Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”

The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.

A fun bit of perspective that I like to mention in discussions about this. Roll back a bit over a century:

Scientific American, November 2, 1907

Artificial Honey

Prof. Herzfeld, of Germany, recently brought out some interesting points regarding the manufacture of artificial honey in Europe. It is noticed that when we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it can be easily redissolved by heating. Owing to the increased production of artificial honey, the bee cultivators have been agitating the question so as to protect themselves, and it is proposed to secure legislation to this effect, one point being to oblige the manufacturers to add some kind of product which will indicate the artificial product. On the other hand, it is found that the addition of inverted sugar to natural honey tends to improve its quality and especially to render it more easiIy digested. Seeing that sugar is about the only alimentary matter which is produced in an absolutely pure state, its addition to honey cannot be strictly considered as an adulteration. Bees often take products from flowers which have a bad taste; and the chemist Keller found that honey coming from the chestnut tree sometimes has a disagreeable flavor. From wheat flowers we find a honey which has a taste resembling bitter almonds, and honey from asparagus flowers is most unpalatable. Honey taken from the colza plant is of an oily nature, and that taken from onions has the taste of the latter. In such cases, the honey is much improved by the addition of inverted sugar. Prof. Herzfeld gives a practical method for preparing this form of sugar. We take 1 kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of high-quality refined sugar in a clean enamelware vessel, and add 300 cubic centimeters (10 fluid ounces) of water and 1.1 grammes (17 grains) tartaric acid. This is heated at 110 deg. C. over an open fire, stirring all the while, and is kept at this heat until the liquid takes on a fine golden yellow color, such operation lasting for about three quarters of an hour. By this very simpIe process we can easily produce artificial honey. Numerous extracts are now on the market for giving the aroma of honey, but none of them will replace the natural honey. However, if we take the artificial product made as above and add to it a natural honey having a strong aroma, such as that which is produced from heath, we can obtain an excellent semi-honey.

!buildapc@lemmy.ca for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.

I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

I did like Sim City a fair bit.

Much faster.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-shows-winds-in-jupiters-great-red-spot-are-speeding-up

The massive storm’s crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour – and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself. The red spot is legendary in part because humans have observed it for more than 150 years.

This is like Mach 18.

Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet

NUT has a hardware compatibility list.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

“Initial indications suggest a mechanical fault might have caused the window to shatter. We await further tests.”

This is a thing with tempered glass.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tempered+glass+spontaneously

They’ll have an extremely small crack or flaw somewhere, and then the entire window will just suddenly go.

Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.

Thanks!

Tales-like

I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?

You mention “depth of story”, so maybe something with a similar level of storytelling?

&

OP, you might want to manually clean that up.

I wish that the Lemmy Web UI “suggest title” code would do one of:

• Translate HTML entities to their Unicode equivalent, which is what the Web UI actually wants in that field

• Change the Lemmy Web UI’s title field to support HTML entities.

I have to manually clean up titles myself on a not-irregular basis, usually because of various dash-like characters, like em- or en-dashes, or typographic quotes.

I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.

I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.

Hydrogen

This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/669763/why-is-a-mems-device-affected-by-helium-but-not-hydrogen

It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.

Hmm.

That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.

I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?

I’d kind of like to see a Balatro HD DLC option.

I don’t have a problem with low-resolution artwork; I think that it’s often an effective way to reduce asset costs. But when a game makes it big, as Balatro has, I’d generally like to have the option to get a higher-resolution version of it. For some games, say, Noita, that’s hard, as the resolution is tightly tied to the gameplay. But for Balatro, the art consists in significant part of about 150 jokers. That’s not all that much material to upscale.

EDIT: And specifically for Balatro, I think that it’s worth pointing out that there’s a whole industry of artists who make (very high resolution) playing cards for print.

kagis

Okay, here’s my first hit:

https://playingcarddecks.com/blogs/all-in/10-top-playing-card-designers

These guys don’t hyperlink to the designers, but going down the list and digging up a link for each playing card design company or artist:

1. Midnight Cards

2. Encarded Playing Cards

3. Seasons Playing Cards

4. Elettra Deganello

5. Black Ink Branded Playing Cards

6. Stockholm17

7. Oath Playing Cards

8. Kings & Crooks

9. Thirdway Industries

10. Kings Wild Project

That’s a large variety of competently-done, high-resolution artwork.

Now, granted – Balatro doesn’t use a standard deck; it’s not a drop-in approach using existing decks, the way it might be with a typical solitaire game.

But it seems kinda nutty to me that there are artists out creating decks, but only selling them in small volume, and also video games that sell in large volume but don’t have much by way of card artwork options.

The green entrepreneur, who has donated more than £5m to Labour, says vegan meals are healthier and better for the environment.

He is campaigning for an end to all farming of animals, which he says is now the biggest driver of the climate crisis.

He told a fringe meeting at Labour’s conference that his company, Devil’s Kitchen, already supplies vegan food to “one in four” primary schools.

He denied he was against farmers, insisting that he did not want to kill the industry but allow it to be “reborn”.

“[Farmers] have to be part of the move to net zero, they have to move away from animal agriculture, we know that the science tells us that - and they already grow grass to feed to animals.”

One regrettable side effect of the fact that children cannot vote is stuff like this.

Imagine how British adults would react if someone proposed a law banning their meat consumption.

But kids can’t do anything about it – other people choose what food is available to them in cafeterias, so…

EDIT: Maybe the real answer is to convert school cafeterias into food courts and have different caterers compete for lunch tickets or something, so that kids have a say.

The only kind of remote analog I can think of that adults tolerate is during wartime, when soldiers are drafted, so that their presence at an institution is required and someone else determines what food they will have available at that institution, if they’re deployed and being issued rations.

using an admin portal’s default credentials on an IBM AIX server.

I think that there are two ways to solve that.

The first is to have the admins actually complete setups.

But, humans being humans, maybe the second is a better approach:

When creating a computer system, don’t let a system be used, at all, until all default credentials have been replaced with real ones. If you do, someone is invariably gonna screw it up.

Your directions may say “Before pulling lever 2, pull lever 1 so that machine does not explode”. And maybe you feel that as the manufacturer, that’s covered your hind end; you can say that the user ignored your setup instructions if they get into trouble. But instead of doing that, maybe it’s better to not permit for a situation where the machine explodes in the first place; have pulling lever 2 also trigger lever 1.

Neat!

I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.

There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.

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

Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.

The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]

I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.