To be completely fair, the diesel we get here is usually not of a grade that would make it legal in places like the US. I do wonder why a different name stuck here, I think that’s much more interesting than “benzeen” for gasoline

We call diesel “Mazut” which is usually the name of a heavy dirty fuel oil, I just found out. More digging needed.

Huh. That’s how it kind of is in Arabic.

I never put it together that what we call “Naft/Nuft” (نَفط) is related to Naphtha. Fuel is “Benzeen” (بنزين).

I’m not in the right headspace to flesh this out completely, but I’ve thought a lot about how out-and-out reactionary currents refer to a mythical great past and how “typical” “moderate” currents also do the same with a mythical “back to normal” that, sure, may have existed in some way, but categorically was not an acceptable state. Or at least the surface appearance of a “normal”.

I’m in Lebanon and we’ve been living through a lot of sudden economic and social changes, and I catch myself yearning for like 2017 when my life savings didn’t lose 99% of its value and I could drive up and down the country to have fun. The reality is that it wasn’t a normal state of affairs, the “good times” were really just us loading debt onto our future selves (not just financial debt). By artificially pretending our currency was worth more, it made the economic crash much much worse when it did happen. These places I would visit aren’t some unfortunate lush destinations designed for me to have fun that I sadly can’t visit anymore from a vague reason, they’re people’s homes unfairly destroyed by war. My enjoyment of them is not the tragedy here.

The “good old days” I look back upon still had me without electricity for hours a day, still had me on 200kbps internet, still had me fight monthly with the local electricity mob, still had me spend multiple periods without running water, still had me perform jobs for faraway companies that paid me less than my foreign coworkers because of my passport. All of these things are unchanged. What do you mean we miss stability? We didn’t have it!

Not sure if what I’m trying to express is getting across, but this moderate “good times” fantasy feels like it has to be by definition an unsustainable state that precludes something breaking and a lot of people materially worse off.

You’re not being paranoid, this is probably one of the intended uses of this technology. Being able to pretend to care about the children is just set dressing.

Any government-level “for the kids” effort that doesn’t start with paying teachers more than a pittance is a transparent push for something else.

I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.

I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.

I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.

I still didn’t quite understand the arc concept. Is it that the ground appears to dip slightly then go back up?

Also finding it hard to acknowledge quite what happened, especially since it’s such a nonchalant situation, but that power line in the background just crumpling is a scary sign that something has changed.

How does that change anything?

It’s already getting bad. It’s kind of heartbreaking. Around 2015 was the sweet spot where a lot of mods would be updated quickly, authors turned around compatibility patches for other mods very often, and the game was still a big enough part of the zeitgeist that you had a lot of people who were interested in DIY game dev putting time into the modding scene, with the expectation that so many people play Skyrim that surely your mod would appeal to someone.

I even have a little mod idea from 2012. I haven’t done it yet. Maybe I still will.

I played a fair bit at the time and then told myself I’ll go again in the future. About a year ago I tried to start setting up a new mod list and it was complicated by the versions and the need to manually port versions and that kind of thing. Frankly, it was laziness on my part, not trying hard enough to learn the new meta, not bothering to understand the porting process. It looked like so much effort and I quite frankly had way less time and patience for it.

My setup wasn’t great (laptop with a 4700MQ (I think!) and GT750 SLI. Not GTX, GT. Yeah.) but it was plenty to play at decently high settings in vanilla and high with a little bit of ultra after doing all the modded optimizations. Seriously, that one texture compression mod made the game playable at all during the summer months.

Those were the days huh. I still think modding peaked with Skyrim and Minecraft and every successive generation of people playing games is fighting for fewer and fewer scraps.

These charts are always suspect when they have a literal apartheid regime run by scores of howling fascists marked as democratic.

I guess as long as you accept their idea where democracy only applies to part of the population, then yes, part of the population can pretend they live in a democratic society. Nothing wrong with just not considering other people as people, no sir. Only freedom here.

