When I was a kid, my folks used to put what I believe was water and dish detergent in sealed plastic containers, and it'd be fine months later. So it's definitely not true of all bubble solution.
“They’re obviously not going to admit that the reason that they’re protesting is because they’re receiving fraudulent money, or that they’re the recipients of wasteful largesse, they’re gonna come up with some other reason, but that is the real reason for the protests,” said the billionaire.
Musk and DOGE have slashed the agency that manages Social Security, as he’s falsely criticized America’s core safety-net program as a “Ponzi scheme.”
They probably receive or expect to receive funds from Social Security or some other government program. The filthy swine.
Somehow, I don't think that this is going to do a great deal to heal any brand damage with progressives.
Frankly, I think that Mr. Musk would be considerably better off if he would simply stop tweeting or publicly-saying things before running them past a PR team.
I'm sure that there was maneuvering for influence, but he's a grown, competent adult. Most of his wealth is associated with a company that has made its products an identity symbol for progressives. It should not be that hard to see that becoming a colossally-important financial supporter of, very-visibly palling around with, and performing some of the more-unpopular actions for the extraordinarily-unpopular-with-progressives Trump was going to piss people off. Having Trump do a sales pitch for said products on the White House lawn is just icing on the cake.
He was not trapped in that situation. Hell, even if he wanted to make huge donations, lots of wealthy people donate money to presidential campaigns --- albeit not normally at the level that Musk did --- and they don't normally engage in the kind of incredibly-visible association that Musk did. He could have walked away. He could have even just asked Trump to appoint someone who he agreed with in the role, rather than taking it himself.
And this isn't Musk's first high-profile brand management screw-up. With Twitter, he was roundly criticized for the rebrand to X, given that Twitter had a very-well-established, valuable brand. Like, after the first time around, you'd think that he could reasonably have someone sanity-checking some of this for impact on brand.
I don't expect Musk to be mistake-free, but I really think that if you placed most business leaders in his shoes, they'd have had an inkling that this was quite likely to be trouble.
If death weren't a thing, I suppose that that pitching someone into lava or something like that would be pretty bad then.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sarah-palin-russia-house/
Did Sarah Palin Say: 'I Can See Russia from My House'?
2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin did not say 'I can see Russia from my house.' That line originated with an SNL spoof.
The basis for the line was Governor Palin's 11 September 2008 appearance on ABC News, her first major interview after being tapped as the vice-presidential nominee. During that appearance, interviewer Charles Gibson asked her what insight she had gained from living so close to Russia, and she responded: "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomede_Islands
Big Diomede Island on the right is part of Russia.
Little Diomede Island on the left is part of the United States.
March 21, 2025:
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5327595/trump-order-fema-states-disaster-response
President Trump has signed an executive order directing state and local governments to "play a more active and significant role" in preparing for disasters. For months, Trump has said he's considering getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the country's disaster response arm.
"I say you don't need FEMA, you need a good state government," Trump said while visiting the Los Angeles fires in January. "FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation."
But emergency management experts say Trump's order technically wouldn't do much to shift responsibility. Currently, local and state governments are already in charge of disasters. The question is whether the Trump administration will begin withdrawing the federal resources and funding that states rely on.
Two weeks later, the tornado outbreak and floods of April 2–7 occurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_and_floods_of_April_2%E2%80%937,_2025
From April 2–7, 2025, a slow-moving weather system and a stationary front caused both a widespread and devastating tornado outbreak and historic, life-threatening flash flooding across much of the Southern and Midwestern United States.
Most states hit voted for Trump.
At some point in the mid-late 1990s, I recall having a (technically-inclined) friend who dialed up to a BBS and spent a considerable amount of time pinging and then chatting with Lisa, the "sysadmin's sister". When I heard about it, I spent quite some time arguing with him that Lisa was a bot. He was pretty convinced that she was human.
In reality, Serbia is pursuing a two-track policy: selectively engaging with the West for economic and political benefits, while at the same time deepening military, economic and ideological alliances with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.
In the immediate term, probably head to the hospital. Two reasons.
- Unless I'm magically-imparted with knowledge as to the scope of this, I've got no idea what's just happened to my body or whether I could keel over at any second or what. I just know that there's been some wildly-unexpected biological change.
- Probably want to get this documented at said hospital. In our understanding of the universe, there's nothing that permits for someone to just wake up with the other sex's genitals. Something like this turns that understanding on its head. Are there little green men beaming humans onto flying saucers and redesigning their bodies? I'm pretty sure that there are gonna be people taking a theological take on it too: that'd probably be the first documented case of something that could reasonably be termed a miracle.
You are either extremely confused or trolling. I very strongly suspect you are intentionally trolling, especially since you created a throwaway account to make this post.
