States have argued successfully to tax cross state commerce. That’s why you get charged local sales tax even when ordering from a company that does not have a presence in your state. I don’t see this as any different, but someone will need to go first to set the precedent.

This is the FTC’s rule, but nothing prevents each and every state from implementing a law to do the exact same thing, except slightly differently than every other state, making it extremely costly for the companies to implement.

Wxterior lights turn on and off with sunrise and set. It’s been running on a raspberry pi b for ages with Misterhouse. I’d like to change it over to something newer, but I automated it because I have other things to do.

I used to download school menus and expose it to my phone as an ical feed, but no longer need that. It still runs. I should shut it off some day…

I have an old one, maybe they were manufactured differently. The main part is a hard plastic. I never noticed a plastic taste, but it could also be the rubber/silicone plunger stopper that imparts a taste. They do now sell a glass one, but I’ve heard that it’s overpriced.

I know people who also swear by their French press. From what I know, regardless of the brew method, the grind is the most important factor, followed by the water quality and temperature.

An Aeropress. I bought it when work removed the free coffee and was super surprised at how good it tasted vs what they were serving. Later, I found a bean hand grinder that fits right inside the Aeropress plunger and now I take it on work trips, vacation and camping.

It’s not fully inclusive for $20 because you need a cup, some way to procure and heat water and beans but still, it’s served me well.

I keep my seedbox in the planter at the coffee shop down the road with free WiFi.

I couldn’t afford one of those fancy 2-cassette boomboxes, so I had my friend bring his tape deck and we put them real close together in the quietest room of the house and recorded that way. Having several siblings meant that there were no quiet places, so we used the empty garage when my parents were at work. The audio was autrocious, tons of echo and static, but I played that tape thin until it snapped.

Several countries require proof of ID to purchase a SIM card.

This worked well for me when I could see the screw and it’s orientation was the same as me viewing it. If I was turning it and it was rotated 90° away from me, I’d get it wrong. In physics class, we studied electromagnetic forces and I learned about the right hand rule which for some odd reason works better for me than righy-tighty. The Wikipedia article is long and the TL;DR is that if you use your right hand and turn in the direction of your fingers, the screw will move in the direction of your thumb.

Of course lefties are SOL as are folks without thumbs.

As some of the other posters argued, this is a slippery slope to censorship by those in power, which does not allow for dissenting opinions to propogate.

Given that free speech doesn’t mean that anybody needs to listen, I feel that the problem (and solution) lies in the conduit for the free speech. I don’t understand the complexities of the laws but have wondered if adjusting the laws to hold entities accountable for their actions would have a positive effect. For example, an idiot shouting from the town square has a limited audience, but if a newspaper picks up the message and promotes it, aren’t they partially responsible for that message?

It gets tricky with opinion pieces, but we already have an established mechansm with newspapers’ opinion pages. One potential problem is that the current media companies enjoy no accountability, no content creation costs and profits from advertisers.

On that topic, I’d even go so far as to argue that advertisers share in the accountability of providing funds to organizations that support harmful messages.

There’s a lot more to this but would be interesting to see a country who has done it and if it had a net positive effect.

Probably not useful to you, but I’ve been using the pics that I deem political as a way to vet the accounts that want to politicize everything and I block them.

Keep the (good, nonpolitical) pics coming!

I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?

I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.

I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

Completely off topic… I saw a comedian in Arizona (USA) who said that his family was so poor that the family car didn’t have air conditioning installed. They didn’t want anybody to know that they were poor, so they would drive around with the windows rolled up.

It’s a VGA connection and, yes, my primary concern is resource usage. I’m running 2-3 VMs on it so that I can easily migrate the VM around.

I had plain old top and it was boring. I did not know how many alternatives there were.

I’ll also have to check out cmatrix.

This is an excellent idea!

Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

I read recently that the lidar on many self driving cars can wreck the CCD on most phones. I don’t know how it works, but maybe parking one of the cars by your front door will solve your problem.