this moisture wicking UV blocking hoodie and it fucking saved my ass. I didn’t wear sunscreen once but never got sunburned, even though I was doing 12 hours days of digging 36" (91 cm) deep foundation footings, mixing and pouring concrete, digging out a shitload of turf and dirt for a gravel foundation, or moving 3 tons (2.7 metric tons) of gravel into that foundation. UPF 50 fabric is dope.

I fucking love that shirt. I bought two more of them since I was washing the one I had multiple times a week.

Honorable mentions go to my work pants and Red Wing boots. I don’t know the brand of the pants rn, but they were so good. They’re really thin but didn’t get damaged when I scraped the shit out of them on rocks, and they had lots of useful pockets. They were much cooler than denim and also gave me much more mobility. I got them while shopping for work pants with my partner who was very dissatisfied with the options available in women’s sizes. She saw them and was so happy with them that I felt the need to get some as well.

The boots were also fucking great. They’re expensive and are made from leather, but I got some that can be resoled so I should be able to wear them for decades. As a bonus, the soles are oil resistant so they won’t get all weird and fucked up out in my machine shop.

W.r.t. water bottles, I think it’s because people don’t look at or think about the signs that are often posted. A loud person yelling specifically at you is much more likely to make someone stop and ask themselves if they have a water bottle.

I’m definitely not defending it, but that’s my take on the matter. The whole water bottle thing is just security theater anyways.

I can’t disagree with the facts presented about the positioning of US troops and the roles Israel and the US play on the geopolitical stage. This is a sick situation and my dread gets a bit deeper every day. I can’t contest that my feelings won’t do anything for the dead and the dying. I can’t ask people to do things that are contrary to their beliefs, and it’s clear that I do not have the capacity or the moral ground to affect the beliefs expressed in this thread.

I apologize, I was rushed and didn’t adequately explain myself. I want to restate the premise on which I made my comment. Israel has a large military and is using it to kill Palestinians right now. I absolutely agree with that. Israel is using weapons provided by the United States, and the transfer of those weapons was authorized by the current Democratic administration. No disagreements there.

My fear is that the military of the United States will become directly involved in the Palestinian genocide. I am afraid of the much larger and better armed US military actively leveling grid squares filled with Palestinian civilians with missiles. What is happening right now is already monstrous. I want the United States to divest and cease its involvement in this genocide at the bare minimum. I want the United States to directly oppose Israel and stop the genocide, using force if necessary. I very much do not want the United States’ involvement to increase. If Donald Trump is elected, an increase in the use of force against Palestine may happen. That is my argument. I absolutely do not believe that the current administration is doing the right thing here. I hate it, and I want it to stop. I just also don’t want it to get worse.

So I’m going to preface this by saying how I feel about the situation. I’m furious that Biden and the Democrats aren’t just… y’know, fucking stopping this shit. I’m furious that the administration isn’t doing more to end the goddamned genocide. It makes me feel sick to think that the executive branch of my country isn’t denouncing what’s happening. The Democrats are supposed to be the party for compassionate people. I consider myself to be a compassionate person, and the Democrats are absolutely failing to represent me.

I’m sure there’s some realpolitik going on there, but like, realpolitik can suck my asshole when my taxes are paying for bombs and missiles that are being used by a different country in an unjust war to kill innocent people in a genocide.

Make no mistake, I want this shit to end right the fuck now. I want Israel to fuck off back to their borders. I want the hostages to be traded, I want Palestine to be a full state in the UN with defensive treaties. I want Bibi and the people who enabled him to be tried for crimes against humanity. I want Israel and the United States to pay reparations and to foot the bill for the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure.

I want change. I am tired of the Democrats. Shit, I think there are a lot of people tired of the Republicans. Nobody is happy with the way out system works. I look at other countries with coalition governments and a large number of specific parties and I wish that I could have that. I would absolute love to have a party that represents my values and desires.

