They may be talking about the CEO being on Trump’s dick, though that’s just a guess.

Anything shared here would inevitably be (or become) a honeypot. If you want a community-driven VPN, it would need to be something like Tor. Individual nodes being hosted by the community, and a zero-trust system to ensure no single node sees enough traffic to ID users.

But the issue with this is that a malicious actor (like the government) could simply spin up enough nodes to be able to capture the system. A zero-trust system like Tor is only secure because it is large. It’s not economical for a single actor to run enough nodes to reliably capture all three connections in the chain. But if it’s a small group (like Lemmy) starting up their own system, then it would be trivial for a larger organization to simply outnumber the two or three dozen safe nodes.

Sounds like it’s simply an engineering issue that nobody has bothered to solve. You could 100% design a window unit that would fit a hinged window. But no company has bothered to do so.

You could always do a heat pump mini-split system instead. Those only require a single hole drilled to the exterior, which then gets used to run hoses into the house from the head unit. The whole thing can usually be installed in a few hours, because it’s basically “drill hole, bolt everything down where it needs to go, run hoses and power, seal hole with expanding foam”

Yeah, I live in the southern US where it gets proper hot, and I definitely prefer the cold. You can always put more layers on. Generating heat is extremely easy from an engineering standpoint. There are even ways to do it chemically for things like reusable hand warmers.

But holy hell, when it’s hot hot, there are only so many things you can do to avoid it. Unlike the cold, there is a limit to how many layers you can take off. And if you’re in the sun, taking off layers may actually make you hotter in the long term.

That’s a mini-split, which is technically a heat pump instead of an air conditioner. They can be extremely energy efficient for heating (they can easily reach above 100% efficiency in terms of power usage vs heat production) because you’re not actually generating heat, you’re just moving it around. If you want to cool a room, you pump it outside. And if you want to heat a room, you pump heat in from outside. You can even bury the heat lines if you have the yard for it, and (as long as you bury deeper than the local frost line) you’ll be able to use geothermal to get efficient heating even when it’s frigid outside.

This comment is hilarious because a heat pump and mini-split system can be installed by basically anyone in a few hours. It only requires a single hole drilled through an exterior wall, to reach the outside where your heat pump goes. After that, it’s just a matter of running hoses to the various mini-splits that are bolted to the walls in your various rooms. And if you really want to be economical, you can strategically cool certain rooms (like the bedrooms and office) while leaving the rest of the house hot. That way you’re not needing to cool the entire house, you’re just creating a few safe havens where you’ll spend most of your time.

The irony is that Buzzfeed actually had some legitimately hard-hitting investigative journalism. They had multiple Pulitzer winners on their payroll. But that shit takes time and costs money, so they used the clickbait BS to pay the bills.

Yeah, in the audio production world, it’s commonly referred to as a “compander”. A compressor for the loud parts, and an expander for the quiet parts. Commonly used in speaker phones for being able to pick up a large range of volumes, meeting rooms for remote meetings, plug-and-play ballroom mic systems, overhead announcement systems, etc… Basically anything that you want to set up once and then never worry about tuning. They can be a pain to properly dial in at first, but can be extremely useful.

That’s because enforcement is largely based on viewer reports. And nobody bothers to report them.

I’d argue that Jeffries is the exact opposite of a DINO. He’s literally the minority leader. He is exactly what establishment democrats want. And that is the problem. He’s not a DINO, because he’s literally the face of the party. Democrats are simply too far right. And Mamdani is doing his best to drag the Overton window back to the left, even with the establishment democrats kicking and screaming.

But also, Mamdani wasn’t born in the US, and is therefore unable to run for president. Nor could he be in any seat that is in the chain of succession for the spot of POTUS. So for instance, he couldn’t be VP, the speaker, any of the presidential cabinet members, etc… Because all of those are potential future presidents, so allowing him to be in one of those spots would cause a constitutional crisis if he is the only one remaining and is ineligible.

There is a car rental company that has been pushing legitimately awful AI ads on YouTube. Congrats, I probably wasn’t going to rent a car from you. But now I will specifically avoid your company if I ever need to rent a car.

You’re not wrong. America’s Overton window is hilariously skewed, because conservatives have consistently been working to drag it to the right for decades. And the “we need to reach the moderate voters” liberals have been letting it happen, by consistently shifting their own messaging farther right to pander to the new “center”.

The two states that are most conveniently located for sending people to space, because they’re closest to the equator, have access to deep water barges for large shipments, and have relatively mild weather for clear launches. Plus, congress had a large say in NASA’s decisions, and Texas had a lot of influential politicians at the time. You think NASA headquartered there because they liked the politics? Clown take.

My parents are reversed, with my mom tempering my dad’s conservatism. But it’s the same basic idea. My mom and I will be discussing whatever Government Atrocity of the Week^TM is making the news cycle, and my dad will basically go “good, I hope it sucks for {victim}. If they don’t like it, they can leave.”

Gee, and you wonder why I don’t ever want to hang out…

Exactly this. It’s the “Doctor requires you to be 20 minutes early to your appointment, then makes you wait in the checkup room for 45 minutes” scenario. You’re there to see the doctor, not the other way around. The doctor’s time is more valuable than yours is, and you’re the one who needs to see them. So they have no issues with making you wait if they’re busy. You aren’t the priority in this scenario.

Is it petty mind-game BS? Yes, absolutely. But it’s also very telling about where each country stands on the diplomatic field.

Or it did find evidence of vote manipulation, but not in the direction they have been screeching about. Every accusation is a confession, after all.

Being buried underground helps. Like unironically, as heat and cold waves continue to get worse, we may see people shifting towards underground homes. They’re already fairly common in parts of America (mostly in tornado alley where being buried helps protect against having the entire house being ripped off the foundation and thrown across town) and they are extremely energy efficient.

Your walls basically use geothermal to transfer heat directly into the earth. Like how being buried in sand at the beach will keep you nice and cool even when the beach is hot. Especially if you’re buried below the frost line, which makes winters easy too. So it’s not like it’s a new building technique that would need to be invented. It’s just that we’ll probably see more of it in places that didn’t traditionally have them.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

Yeah, modern living is so anathema to human life that the ancient greeks literally told horror stories about it. Sisyphus pissed off Zeus, and was cursed in the afterlife to eternally push a boulder up a mountain, only to have the boulder roll away from him as he neared the peak and end up at the base of the mountain again. That was meant to be an extreme torment, because the task can never actually be completed. Sisyphus is forced to spend all of his waking hours struggling, only to have the struggle reset again every day.

And now we stare at spreadsheets for 8 hours every day, doing tasks that have no end.

I just block my Roku’s telemetry and ad servers at the DNS level with my pi-hole, and it works fine for streaming from my Plex/Jellyfin server. If you really wanted to be sure, you could just reset the firmware and refuse to connect it to the WiFi afterwards. It’ll still work just fine as a regular TV. Then you can hook up something like an Nvidia Shield Pro or an Apple TV 4K to it, and use that to stream instead.