I don’t have a YouTube account, and have no interest in getting one. I hid shorts with this browser add-on:

https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts

QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.

SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.

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

Features of SCTP include:

• Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.

Such an entrenched technology that would take decades to replace across the planet.

I don’t think that it’d really be necessary to alter the underlying protocol (well, you could make something a lot more elaborate with designated “receivers” and acks of transmissions, but I’m talking about something analogous to what humans already do, retransmitting in the event of collision). Humans do have to figure out whether someone’s transmitting, but the reason you don’t hear static on analog radios constantly is because they have a squelch feature, detect when there’s a transmission present; the radio is already looking at the signal sufficiently to do the necessary work.

Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in [email protected] when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

However.

End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like [email protected] still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like [email protected].

I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.

I bet VASAviation has it. They’re pretty good about having ATC recordings of anything in the news up.

searches

Nope, but it is on YouTube anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

EDIT: Though they do have a recent recording of ATC and pilots talking about pizza toppings, which is more-or-less in the same “it’s technically not necessary to have on the air and shouldn’t really be there, but it’s at a level where it’s not really causing a problem”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

I suspect that if the airwaves got too crowded, they’d transmit “break, break” until they got through and ask people to tamp it down.

EDIT2: Though…you can still get someone stepping on a transmission. That is, it’s not just inability to get through, but sometimes someone will transmit and not realize that someone else is transmitting. That’s caused some real problems in the past, including partially contributing to the Tenerife disaster.

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

On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on a runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North–Ciudad de La Laguna Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife, killing 583 people and injuring 61 others in the deadliest accident in aviation history.[1][2][3][c]

The controller then immediately added, “Stand by for takeoff; I will call you”,[4] indicating that he had not intended the instruction to be interpreted as a takeoff clearance.[25]

A simultaneous radio call from the Pan Am crew caused mutual interference on the radio frequency, which was audible in the KLM cockpit as a three-second-long shrill sound (or heterodyne). This caused the KLM crew to miss the crucial latter portion of the tower’s response. The Pan Am crew’s transmission was “We’re still taxiing down the runway, Clipper 1736!” This message was also blocked by the interference and inaudible to the KLM crew. Either message, if heard in the KLM cockpit, would have alerted the crew to the situation and given them time to abort the takeoff attempt.[26]

I guess maybe radios could be made to be capable of detecting conflict, buffering a voice transmission, and then immediately transmitting it afterwards.

In astronomy, you first enjoy three or four years of confusing classes, impossible problem sets, and sneers from the faculty. Having endured that, you’re rewarded with an eight-hour written exam, with questions like: “How do you age-date meteorites using the elements Samarium and Neodymium?” If you survive, you win the great honor and pleasure of an oral exam by a panel of learned professors.

I remember it vividly. Across a table, five profs. I’m frightened, trying to look casual as sweat drips down my face. But I’m keeping afloat; I’ve managed to babble superficially, giving the illusion that I know something. Just a few more questions, I think, and they’ll set me free. Then the examiner over at the end of the table—the guy with the twisted little smile—starts sharpening his pencil with a penknife.

“I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

“Could you be more specific?”

I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and…

“Could you be more specific?”

An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy.

— The Cuckoo’s Egg

Paul Krugman pointed out that opaque approval processes are fertile ground for corruption.

https://people.com/jd-vance-heckled-says-pope-leo-should-be-careful-talking-theology-amid-donald-trump-conflict-11950188

While speaking at the event on Tuesday, April 14, Vance, 41, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, insisted that the first American pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

I don’t feel like the current cabinet would be strongly-positioned for a theological dispute with the Pope.

change the default SSH port

Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65355 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

$ nc localhost 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
^C
$

It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.

I’m rather concerned about what I do when my Surface Pro 7 dies

Well, most of what I’ve seen expects memory prices to be coming down in 2028. So if it’s got two years of use in it, you’re probably good.

If you’re desperate for a laptop sooner and cheaper, you can get used laptops on eBay (well, maybe somewhere else if you’re not in the US; dunno what the used PC market is like globally).

How in the ever living fuck does this dude get to have any say on healthcare?

Trump gave him the spot in exchange for the guy dropping out and giving Trump his endorsement.

I have a really hard time believing that both the Windows installer and a Linux installer don’t work without there being at least one hardware problem present. But you did swap out most of the parts that I’d think are likely culprits.

Hmm.

When you were swapping parts on this thing, did you have the system either unplugged (preferably) or powered down at the PSU switch? Not just the motherboard’s power off? I remember once accidentally pulling a video card without cutting the actual PSU power, frying both the motherboard and (though I didn’t realize it at the time) the video card, then plugging the video card (correctly) into a new motherboard and frying that motherboard as well, so that even after I swapped out the video card, I still had problems. That is, a damaged part theoretically can damage other parts. Never heard of anyone else hitting something like that, but…

I could imagine that an underpowered PSU could maybe cause a variety of other failures, but you said that you replaced it, and I’m assuming that you checked that it was rated for the components that you had.

Manually underclock the memory in the BIOS as far as possible? Try running with just two sticks (your motherboard manual will tell you which slots to use if you have only two DIMMs)? If the memory’s marginal with your hardware, that will help. Not saying that that’s a fix, but it’d isolate the issue.

EDIT: Maybe vacuum the thing? I guess if you have metal shavings or a screw or something like that rolling around in your case shorting stuff, it could cause issues.

I mean, something clearly isn’t working right there, and I can’t think of many things that would cause that.

considers

The keyboard (and mouse?) do work in the BIOS, just not in the Windows installer? While plugged into the port in question? (I mean, it’s possible to disconnect the cable running from the USB header on the motherboard to the front panel.)

Have you tried, while the PC is on and the Windows installer is active, unplugging the keyboard and mouse and then re-plugging them back in? That’ll reset the device and let the installer handle them. It’s not completely impossible, I guess, that the BIOS talking to them could somehow put them in some kind of wonky state.

EDIT: If the keyboard and mouse aren’t working in the BIOS either, try them on someone else’s computer to rule them out as a source of trouble? I doubt that they are the problem, but might as well get the data point, just to be sure.

The U.S. paints a similarly bleak picture. Roughly 45 million Americans read below a fifth-grade level.

I assume that they actually mean adult Americans, as a considerable number of Americans haven’t gotten to fifth grade yet.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2026/

About 40 million.

I would guess that immigration is gonna be the major variable in US literacy levels, since you’re going to have a significant chunk of people learning English as a second language.

searches

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States. However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population (figure 2).

White and Hispanic adults make up the largest percentage of U.S. adults with low levels of English literacy, 35 percent and 34 percent respectively (figure 3).

Yeah.

The WordPress plugin marketplace has a trust problem.

I think that the problem is really broader — that for any system, be it Linux distros or browser plugins or AI Python packages or NPM packages or whatever — even trustworthy software can change ownership. Most users are probably not monitoring those changes and are not in a position to evaluate the impact of those changes.

Some of that can (and probably should) be handled by compartmentalizing software, limiting the effect it can have, though that has some costs of its own. But I don’t think that that’s going to handle everything.

Throughout his nine-year relationship with Sotomayor, Noem reportedly expressed a desire to leave his wife, who was recently fired from her job as the Secretary of Homeland Security,

While texting with Sotomayor, Noem reportedly said he can “see us leaving our spouses for each other” and expressed a desire to hook up with and be dominated by the type of large-breasted woman he dressed up as.

report on Noem given his wife’s long history of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and action, including signing a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that allowed LGBTQ+ discrimination, banning trans girls from participating in women’s sports, and banning gender-affirming care for trans kids.

Whatever of Kristi Noem’s stuff was just politicking to appeal to her voters and what wasn’t, if the leaks are accurate, I kinda feel like this isn’t likely going to result in Kristi Noem being any more enthusiastic about transexuality.

EDIT: “Kristi and Crystal” doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

So, I don’t have a comment on specifically doing Zuckerberg, but a practice adopted by a number of companies that make a product that can reasonably be used by employees is to try to have employees actually use the thing, because that makes them aware of things that need to be changed or other issues or improvements and more-interested in doing so. That is, in general, as a company, you’re likely better-off in terms of filling user needs if employees actually use whatever they make, especially if they’re in a position to make decisions about how it works.

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

Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one’s own products or services.[1] This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers’ confidence in their own products.[2][3]

Not everywhere I’ve worked has done that, but at places where it was applicable, they tried to do so, including one handing out free hardware if necessary to use the product, as well has having the company itself make use of the products if possible. I think that it’s generally a good idea; it makes people at the company in a position to improve things very aware of pain points.

If — and I have no idea if this is actually the case — Meta is trying to position AI models they make to act in a “contact the company” role, they might want to have their employees actually doing that themselves.

Have you tried plugging them directly into the USB ports on the PC? I have seen BIOSes that don’t deal well with some USB hubs.

The overall fertility rate decline in the U.S. extends beyond just teenagers, Siegel noted.

“Dana, people are having kids in their 30s now, not their 20s,” he told the anchor. “And again, that’s leading to one thing I want to point out. The replacement rate is down to 1.56, meaning every couple is having, on average, 1.56 children in the United States. We need two or above to keep the population at the same amount.”

It’s actually a bit more than 2. About 2.07, IIRC.

EDIT: Though you’ll often see it rounded to 2.1.

EDIT2: Basically, at about the Great Recession (~2007), it took a major wallop and didn’t recover, and then kept declining through the COVID-19 era. My understanding from past reading is that it had been expected that the Great Recession would send it down — economic uncertainty causes fertility rates to drop — but the problem is that it didn’t rebound afterwards.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US

I have a KitchenAid hand mixer that’s been fine. If you’re happy with your KitchenAid stand mixer, seems that it might be reasonable to get the hand mixer version. I mean, you’ve already got a picture of one posted.

Note that I’m assuming that “variable speed” here translates to “discrete number of speeds in a given set of increments”, and not some “continuous-variable speed where you can just move a slider” thing.