With all that said, I just don’t think that we will be able to enact meaningful change in 30ish days. To enact change within the confines our current system, we would need to convince tens of millions of people to vote for a candidate that truly represents them in that timeframe. Given the constricting nature of our two-party system, I think many people wouldn’t know who that is. I certainly don’t know who would represent me. It certainly wouldn’t be Jill Stein, to provide an example of a third party candidate. I’d vote for Bernie Sanders, but he’s not running for president. His election would require tens of millions to write his name on their ballots.

Many of the people who don’t feel represented by our government with regards to Palestine currently vote for the Democrats. If we were to all switch in unison and vote for someone who would truly stop this shit, then we could enact our change. I believe that there’s just no way to do that in a month.

If we try to enact change right now and fail, then we will likely end up with a violent, narcissistic rapist as the head of our government who will continue to implement blatantly christo-fascist policies. Christo-fascists do not like people of the Islamic faith, and Donald Trump has promised to wipe out Palestine if he is elected. He cannot be trusted to act according to what he has previously said (which, speaking from experience, is the fashion of all malignant narcissists who are not being treated for their PD), but there is a chance that he will follow through on his word and will speed up the genocide of the people of Palestine.

There are two primary candidates. One candidate will likely maintain the monstrous, awful, status quo. The other candidate may or may not direct the most powerful military force in the world to level Palestine and order the destruction of every man, woman, and child within its borders. The former gives the people of Palestine more time while to survive while we try to unfuck our system. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a chance.

Earlier, I said that realpolitik can suck my asshole, and that’s what this feels like. It’s shit and I hate it and it makes me feel gross. None of this brings back the lives of those who have already died, and my choice probably wouldn’t really be appreciated by a Palestinian who is trying to survive the bombs I’m paying for. I won’t shame anyone who cannot live with themselves if they vote for Kamala Harris. People are entitled to their beliefs, and living out of compliance with them can be very harmful. However, I feel compelled to at least present an emotional argument against a vote for a 3rd party candidate (or no vote at all) in this specific situation.

The arch wiki has a udev rule that can automatically do something if the battery crosses a certain threshold: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop#Hibernate_on_low_battery_level

No polling which is great. I always try to do stuff on an event driven basis where possible for efficiency reasons. Gotta test this out though, since your battery might not send events for every percent change.

It very definitely was 😅 The way that company used the satellite network was cool, don’t get me wrong. They would use it to push content out to all their stores with multicast which was really efficient with bandwidth. I loved it for that, but I hated interacting with it over unicast in any way, shape, or form. Horses for courses, as they say.

Nope, it would have no bearing on my decision-making process. Not my body, not my womb, not my fucking business.

The screenshots look really nice. I’ve personally always struggled with designing nice TUIs, so I really appreciate the way this looks.

I’d recommend trying out shellcheck and potentially building it into your repo as a CI check. I’ve written a ton of Bash over the years, and I’ve found shellcheck to be absolutely essential for any script over ~100 lines. It’s not perfect, but it does do a great job of helping you avoid many of the foot guns present in Bash. I also dearly love this site. It’s a fantastic reference, and I look at it almost every day.

I may take some time later today and provide a bit of specific feedback.

My pain tolerance for shitty input methods has been permanently warped after experiencing psychic damage from using Teamviewer to connect to a system over a very flaky HughesNet satellite link. I was working for a vendor that supplied a hardware networking box to a stupid retail company that sells food and shit. I just wanted to ssh to our boxen on a specific network so I could troubleshoot something, but the only way I could get to it was via putty installed on an ancient Windows XP desktop on the same network as our box that could only be accessed with Teamviewer. My favorite part of that was that the locale or something was fucked up, so my qwerty keyboard inputs were, like, fucking transformed into azerty somehow?? The Windows desktop was locked down and monitored to a tremendous degree, so I couldn’t change anything. The resolution was terrible, the latency was over a second, and half of my keyboard inputs turned into gibberish on the other side.

