City boy checking in.

So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards.

Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that's about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL.

I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts.

Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?

So I got a notice from Ticketmaster that my identity was accessed by an intruder and my name, contact info and /encrypted/ payment info was compromised. These notices are more and more common. Why aren't companies accountable for damages when they fail to protect all the myriad data they collect on people without consent? I never asked them to store these things..

I'm going to university this September. Nearly everybody says "In university they don't try to understand what you've written it is unintelligible." My handwriting is incredibly ugly. I want to improve it by the time I go to uni.

In elementary school they only taught me cursive handwriting. And I never bothered to learn print handwriting. I can write like that but I'm really slow at it.

How can I improve my handwriting? Which exercises I should do?

Thanks in advance!

Just a shower thought. Seeing how these structures took decades to build in their times, and that too entirely with manual labour, I was wondering how long these architectural marvels would take to be built in this post modern era with the help of our technological advancements.

Imagine the world has dedicated its focus and the entirety of its resources on building just one Pyramid as quickly as possible out of the same materials and in the same location as the original ones. The medium of construction has no constraints but the end result must be indistinguishable, structure and composition wise.

I would love to hear how the process would take place in addition.

When I was a kid, I learned about Dinosaur being "giant lizard", and it's been may-be 10 years, that I hear "Birds are dinosaurs".

I am curious on how the concept evolve, both among paleontologists, and among the general public.

For example the living room is a middle square and the kitchen and bed rooms are not aligned but just smaller squares added to the sides

I believe lighting plays a very important part in making a scene realistic when it comes to creating one artificially, like in 3D modelling. That is why I also think the lighting of these AI generated images is the prime source of what impresses people about these images since no matter how unrealistic or distorted the subject is, the lighting makes it look like a natural part of the background. This is clearly different from photos like from poorly Photoshopped ones where the subject feels deliberately inserted into the scene from a cutout.

I am interested to understand how LLMs understand the context of the lighting when creating images. Do they make use of samples which happen to have the exact same lighting positions or do they add the lighting as an overlay instead? Also, why is it that lighting doesn't look convincing in some cases like having multiple subjects together etc.?

a'la 2010, would any moons that survive then be considered 'planets' ?

I saw an article about them attacking Lebanon now. So, where will it stop? Have the Israeli government ever spoken about this?

Source

Disclaimer: I am not trolling, I am an autistic person who doesn’t understand so many social nuances. Also I am from New Hampshire (97% white), so I just don’t have any close African-American friends that I am willing to risk asking such a loaded question.

This seems insane to me. I live in a city where maybe 50-60% of people have cars, and most don't drive them that much. Yet every grocery store I'm aware of with the sole exception of the expensive Whole Foods has a fuel rewards points program. Reasons this should be controversial enough to enable a low-cost alternative:

1. Many people don't drive and therefore pay a little more for groceries because it includes a perk they don't use
2. It seems like a very ardent pro-fossil fuel move that you'd think would cause some sort of negative attention from environment activists.
3. The subsidy typically applies as an amount off per gallon, so you end up really subsidizing big vehicles with big gas tanks. Again, really makes some customers subsidize others and you'd think people (other than me) would be annoyed at this.

But yet, virtually every grocery store does this. Anyone know why? Does the fossil fuel industry somehow encourage this?

I haven't run windows since 2019. However I need to boot my old drive to grab some data. I really need to make sure this system doesn't update any windows components, but I'll need it to have internet access for a portion of the time.

On a different system, I used to have two reg keys that I would run to disable or enable updates when I found that disabling the services only worked until the watchdog would re enable them. Those resulted in updates saying something was wrong, which is perfect by me.

Now that web searches for stuff like this are all AI-gen'd SEO BS, can anyone tell me or point me to a reliable resource for truly disabling updates on Win 10?

PS - Bonus points if Anyone can link me to the page I used a few years back that had all sorts of privacy enhancing and telemetry disabling option on the left side and would create a reg file for applying those changes on the right. It might have been a purple theme, I forget.

Edit: it may also have been a "services" command that fully disabled services from CLI where the GUI says access denied. I forget.

Edit 2: I got the updates services disabled via registry. Thanks to those who refreshed my old Windows admin memory. I dumped Windows on my personal systems years ago, and haven't had to think about this for a while. It's a shame when the operating system changes to this model of SaaS where they call all the shots. I want security updates, but not bleeding edge drivers, candy crush, "feature enhancements", random unexpected reboots, etc. I miss when the update feature didn't assume nobody in the world could handle manual updates. You know, like sudo apt-get update.

