This whole post is a lie to manipulate people into engaging with an astroturfing bot.

AI engagement bots like OP.

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It could have been an accident or incident that resulted in a death. They may have been collecting evidence. There are even some police in my area that uses conventional land surveying equipment and rapid high density laser scanners. Precise measurements of things like skids marks and other evidence of how the vehicles came to rest can be used to estimate initial speeds and confirm or refute the testimony of witnesses.

It could also be something more mundane like an actual land surveyor collecting data to support future design work or verify completed projects.

Neither of these are jobs that can be done at night or at times more convenient for your car.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

First, 400 pounds is a pretty beefy fridge, most basic units are a lot lighter. 400 pounds is coincidentally the top end of the average weight search AI gave me too, the lower end being 200 pounds. I’ve moved a few fridges over the decades, they’d have been hard pressed to get a 400 pounder wedged in there like that.

Second, a fridge is mostly empty space. The weight is certainly not distributed throughout. If they put the heavy end (usually where the compressor is) hanging out the back, they probably wouldn’t have made it very far anyway before the thing ejected itself. They are primarily difficult to move because they are bulky and lack safe handholds for lifting.

Third, police modifications adding weight would necessarily require modifications improving the suspension. It would be pretty bad design if putting three 200+ adults in the rear of a police wagon were enough to make the vehicle unsafe.

This is all a pretty dumb thing to argue about. After all, I agree that the cop in this case was an idiot. That’s mostly because storing a fridge on its side is a dumb move, but also because I do actually believe that storing it as we see in the photo would be bad for the car too. Fridges have lots of sharp edges, plenty of opportunity to destroy the interior, shatter a window, or cause an accident. I just don’t think weight or its distribution is the problem.

Just another way to dehumanize.

Can this keep num lock engaged? I swear my biggest frustration with windows lately is it’s habit of randomly and arbitrarily turning off numlock after I’ve turned it on. I never turn off numlock while working. I never use the number pad arrows. I prefer the number pad numbers and use them practically all day. And yet, several times a day I find my cursor moving around the screen instead of typing a number because windows decided that it got to control the numlock function instead of me and the dedicated light up key designed for that function that has worked fine for me for decades before.

Marshmallows are like ogres, you’ve got to torch and eat the layers bit by bit before you slurp the gooey center.

They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it’s apparently gone full Applebee’s microwave kitchen bad lately.

It used to remember passwords, it briefly got a gig memorizing drink orders, now it mostly focuses remembering project numbers and does a little 2FA code work on the side.

People in here looking for less evil alternatives to Spotify and you suggest Clear Channel, the company that killed local radio broadcasting and enshittified the airwaves long ago?

So, far right parents in a conservative religion in a Republican town in a Republican state produced a child so tortured by a culture of hate and violence that as soon as they even start to lean either way their instinct is murder. Breaking the cycle of hate is relatively easy compared to breaking the cycle of violence. The statements they made to their roommate (even if that heresay is true) just confirm that they were a troubled child from a troubled culture trying to change. It should surprise no one that those childish attempts would be a VERY twisted reflection of the ideal. So no, he was not part of the left. Just a child in pain reacting the only way their conservative upbringing taught them.

My smartphone isn’t a phone with “extra” features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don’t want to carry an extra “dumb” phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver’s license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the “year of the Linux desktop”. But a kid can dream.

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Hot take: Most metal is just Classical Music II Electric Bugaloo.

Same era, I used to playing games on my calculator. I suppose you still can, but I used to do it. I remember I had RISK on my TI-89, but the games on my TI-82 were on par with the version of snake shown in the post. We would even trade the games around with the kids that didn’t have a computer and/or Internet at home. We’d connect them with funky little cables that looked like audio jacks.