Google and Apple and others already do that ad hoc, using signal strength from Bluetooth and WiFi beacons. Can contribute to that by just setting up a wireless access point or several near where you want more signal. Doesn’t even need to be Internet-connected.

Well, that’s a pleasant piece of news among a number of not-so-pleasant news items.

Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.

Hmm. What does this pertain to?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge

Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”

In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.

Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.

Ah.

https://biologydictionary.net/snow-leopard/

Snow leopards are apex predators, which means that they sit at the top of the food chain and have no natural predators themselves.

On the other hand, that’s “natural” predators, which explicitly excludes humans. We have our own unique tier in the chain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_leopard

The snow leopard is easily driven away from livestock and readily abandons kills, often without defending itself.[31] Only two attacks on humans have been reported, both near Almaty in Kazakhstan, and neither were fatal. In 1940, a rabid snow leopard attacked two men; and an old, toothless emaciated individual attacked a person passing by.[53][54]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109894-hundreds-of-endangered-wild-snow-leopards-are-killed-each-year/

Hundreds of endangered wild snow leopards are killed each year

As many as 450 endangered snow leopards have been killed each year since 2008, a report on the fate of the mountain cats estimates.

A big surprise is that more than half the killings – 55 per cent – are estimated to be done by herders avenging livestock attacks by leopards, with only 21 per cent of the cats taken by poachers.

Only 4000 to 7000 of the animals are thought to remain in the 12 mountainous Asian countries they inhabit.

That is, we annually kill something like 3%-10% of the global snow leopard population. They have never been known to kill a human, and have very rarely attacked one.

Wick posted the code for a tool that automatically downloads DMs from Twitter accounts. The code specifies Twitter accounts, which existed only until the social platform rebranded to “X” in October 2023, suggesting the possibility that the tool could be used to search through the digital past of government employees looking for disagreeable opinions or references.

Another tool appeared to be designed for collecting sensitive data from government agency org charts. The tool contained fields for capturing the employee’s office, a 1-5 satisfaction rating, union status, and whether or not their position is statutorily mandated.

Well, that’s interesting. The guys who are determining who to lay off are apparently using union status as an input.

Is the Executive Branch taking someone’s union status into account in making a firing decision legal? I’m pretty sure that it’s not for private business.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/discriminating-against-employees-because-of-their-union

Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies (Section 8(a)(3))

It is unlawful to discourage (or encourage) union activities or sympathies “by discrimination in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment.” For example, employers may not discharge, lay off, or discipline employees, or refuse to hire job applicants, because they are pro-union.

I believe that that also applies to government. That seems like it might be some pretty juicy meat for the public sector union lawyers to work with.

It said that he didn’t have a variable-speed fan and then moved to a variable-speed one. That is, he had a fan that was always running at the highest level he’d ever need. That’s gonna be a big change.

I don’t think that, at a given diameter and rate of airflow, there’s a huge difference in the noise from one fan to another. A lot of what quieter fans do is to just use a reduced airflow via one route or another. IIRC, Noctua has some fancy bearings, but fans are mostly wind noise, not bearing noise (well, unless your bearings are going, in which case you should replace a fan anyway).

EDIT: Out of curiosity, I went looking. Kind of surprisingly – this doesn’t seem like it would be a very expensive test to run, just put a sound meter a fixed distance away from fans, get a bunch of PC fans, and have some sort of acoustic enclosure in a reasonably-quiet environment – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of testing out there.

You can get fancier, because some sounds are more-obnoxious to humans than others, and then it can get more-complicated, but if you’re willing to limit yourself to the simpler “how loud does it sound on average”, you shouldn’t have too much work.

I did find this:

https://imgur.com/3lAEFPn

No idea the source. It ranks the Noctua fans (NF-) as slightly worse than average at a given flow rate, which kind of surprises me.

Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.

Also, if users don’t know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a “search engine”, they likely also want this.

One of my personal pet peeves is power stations — a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels — being called a “solar generator”. It’s not a generator, doesn’t use mechanical energy. But…a lot of people who think “I need electricity in an outage” just go searching for “generator”. I don’t like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.

I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers “air conditioners”. Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.