I've been looking for a new job as a software developer. The huge majority of job listings I see in my area are hybrid or remote. I just had an introductory phone call with Vizio (which didn't specify the location type in the job listing). The recruiter told me that the job was fully on-site, which I told her was a deal breaker for me.

It makes me wonder how many other people back out after hearing that the job is on-site. And it makes me wonder why this wasn't specified in the job description. I assume most people only want hybrid or remote jobs these days, right?

Anyways I was just wondering how many of you guys apply for on-site IT jobs? Hybrid is so much better, I don't know why people would apply for on-site jobs unless they have no other options.

So awkward, but come on it says right there on the package to wash those mushrooms or whatever it is… You’re not their mom but you don’t wanna eat feces or whatever ended up on the produce. A quick rinse is never going to be perfect but it’s better than nothing.

In the absence of legitimate suggestions, commiseration is welcome too 😉

This is based off of my conclusions from watching Narcos. The narcotraffickers in Colombia were terrified of being extradited to the US because they knew they would never be able to break out of prison, whereas they were certain that they could strong arm their way out of any Colombian corrections facilities. Their methods in Colombia were to either use political corruption or intimidate corrections officers with severe consequences.

Why did the narcos believe that they would not have been able to use those methods in the US? Basically, I'm trying to understand why the US corrections system is seemingly more secure and capable of maintaining drug traffickers in custody compared to Colombia.

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/4263335

I'm an Europe based nurse and work shifts: 06:00 to 14:00, 13:00 to 21:00 or graveyard shift: 20:00 to 06:30 the next day.

Working bedside full time I earn EUR 4K before taxes plus shift supplements that earn me between EUR 0.5 and 0.9K per month, so that’s between 4.5K and 4.9K per month. Most of this extra money comes from working the graveyard shift, the second biggest contribution are weekends.

I know I'm not going to work bedside until I retire because this is a tiring and demanding job and have been looking for administrative positions within my hospital system.

There are 2 regular 9 to 5 jobs that fit my area of expertise: case manager and study nurse. Monday to Friday, no weekends except a doctor needs me with him there, no night shifts. My starting base salary would be 3.7K but I wouldn’t get supplements anymore.

I’m not sure I want to have a normal 9 to 5, mostly office based job if it means earning EUR 0.8K to 1.2K less than I do now. I’d sleep better, I wouldn’t have to wake up at 4:30 or fear that a loud neighbor is going to ruin the night because it's Friday and he wants to party, I wouldn’t feel tired after every morning shift, I wouldn’t have to work 8 to 10 days without breaks…

But I believe I’ve grown used to nursing: a positive aspect of waking up at 04:30 is that streets are empty when you go to work and when you come home, there are always free seats on your commute, no children yelling after school, no queues when you go shopping, I don’t mind working weekends because you work less and earn a bit more… And where I work there is a huge nurse scarcity and my manager doesn’t complain much when I call in sick.

I don’t know how to decide

Reddit is blocking vpns and invites users to create a ticket if they think there's been an error. I almost created a ticket with email address fuckyouspez@gmail.com saying i wasn't sure if I was using a VPN with the body text just being "fuckyouspez!!!!" over and over. I didn't submit it because I thought for a moment "would this be illegal to submit?" It probably isn't, but I am not sure.

Info Flow:

https://youtube.com/@INFOFLOW211

Audit the Audit:

https://youtube.com/@AuditTheAudit

Background Info:

• Reclaimed Water
• Toilet to Tap

Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?

If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn't it already doing that?

In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.

Even if your water company's intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town's intake is downstream. So if you're not drinking your neighbor's processed toilet water, you're drinking that of the town upstream.

Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to "dilute" the ick-factor here, or is there something I'm missing?

Is there a hard threshold? Do high risk investments such as penny stocks qualify as gambling? Do low risk investments? Annuities? Bonds? CDs?

This comment got me wondering.

Is it more to do with the venue? Stock markets and real estate vs casinos and the lottery?

Were the MIT Blackjack Team gambling or investing?

Or Jerry and Marge Selbee?

Is this just another semantic hotdogs are sandwiches discussion or is there an agreed threshold?

Can credit union and coop banks replace traditional banks completely?

Edit (adding additional question): Has there been an attempt to do this on a national or societal level?

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)

Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!

So:

1. Do they retain the files forever?
2. If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?

Cheers!