(I don’t disagree that disinfo is usually discussed in the context of countries where people are more likely to affect policy)

If we’re gonna talk about actual implementation, you can probably stick a few simple waterblocks on both of the phone’s sides with some thermal pads and have water flowing through everything. Maybe two CPU sized blocks on each side. Not the fancy stuff, the questionable cheap ones.

I don’t even think you need a radiator, a phone will only dissipate so much heat. A loop sucking water out of a metal bucket and dumping it back in will probably radiate enough heat to keep everything relatively cool. Unless we’re doing 25W phone processors now.

If I remember correctly, there were mods that made the settings go below the lowest available ones.

Suddenly feeling like my Skyrim mod knowledge is some complex ancient fading lore in parts of my mind I haven’t used in years.

The superior plug is clearly having no standard and having like four different types all over your house. French plugs at the kitchen counter, German plugs in the living room, Italian plugs everywhere else, combo Italian/American (German/French compatible) plugs wherever the panel has been changed in the past ten years. I even fucking have one of these and I don’t know the fuck why. Never seen it used. Didn’t know what it was until I saw it on Wikipedia 20 years after noticing it as a curious child. Let’s not get started on the abhorrent copper phone lines or the coaxial TV connection that fried multiple TVs with lightning (we just unplug them during storms now).

Also, I bring half of my small appliances/electronics from the Gulf which uses UK plugs, so I also need a fuckload of adapters.

All ungrounded and haphazardly breakered for maximum flavor. Imagine having electrical standards laws in your country. This isn’t a nightmare at all. What are they gonna do, throw my adapter in jail? Subpoena the contacts for being at the wrong angle? /s

I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.

At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.

It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.

And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).

Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.

This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.

At least for web search, Google was head and shoulders above all of the other search engines. People joke about page 2 of Google, but I used to keep finding relevant links ten pages in with Google while Bing(/DDG) or Yahoo would fall apart on the second page completely. This was before 2020 or so. It was seriously really good.

Google, being a brilliant company dedicated to providing the best possible services for their users, has decided to make its own web search complete dogshit as well. I don’t feel like DDG is way better than it used to be, but it’s now much closer to Google, which has fallen off a cliff. I’d like not to think that the web is dead, but it’s just getting harder to find non-LLM garbage pages for any given search query. Also, Google doesn’t respect operators as strictly anymore, which sucks. If you search for an exact term using quotes it has started to suggest corrections for it, which… no. Fucks sake.

Sometimes I wonder if spinning up my own SearXNG would work for my job or if corporate would draw and quarter me for doing something like that. There’s also Kagi, which a few Lemmy users swear by. Frankly I’m just using the hamstrung new Google and a bit of DDG for the privacy related queries. I’ve never used Qwant.

Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.

OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.

I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don’t know. I don’t have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I’ve been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I’m not super comfortable doing all of this manually).

I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I’m doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.

And that’s just the computers. I use a phone as well.

As of right now, Nexus Mods and Reddit are enforcing these new laws. I don’t use either site very often (the latter not since the API exodus). My understanding is that it’s mandatory for platforms of a certain size in the UK after the 25th of July.

The UK is kind of a perfect exit node country (everything is in English!)

I can still view these, but it’s much much harder for me.

I don’t know why parallel isn’t the default.

A sizable minority of Palestinians are Christians, a sizable minority of Israeli settlers are atheists, a sizable plurality of Zionists around the world are Evangelicals. This isn’t a cut-and-dry sectarian conflict.

I’m not in academia, but I’ve seen my coworkers’ hard work get crunched into a slop machine by higher ups who think it’s a good cleanup filter.

LLMs are legitimately amazing technology for like six specific use cases but I’m genuinely worried that my own hard work can be defaced that way. Or worse, that someone else in the chain of custody of my work (let’s say, the person advising me who would be reviewing my paper in an academic context) decided to do the same, and suddenly this is attached to my name permanently.

Absurd, terrifying, genuinely upsetting misuse of technology. I’ve been joking about moving to the woods much more frequently every month for the past two years.