Speaking as a consumer of news sources, it doesn’t really help me whether a news publication includes some kind of automated analysis, because I’m really concerned about bias originating from the news source, not the specific writer. Even if it actually works, the news publication is the one that selects the systems used to conduct that analysis. It’s maybe useful for the news publication in identifying bias from the writers working there, but they don’t need to publish that.

However, the idea of running some kind of text classifier to grade an article automatically on metrics like that from a party who isn’t the news source itself is maybe more interesting. Like, I can imagine having a coterie of bots that run here on the Threadiverse, run an automated classification of an article and post it on said article, for example, and then one could block bots that one isn’t interested in seeing.

I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.

We’ve seen shifts like that before.

There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn’t exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.

The change started when some people…I think Quakers…decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back…lemme see if I can go dig it up.

Yeah, here we are:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577

That wasn’t driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it’s possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don’t also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.

Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.

I should qualify that – I don’t know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively. fwupd has the ability to do so and it’s billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn’t mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.

The only reason I’d guess that it might not run automatically is that some devices do not deal well with power loss during firmware updates, and I can imagine that a distro – which has no way of knowing when a user might start flipping power switches – might want more-conservative settings. Might be something like the last bit of distro installation, but they might not want to run during normal operation.

But yeah, I bet that Louis Rossman didn’t think of that either when he was talking about using USB connectivity to prevent firmware updates.

EDIT: I also vaguely remember reading something claiming that smart TVs from some manufacturer that are not connected to the Internet were using nearby smart TVs of the same brand and within WiFI range that can reach the Internet for Internet connectivity. Ordinarily, I’d say that that’s not generally an issue for most devices, but printers often do have wireless networking capability, so probably one more at least theoretical vector via which a printer might potentially reach the Internet. I have not read any claims of a printer doing this, though. I also don’t know whether-or-not those claims for the smart TVs were legitimate, but they are technically-possible to do, so…shrugs

If we reach a point where an AI can summarize a video to that degree and provide background summaries, I’d happily use it. I mean, I’d mark the origin, but nah, this is just me.

Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don’t weight ongoing costs as much – happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.

For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn’t have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.

Rossman: What Rossman’s saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He made a wiki page listing all the things that they’re doing. He says that he doesn’t know of a type of printer to recommend now.

He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream. A substantial portion of the video is his cat licking him.

Yeah, that can cover some cases (also, throwing data on a smartphone, which most people have and keep with them most of the time) but I think that for most people, electronic devices still aren’t a complete replacement for paper.

• Power. Paper just needs some kind of light in the environment.

• Shareability. Okay, there are schemes to let one transfer data from phone to phone, but it’s hard to compete with how intuitive and universal handing some paper to someone is.

• Battery. Just keeping the display on a phone or laptop, even if you aren’t far away from power, on to keep the page visible tends to consume power, and many devices can’t keep something visible all day. I’ll concede that eInk displays can cover some of that.

• Disposability. Paper is pretty cheap, and if a piece of paper gets soaked in water or whatever, it’s no big loss.

• Use of paper in the physical world. I can do things like create stencils on a sheet of paper and cut them out. It’s a device that lets a digital computer interact with the outside world beyond purely showing information.

We’re a lot closer to the paperless world than we were when I first started hearing the phrase “paperless office”, and a lot of documents never leave electronic form, but I still do occasionally want to use paper.

Professional writing was always fake.

I don’t even know what that means. You mean that professional authors use spell-checkers or something?

Strictly-speaking, in this case, it’s not the ability to be network-connected that’s at issue, but rather the ability to push updates to firmware.

I don’t know what type of computer you have it connected to, but Linux has a system that will automatically update firmware on USB-attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.

$ sudo fwupdtool get-devices

Will show you a list of managed devices.

I’m sure that Windows and MacOS have comparable schemes.

On Linux, I’m sure that you can blacklist a device for updates.

I’d guess that it’s possible to get one of those dedicated USB print servers. Those probably don’t support updating firmware on an attached printer. I might have some questions as to how much I’d trust a no-name one of those on my network itself, but…

Honestly, that’s not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including – as Rossman points out – making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn’t mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.

Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the xz attack – the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up. I understand that it’s also been a concern with even browser extensions.

The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value. And there are people who will try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.