The post you are complaining about appears to be this one:
https://lemmy.today/post/27979434
Here is your complaint:
https://lemmy.today/post/27979434/15777591
The OP in that post posted an image taken from a well-established website from a 2014 article, long before anything approaching today's image generation AI existed.
You accused the images of being generated by an AI, based on a "probability rating" from an AI image detection website.
The person who posted those pointed out the date of the article. You then ignored this and claimed that the article consisted of a mix of AI generated images and real photographs.
Being extremely generous and assuming that there is a slim chance that you are not trolling, even aside from the issues with the date on the source, there is no reliable mechanism to detect AI-generated images. The best you're going to get are heuristics.
If anything, this just illustrates the issues with software that tries to detect AI-generated images using any heuristic --- you're going to get false positives and negatives, and invariably people out there are going to misinterpret it (or attempt to leverage the false positives or negatives to encourage other people to misinterpret them, like to claim that an AI-generated image that passes a detection website must be a photograph or that a real photograph that fails must not be evidence of what is shown).
Grego was part of an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society, which took a look at missile defense. Earlier this year, they concluded a constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to attempt to counter a rapid salvo of about 10 solid propellant ICBMs similar to North Korea's Hwasong-18 missiles.
Sounds like Brilliant Pebbles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
Brilliant Pebbles was a space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) system proposed by Lowell Wood and Edward Teller of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1987, near the end of the Cold War. The system would consist of thousands of small satellites, each with missiles similar to conventional heat seeking missiles, placed in low Earth orbit constellations so that hundreds would be above the Soviet Union at all times. If the Soviets launched their ICBM fleet, the pebbles would detect their rocket motors using infrared seekers and collide with them. Because the pebble strikes the ICBM before the latter could release its warheads, each pebble could destroy several warheads with one shot.
Brilliant Pebbles is named as a play on "Smart Rocks," a concept promoted by Daniel O. Graham under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).[2] Smart Rocks envisioned large orbital battle stations equipped with powerful sensors and carrying numerous small missiles. However, deploying at least 423 stations to maintain coverage over the Soviet Union was impractical due to limited space lift capabilities at the time. Edward Teller dismissed the idea as "outlandish"[3] and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks, a sentiment shared by the SDI Office (SDIO). But after their own project, Excalibur—an X-ray laser system powered by a nuclear warhead—failed critical tests, Teller and Lowell Wood recognized the limitations of directed-energy weapons. The SDIO then revisited missile-based concepts akin to Smart Rocks. Wood introduced "Pebbles," proposing that advances in sensors and microprocessors allowed missiles to operate independently without central stations.
To intercept missiles promptly, the autonomous pebbles are kept in continuous low Earth orbit near the edge of the atmosphere. This low-altitude placement makes them susceptible to anti-satellite attacks. However, it also reduces the risk of contributing to Kessler Syndrome and space debris, as pebbles decay automatically due to atmospheric drag, re-enter the atmosphere, and are regularly replaced—a form of planned obsolescence. Because of their low orbit, the pebbles must travel at high velocities to maintain altitude, which prevents them from remaining fixed over a single location. Consequently, a constellation of many thousands of pebble satellites evenly distributed around the Earth is necessary to ensure sufficient coverage, making it inherently a global system.[4] Critics contend that this global distribution renders the majority of satellites ineffective during a conflict, thereby making the system less efficient compared to localized or regional missile defense systems.[5]
Pebbles replaced Rocks as the baseline SDI design and in 1991 it was ordered into production and became the "crowning achievement of the Strategic Defense Initiative".[6] By this time the Soviet Union was collapsing and the perceived threat changed to shorter-range theatre ballistic missiles. Pebbles was modified, but doing so raised its weight and cost; the original design called for around 10,000 missiles and would cost $10 to $20 billion, but by 1990 the cost for 4,600 had ballooned to $55 billion.[3][a] Fighting in Congress through the early 1990s led to Pebbles' cancellation in 1993, but elements of the concept re-emerged with the Space Development Agency in 2019, and later in 2025.[7]
That can probably do a pretty good number on an ICBM, as the article mentions. But I'm not at all sure how well it'd work against SLBMs launched from near-offshore ballistic missile submarines in a depressed trajectory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile#Throw-weight
Depressed trajectory
Throw-weight is normally calculated using an optimal ballistic trajectory from one point on the surface of the Earth to another. A "minimum-energy trajectory" maximizes the total payload (throw-weight) using the available impulse of the missile.[27] By reducing the payload weight, different trajectories can be selected, which can either increase the nominal range or decrease the total time in flight.
A depressed trajectory is non-optimal, as a lower and flatter trajectory takes less time between launch and impact but has a lower throw-weight. The primary reasons to choose a depressed trajectory are to evade anti-ballistic missile systems by reducing the time available to shoot down the attacking vehicle (especially during the vulnerable burn-phase against space-based ABM systems) or a nuclear first-strike scenario.