Oh, and I was onsite at that same company’s HQ doing a sales engineering call while I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I spent 5 days sitting in spare offices with shitty chairs, away from my family, living that fucking nightmare before I finally figured out what was wrong. God damn, what a fucking mess that was. For anyone reading this, NEVER WORK FOR GROCERY/DRUG STORE IT. They are worse than fucking banks in some ways. Fuck.

EDIT: also, I asked ‘why Teamviewer’ and the answer was always shrugs. This was before the big TeamViewer security incidents, so maybe they thought it was more secure? Like, at least they didn’t expose RDP on the internet…

Having been in this situation (the only binary I could use was bash, although cd was a bash builtin for me), echo * is your friend. Even better is something like this:

get_path_type() {
    local item
    item="$1"
    [[ -z "$item" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to get_path_type'; return 1; }
    if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'dir'
    elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'file'
    elif [[ -h "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'link'  # not accurate, but symlink is too long
    else
        echo '????'
    fi
}

print_path_listing() {
    local path path_type
    path="$1"
    [[ -z "$path" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to print_path_listing'; return 1; }
    path_type="$(get_path_type "$path")"
    printf '%s\t%s\n' "$path_type" "$path"
}

ls() {
    local path paths item symlink_regex
    paths=("$@")
    if ((${#paths[@]} == 0)); then
        paths=("$(pwd)")
    fi
    shopt -s dotglob
    for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
        if [[ -d "$path" ]]; then
            printf '%s\n' "$path"
            for item in "$path"/*; do
                print_path_listing "$item"
            done
        elif [[ -e "$path" ]]; then
            print_path_listing "$path"
        printf '\n'
        fi
    done
}

This is recreated from memory and will likely have several nasty bugs. I also wrote it and quickly tested it entirely on my phone which was a bit painful. It should be pure bash, so it’ll work in this type of situation.

EDIT: I’m bored and sleep deprived and wanted to do something, hence this nonsense. I’ve taken the joke entirely too seriously.

oh my God it’s like you’re in my head get out of my head. I’m reading this because I’m trying to catch up on sleep and need to distract myself from the dread, so this hits way too close to home lol

Yeah, hypercapnia is fucked. I’m actually testing a small CO2 gas generator (literally just citric acid added dropwise to sodium bicarb with an acid trap and a dehumidifying stage) as a means to kill pests on houseplants and did some reading on the symptoms to be safe. It is unpleasant. It’s not the worst death I could imagine, but it’s shit.

As an aside, the way that CO2 kills bugs is interesting. Basically, the excess CO2 (in the range of 10-80,000 ppm) causes their spiracules (i.e. the little holes in their exoskeletons they use to breath) to stay open. This causes them to lose moisture until they die of dehydration (usually in a matter of hours). All this happens long before they asphyxiate or suffer from any sort of acidification from the CO2. It’s a bit fucked up, but all other means of getting rid of the pests on my partner’s houseplants have failed.

The timbre and content of our conversation here combined with something I read from your account has led me to perseverate on this conversation, so I’m going to make a comment that’s definitely off-topic to satisfy my brain.

When I received the first response in this thread, I became curious about who I was conversing with. I looked at your profile and saw this in the account bio (or whatever it’s called here):

Independent thinker valuing discussions grounded in reason, not emotions.

And in this most recent comment in the thread:

I don’t believe in free will nor self

I’m assuming that you are a determinist. I’m also a determinist! I believe that our actions and identity are ultimately the product of the way our brains interact with the environment around them. I believe that free will is an illusion many people see because the way our brain interacts with its environment is incredibly complicated and is almost impossible to quantify. I think we agree to some degree on this, although I could be totally wrong. I just wanted to see if I could establish a shared (if limited) understanding of how the brain do its thang based on the quote I’ve taken from this thread.

I wanted to write about emotions. I used to believe that emotions were not helpful when discussing fractious issues and when doing things like, say, software development. I’ve come to believe that I felt this way because I was not taught how to understand or process emotions. Because I didn’t understand them, I was frustrated when they’d come to lead a conversation. I thought that if people could just be purely rational beings, we’d all be able to talk about hard things and come up with mutually beneficial solutions to our problems.