Ehhh. I rarely print anything, but I really don’t want to give up the ability to print things at any time I want and have them promptly available.

I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).

If we want to get pedantic, it is possible to get a pen plotter. There are fountain pen compatible pen plotters, and the whole fountain pen world has a healthy and mature third-party ink market.

Now, that’s not simply a drop-in replacement for a regular printer, starting with the fact that you need to use monoline fonts so that the plotter traces out what a hand would rather than filling it in, and that a plotter just can’t produce all the same stuff. The speed is going to be abysmal compared to a conventional printer for virtually any image. And I don’t know if there’s anyone who has built one with a paper feed system (there are large-format pen plotters that can work with a continuous-feed roll of paper, but I don’t know if those can handle fountain pens. I don’t know of a fountain pen plotter that can just take a ream of A4 or US Letter pages and then handle those correctly).

But you can, strictly-speaking, have a computer create output that uses ink from the fountain pen world.

Ugh.

$100 mono laser printer

Well, you probably aren’t getting a $100 laser printer unless they’ve got a razor-and-blades model. I definitely paid more than $100 for the mono laser I have. I don’t know what printers out there are gonna be fine with third-party ink (or toner), but any that do are going to cost more, because they aren’t relying on ink sales to make the printer business viable.

He says that he doesn’t know what to recommend any more, now that Brother has started doing this too.

I understand that Epson has some inkjet printers that don’t use ink cartridges. You just pour more from a (cheap) bottle into the tank. Like, they can’t implement a lockout, and there are other manufacturers that sell ink for them.

kagis

“Ecotank”.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ecotank

But if you want those, they’re gonna cost more than printers that are using the razor-and-blades model and expecting to make their money on the ink.

https://epson.com/For-Home/Printers/Inkjet/c/h110

There’s a list of their home inkjet printers. Notice how the “EcoTank” ones cost more than the non-EcoTank ones.

Like, one way or another, the printer manufacturer is gonna make their money. Either it’s not razor-and-blades model, in which case the printer is gonna cost more but the ink is cheaper, or it’s razor-and-blades and you get a cheap printer but pay more in ink and the printer manufacturer will do everything they can to lock out anyone else from selling ink for the thing.

EDIT: I’d add that I am not personally a huge fan of inkjet printers unless one really needs what they can do, like printing photo-quality images, because they have so many more issues with ink handling than do lasers. I can have laser printer sit without powering on for five years, then turn it on, and it’ll come right up and work fine. Inkjet printers are prone to clogging problems.

I loath them because I don’t have pockets

This is especially an issue for women, who often have more form-fitting clothing that either doesn’t have pockets or have very small ones that don’t work for phones.

I think that the usual solution for “women carrying things” is that many are gonna carry a purse – if someone’s pre-menopause, they’re gonna need pads or tampons anyway, so can put it in there. Problem is that the phone breaks this. Even if women have a purse, women don’t always carry their purse all around the office or house or whatever, but don’t want to miss calls.

My mother got a fanny pack just for her phone (which isn’t even all that large).

At one point in the past, it used to be common for women to wear a bag on a belt accessible through a slit in their skirt.

https://pieceworkmagazine.com/a-brief-history-of-the-pocket-in-womens-fashion/

The first examples of pockets began to be inserted into men’s clothing at the end of the 1600s. Before this construction development, illustrations show that men used small pouches, which hung from a belt around the waist. These separate pouches could be concealed inside of a coat or tunic. The words pouch and pocket are related, through the Middle English/Northern French word pouche, originally describing a small bag.

For women, pockets remained an accessory that tied around the waist and was accessed through an opening in a skirt’s seam. The full skirts of the 1700s allowed these pockets to be easily hidden.

The shift by women to pants kinda killed that option.

I think that the solution is gonna be some women’s clothier figuring out how to make an appealing way of carrying a phone.

Lara Croft runs around with thigh holsters. That way, the carrying system is clearly distinct from the body, doesn’t mess with the body silhouette, which I assume is why women don’t want male-style large pocket, non-form-fitting clothing. So maybe something like that would work. Dunno how much of a chafing issue that is.

EDIT: Drop bags are kinda in the neighborhood of what I’m thinking of too, though I’m thinking lower-slung and smaller: