• 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Well, you’re right about the fighting part, but wrong on the attempts.

    Dozens of states tried to pass election integrity bills after the Trump fiasco. Few got it passed due to Republican intervention.

    Same in Congress in both the 117th and 118th. Attempts to make a bipartisan bill always fails because of GOP additions that are absolutely insane.

    The opposite has happened in GOP controlled state sessions in places like Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, where bills have been passed that are very obviously skewed towards the GOP controlling the seats, and getting the benefit of either limiting Democrat control directly, or limiting future abilities of such.

    It’s absolutely foul, and though the Democrats are working hard to fight these things, it looks like abject failure before any real attempts can even be made, which voters seem to see as weakness. Maybe that’s just a defeatist point of view though.


  • These trained bamboo plants are tricky, because they require that you continually train them to a post when growth is going to keep that shape. When allowed to grow normally, of course they grow straight, and fast. You can trim that top growth off without harming the overall plant (use the 1/3 rule, of course), but you’ll likely get multiple offshoots where you do the cutting because the trunk of bamboo is fibrous, and will regenerate new leaves from cuts, that will eventually turn into shoots over time. You might even get some new shoots from the soil line after spurring new growth after cutting, which is a positive or negative depending on how you see it.

    If you wish to keep it small, just set a reminder to trim it every so often and keep the new growth to where you’d like it. Treat it like a Bonsai.



  • Nobody can fight them right now though. Executive Order wouldn’t work, and Dems don’t have enough control in Congress. Dems need both to pass legislation that the Republicans definitely don’t want passed.

    Republicans have done nothing but fight this type of legislation for decades, because they know they will never win the general populace come election time. This is why they Gerrymander, this is why they pass laws allowing themselves to unilaterally throw out election results, and this is why we’re seeing the Supreme Court making insane rulings right now. It’s all to try and disenfranchise the majority population opinion, and try to rewrite it with indoctrination.





  • So, yeah. I can’t watch the full hour, but I skipped through and get the point.

    Essentially, there used to be some guardrails around direct advertising in movies and TV after everyone selling ad time in the 50’s-70’s got multiple generations hooked on cigarettes and booze. Then it shifted from smokes to Coca-Cola which was in literally every movie in the 00’s, and now it’s websites.

    The trick is, you can leave these brands anywhere in sight on screen, as long as you don’t directly tell the audience they need to buy it.

    Bottle of Aviator Gin in a bar shot, sure.

    Brawny paper towels in a janitorial closet, why not?

    You just can’t draw attention to it. It’s a foolish distinction now because it’s been getting abused for so long, but until there are direct bans on all brands on screen - which seems kind of impossible - this will be a thing. Even more so now that you can quickly work AI generated billboard scenes in wherever you want without having to CGI or film it anymore. Sucks.

    Edit: This is a perfect (though comedic) example of how it still works - https://youtu.be/5OHxP7pnwPg




  • AGAIN.

    This is not “phoning home” as claimed. It is not a SECURITY RISK as claimed. It is a privacy want/complaint/nag at the very VERY least. THIS IS ALSO NOT A PRIVACY FOCUSED PROJECT.

    Refer to the original comment, and realize this was being run in a container. So, what…it’s a risk to have libcurl ide tidied on your server? Your IP address is so damn private and important? Literally nobody cares.

    Y’all need to get better hobbies, seriously. Probably just need to get off the Internet if this is the stuff causing consternation in your lives.







  • Friend, please listen to reason.

    The “code” you linked to is not functional code of any sort. Not to be nitpicky, it’s just an HTML image tag, so its Markup at best. All you did was stop the loading of an SVG image. The fact that they source it from their own domain tells you everything: they have a script that runs to check the current number of stars, then generates this image that reflects that. SVG is an image format. It’s really standard.

    All your other points you’re making because you do not have much experience in the software realm, which I’m not saying to be dismissive or anything at all, I’m simply illustrating that all the points you’re questioning or mentioning are 100% standard.

    • you don’t make a fork for three lines of code and ask others to “check it out”. If anything, just point out the issue and post a diff or a script to fix it. Simple.
    • They have a pro version, and are using images they generate in a template viewed by users to promote its popularity and try to sell pro. They’re running a business out of this. Not every FOSS project is non-profit, and these people are simply trying to sell a product AS WELL as keep it open source for others to enjoy, like yourself. Feel lucky to have the privilege they are letting you use it for free.
    • The term “phoning home” as you’re trying to use it, is wrong. You’re implying that it is functionally doing something unexpected. It is not. It is sourcing an image in HTML. The suspicious type of phoning home is code that executes locally and pulls down other functional bits of code that alter the way the software APPEARS to be used. It’s a way of obfuscating something shady, like a virus, or malware. This is not that kind of code.
    • If your concern is simply that the code you’ve run is sourcing an image from somewhere, I can only imagine how upset you’ll be to learn that software repos of this size are pulling things from dozens, if not hundreds of places. This project pulls from rubygems, yarnpkgs, and the dreaded example.com.
    • Lastly, the reason that team responded to you in that manner was more that they were taken aback. Like “WTF is this person talking about? I don’t get it.” Realize that they were nice enough to respond, where most project maintainers would just ignore or close the issue.

    Also, you might want to freak out about the social badges being sourced in this as well. This isn’t a “privacy first” project or anything. They aren’t doing anytweird, you’re just misunderstanding some things.


  • That’s the best time to market. They simply didn’t have the big IP that Nintendo and Sony had been marketing at the time. Sega at that time led with Sonic - as they always do - and then a few properties that were really fun and original, but required an expensive console to even try and get aquatinted with.

    This is not even bringing up the prior hardware failures they had launched. They just miscalculated on the popularity of Sonic globally. It’s not enough to get people with consoles that are working just fine and still have years of games to come to switch.


  • Lol. There is no time. Replacing an incumbent at the last minute is a death sentence for a political campaign. It would be the most foolish option. Even if Biden came out and said he’s stepping back and letting Kamala Harris take the spot, you’d be fighting an uphill battle for people who haven’t been paying attention to her work as VP, which the uninformed thinks does nothing.

    That’s not even taking into account all the sexist and racist shitheads who have been doing all the fear mongering and hand-wringing about the prospect of Harris becoming president by simply being VP. We have a bunch of really shitty people in this country…


  • Yes, exactly.

    Not only is it insanely power hungry and will drive up electric bill, it’s storage and memory limited, and worst of all, 32-bit.

    You wouldn’t be able to run much as far as modern software goes on it, and even then, not for long. You probably won’t even find a working distribution because of the age of the hardware, and the fact that large swaths of 32-bit drivers have been removed from the kernel over the years.

    Just chalk it up to being E-Waste, and take it to someplace that will properly recycle it.