That sounds pretty naive because it is. I absolutely acknowledge that there are more nuanced arguments for why emotions should be kept out of debates, but I don’t properly understand those arguments so I can’t represent them here. Normally this would be enough for me to not make this comment, but I think I have a way to make my point that doesn’t really depend on whether or not emotions should be involved in discussions.

Basically, I feel that it is impossible for two people to discuss something without that discussion involving emotions. I believe this is the case for the same reasons I believe in a deterministic universe (which is a ridiculous sentence lol, I sound so pompous right now). I think that a person’s capability to express rational thought is either the result of emotions, or is inextricably linked to emotions. The human brain is a glorious fucking mess. The brain interacts with itself in ways that are just as dynamic and complicated as how the outside environment affects the brain. There’s been a lot of research done to try and separate out what’s responsible for cognition and emotion. Those efforts have failed, and there’s now a lot of literature out there showing how you can’t have one without the other. That’s all really nice and cerebral and such, but I’m not qualified to talk about any of that and don’t want to barf out another debate on the internet on “how does an brain work.” There are enough of those. All I can do is talk about personal experience.

Like, emotions can be really useful in guiding rational thought. I’m a software developer by trade, and I’ve learned over the years that I architect, write, test, and debug software based on how I feel on a moment-to-moment basis. When I’m trying to filter a list, I just kinda let my fingers move and pound something out. I read it, and if I feel bad (e.g. anxious), I let my fingers delete some stuff and add more stuff, and I keep doing that until I’m happy. Sometimes I’ll stop and think more consciously and “rationally” about what I’m doing, but like, I only do so when I’ve hit a point of feeling consistently unhappy for 3-5 minutes. My emotions and instincts have done most of the work in filtering out the contents of a list or coming up with a state machine or designing a class hierarchy or whatever, which is all pretty logical and rational shit. I work that way and my code works pretty well and is pretty fast and people generally like to read it and work with it. The times when I’ve struggled are when I’ve lacked the necessary instinct or “feel” for what’s good and bad and have had to think purely rationally about what I’m doing.

I’ve found this to be true for debates as well. I’m far more convincing when I allow my emotions to guide my rational arguments. I’ve changed far more minds, and I’ve had my mind changed far more often when I include my emotions as an essential component of my rationality.

I’m just some random dude on the internet making a comment about something nobody asked about, so take this for what it is. I figured it’d be fun to write about, and I guess it was since I’m approaching kbin’s 5000 character limit for a single comment.

For future reference, here is a direct link to the comment on my instance, and here is the contents of the comment:

I’m a cop and I can tell you that, at least in my country, you’d have no reason to not unlock your phone if you haven’t done anything.

I can understand that in some countries cops can be seen as criminals (and are behaving like criminals), but I don’t think a generality should be made. Just like a generality shouldn’t be made about people from an origin all doing the same bad thing.

Also don’t take advices from what you see on Lemmy as every user comes from a different country with different laws.

In my country, we can take your phone but we aren’t allowed to unlock it without your consent or without a prosecutor saying so.

I’m purposefully not including their username here in case they want to delete their comments at a later date.

That’s a pretty rough thread to read. It makes me feel pretty damn bummed out. The cop (who I will refer to as “they”, “them”, and “the commenter” from now on) clearly believes in their position, and like, I get it. I think everybody would be happy to live in a world where following the belief that “you have nothing to hide” truly resulted in universally positive outcomes. They mention that cops in some countries act like criminals, which is a true (if perhaps incomplete) statement. I think there may be some defensiveness in their comment, but that’s pretty natural when commenting on an article that’s written on the basis that everyone doing their job is bad and should not be trusted. They probably have a hard job, and I’m guessing that part of the way they (and many cops) get through the day is to view their role as a protector of the innocent. That’s not a groundbreaking statement or anything, but I figured I should include it. I’ll also say that they did a pretty good job of avoiding aggressive language. It’s natural to want to fight when dearly held beliefs are attacked, and they did a good job of avoiding that.

However, I can also understand how that comment makes some people very, very angry. For example, it makes me feel frustrated because I feel like it is missing important context (e.g. roughly where they’re from and how the police and community interact there), and I feel that it is presenting an argument that is problematic and evidently untrue in some contexts. I also feel like it’s a potentially reckless comment. When I read that comment, I feel I’m being told that I may be less safe if I try to maintain my right to privacy. I personally disagree with that idea, and I’m guessing that the people who made very aggressive responses feel much more strongly about that than I do. I won’t claim to understand all the reasons why people are so angry at the police, so all I can do is share my reasons for feeling upset when reading that comment.

I dunno. I’m torn about that whole thread. I think the commenter was arguing in good faith and was communicating somewhat effectively, but I also don’t think they considered how hurt and angry people are. It’s not their job to avoid provoking trauma responses and angering random people on the internet. I have had times where I had to say something that I knew would really upset and activate my partner. However, I have found that I have better outcomes when I take some time to empathize before saying something that I know will potentially activate someone. I can hear them out, show empathy (or compassion if I have the resources to express it and am comfortable giving it), help them come back to the here-and-now, and then continue the discussion. That wasn’t done, and the folks who have a hard time regulating their emotions made aggressive comments.

I don’t feel like they were expressing vulnerable feelings, so I’m hoping that they had an emotional shield up and didn’t experience harm. I’m sure it was hurtful, but I hope it wasn’t harmful. I hope that the people who clearly feel such deep rage are eventually able to find peace and a safe place to recover from whatever shit they went through, assuming they have unprocessed shit to deal with. I obviously hope that we’ll someday look back at police brutality some day and be horrified that we ever lived like that, but that’s a nothingburger of a statement in this context. The commenter has expressed their desire to move on from the topic so I won’t leave a comment over there, but I figured I’d share my thoughts here. There’s not really a point to what I’m saying beyond that.

I have some perspective on this that’s a bit hard to share, but I’ll try to do so briefly. My partner had a very traumatic upbringing and has spent several years processing all of that trauma in therapy. She has occasionally said things while in an activated state that she later came to deeply regret. When she has said these hurtful things, I’ve been able to see an injured and frightened 18, 15, 12, 10, 7, or 5 year old kid lashing out as the only defense to an existential threat. There was no existential threat in our time or place, but the trapped knot of trauma that was smashed into her brain by her circumstances saw it as one and tried to survive. With that understanding, it became hard to feel anything but sadness and compassion on the very rare occasion when her anger turned to me.

This has had a profound impact on how I view angry discourse out in the world. Most people haven’t been through the shit my partner has, but most people have absolutely been through something terrible that has wounded them. Those wounds often turn into trauma, and that trauma can sometimes explode out into the world.

I don’t think that having trauma means that adults aren’t responsible for their actions. My philosophy is that every person has a duty to take care of themselves and to not harm others, in that order. Harming someone else is not acceptable to me unless it must be done to protect your present self. I just no longer feel like I am able to assign blame or worthiness to these types of comments and the people making them. When I see someone saying something like “ACAB” and expressing really painful trauma, I think of my partner and all the pain she’s gone through and all the work she’s done to get to the bright place she’s at today.

All of this is to say that I just can’t agree with calling them assholes. I think that there are times when they could be misguided and hurtful and even harmful, but that makes me sad rather than angry. The comments that make me angry are the ones made in bad faith, but thankfully the block and report buttons are easy to reach.

I’m curious about the incident you mentioned. Would you be able to link it to me? I might like to comment over there if possible.

EDIT: I was not, in fact, brief.

EDIT: Found it: https://kbin.earth/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/353424/-/comment/2994009
I’m shit at the fediverse so sorry for my dumb link. I think there’s a better way to link stuff, but I don’t know what or how even.