I think that you've really hit the nail on the head here. A bit of distance and etiquette is clearly needed in situations like this.
- Obtain a pair of Montblanc 149 fountain pens.
- Fill one with something with a bit of executive class, like Diamine Oxblood.
- Fill the other with something a bit fun-and-quirky, like Noodler's Southwest Sunset.
- Obtain a nice, high-resolution C-mount camera of the sort frequently used for computer vision work.
- Obain a Bantam Tools NextDraw 8511, a pen plotter capable of using arbitrary pens and making use of tilt.
- Obtain a computer with a substantial amount of GPU capability.
- In the secretary's office adjacent to yours, install the OCR-capable computer vision LLaVA model on the machine. Attach the camera, and aim it at the desk. Install motion, the motion-detecting software package. Have
motionrun a script that, on motion, feeds the most-recently-captured image into LLAVA to convert it to text, and from there into ChatGPT. Attach the NextDraw 8511. Place the Southwest Sunset-loaded Montblanc 149 in the NextDraw pen plotter. Obtain a monoline font appropriate for handwriting pen plotter use, and feed ChatGPT text responses intotext2svg, then feeding the resultant SVG file to yourlpd, which has the NextDraw pen plotter set as its output. - Pen your first note with your Oxblood-loaded fountain pen. Have your executive assistant carry your note next door and place it on the table under the camera. Your virtual secretary will read it and write her response. Your executive assistant will wait for the note to be written, then carry it back to you.
This is the sort of decorum and professional class that one would expect in a proper office environment.
On one hand, it's true that there will be no near-term return. On the other hand, if nobody makes the investment because it is a large project, then it will never happen.
A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit.
That's a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.
Somewhere, a [email protected] denizen looks offended.
Yeah, sucks. :-/
For anyone else in the same boat, let me go see what that enclosure is with a physical power button that I wound up ultimately getting.
goes to look
This:
https://www.amazon.com/Swapable-External-Enclosure-Support-Capacity/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ
Probably others one can find --- just an 8-bay JBOD enclosure with a variable speed fan and physical power switch.
But unlike the non-powering-on-after-power-loss enclosures, I haven't had problems with it.
I have a ton of USB devices, and drive enclosures --- the one thing that I really do not want to stay offline --- are the only thing I've ever seen that doesn't power up again on power loss. Maybe there are some USB displays that might also do so, but I don't care about that if I'm not physically present.
Both The Economist and the Wall Street Journal have been quite critical of the tariffs. Not only that, but those articles have been posted here.
I was reading an article talking about how the people most-severely being taxed by the tariffs are relatively poor. First, tariffs are a regressive tax anyway --- it's a tax roughly linked to consumption. Consumption taxes are regressive anyway, and I've talked about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax
Flat consumption taxes are regressive (shift the tax burden to the less well-off). The ratio of tax obligation to income tends to shrink as income increases because high-earners tend to consume proportionally less of their income.[25] An individual unable to save will pay taxes on all his income, but an individual who saves or invests a portion of his income is taxed only on the remaining income.
But secondly, what the article was pointing out was that it'll hit inexpensive household goods out of China, stuff like clothing and whatnot, and the people who get whacked by that the hardest are people buying inexpensive everyday items.
It's kind of amazing, actually. West Virginia was the most pro-Trump state in the elections. But they have the highest rate of Medicaid dependence, something that will take a hit, and then they're going to take a clobbering from tariffs on inexpensive items. The tax cuts that Trump's passing that all this is paying for are principally for the wealthy, aren't going to be very helpful for them.
Well, you've posted three things. The first saying goodbye to Reddit, the second asking which of two instances to use, and the third saying that most posts aren't relevant to you. Might post some things that are relevant, as it'd help generate conversation on those topics.
I think limiting one's sense of smell is probably the least-restrictive.
Well, I guess when everyone in it is dead and everything they did is totally forgotten, which will presumably happen at some point.
Looks like the "Stylish" trait has been removed
Looks like the Stylish trait --- a long-standing ability that allowed one to get a small, constant amount of morale by wearing fancy or very fancy clothing --- is gone.
Just noticed this after doing a build out of git.
I kind of regret this. I'm not saying that it's the most-realistic trait, but it made it interesting to collect fancy items.
Related PR on GitHub:
There is a "maybe 35% probability" that the U.S. will enter a recession this year, says Alec Kersman, managing director and head of Asia-Pacific at Pimco.
Government-backed heat pump installations in the UK reached record levels for 2024.
For too long, Europeans have neglected their defence infrastructure. With the threat of Russia looming, policymakers should consider four ways to present a strong, unified front
Ending the Ukraine War: A Reset in U.S.-Russia Relations? | Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Michael Kofman
I've typed up a summary/semi-transcript below while I listened through for people who don't like listening to podcasts.
As the generative AI race heats up, it’s important to examine where in the U.S. the technology might boost or harm workers, or if place even matters.
A growing number of young Europeans are turning to social media as their primary news source, with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube surpassing traditional media outlets such as TV and print. #EuropeNews
Three out of the four VLOPs have filed monthly users below 45 million users in the EU
Europe's four biggest porn platforms, Pornhub, XNXX, StripChat, and XVideos, all recorded major drops in traffic in the latest transparency reports that EU law requires them which, if true, would exempt them from some of the most arduous requirements of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Growth in 2022 and 2023 was driven by soaring gas prices caused by Russia’s invasion, but 2024 saw sales slump
The Americans counted on Kyiv accepting any conditions due to its security struggles. But when Zelenskyy refused to sign, something even more unexpected happened...
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25722259
FYI: I ended up posting this with some reservation. Pravda's mediabias is mostly factual. The story sounds quite credible. Other media's report are more or less similar, but weren't as complete. check out telegraph
Fix for audio crackling in Steel Division 2
Whenever I've played Steel Division 2 in Proton, I've had some audio crackling. This is typically what one sees with buffer underruns. The audio stack running from a Proton game to audio hardware is pretty complicated, so I assumed, incorrectly, that this was on the Linux system side, spent a lot of time poking at my audio hardware and stack trying to figure out what the cause could be.
Turns out that this isn't a Linux-specific problem, but a Steel Division 2 problem; the fix here appears to work for me as well, which is simply overwriting the game's bundled OpenAL DLL with the latest version. Wanted to post it for others who play the game, or people down the line hitting search engines for a solution.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steel_Division/comments/11u7t2y/audio_problems_with_steel_division_2/
Well I got a solution if you want to try.
first is install Open AL: https://www.openal.org/downloads/
then what you want to do is download Open AL soft: https://openal-soft.or
"Good, we don't need anything foreign in our skies," says another Santa in the video, which has emerged following the Azerbaijani Airlines crash.
These latest findings further support the Hubble Space Telescope’s prior expansion rate measurements.
DOJ announces charges in Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump
The Justice Department on Friday announced federal charges in a thwarted Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump before the presidential election.
This is a newly disclosed plot and marks yet another alleged attempt on Trump’s life by the Iranian regime.
Games suspending when on another workspace in Wayland
I use sway in Wayland, and tend to keep games on a separate workspace.
In X11, with i3, I'd frequently switch away from the game and leave it running when something was loading or progression was required, and do something else while waiting. In Wayland, pretty much every game would suspend while viewing another workspace, which drove me bananas. I assumed that this was toggleable functionality, but couldn't find where the toggle was.
Today, I finally ran across an answer to this and wanted to highlight it for anyone else who dislikes this behavior. By default, if a window is not visible, rendering will block. Setting the vk_xwayland_wait_ready=false environment variable will disable this functionality.
Après le Dîner, Second Night
UI: ComfyUI
Model: STOIQNewrealityFLUXSD_F1DAlpha
A still-life oil-on-canvas painting by Caravaggio.
The image shows a silver platter on a table. The platter has elevated lips. The silver platter has legs.
There is an éclair on the platter.
The éclair is cream-filled.
There is a banana on the platter touching the éclair.
There are two cherries side-by-side on the platter.
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Après le Dîner
UI: ComfyUI
Model: STOIQNewrealityFLUXSD_F1DAlpha
A still-life oil-on-canvas painting by Caravaggio.
The image shows a silver platter on a table. The silver platter has legs.
On the platter, from right to left, is an aubergine, a doughnut, and a glass dessert dish containing a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
The ice cream has two Maraschino cherries on top.
The doughnut is iced.
There is a Maraschino cherry on the table to the right of the platter.
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Singing with Accompaniment
UI: ComfyUI
Model: STOIQNewrealityFLUXSD_F1DAlpha
The image is a photograph.
The image is in a darkened bar.
The image is high-contrast.
The image has a noir theme.
The bar's walls are paneled in dark wood. The bar's flooring is dark green marble tile.
In the center of the image, there is a singer named Jill.
Jill is singing into microphone on a boom mount. Jill is wearing a long, red, clingy, sequinned dress. Jill is w>earing black heels. Jill has shoulder-length, soft-curled, auburn hair. Jill is beautiful. Jill's eyes are closed.
Jill is the focus of the image.
A musician named Bob is in the left half of the image.
Bob is a young man. Bob is wearing a white shirt with the top button open. Bob is wearing a brown suit jacket and brown trousers. Bob is leaning against the back wall and playing a plain acoustic guitar in the background behind Jill. Bob's eyes are closed. Bob is relaxed. Bob is heavily-shadowed.
The lighting is dramatic. Jil