Normally you need to put a coin in shopping trollies around here to take them out. When you properly return them you get the coin back. It’s not a lot of money, usually 50 cents. And if you don’t happen to have a coin on hand most shops will give you a key chain with a properly sized round bit of metal. It being so common, most people have one of those key chains anyways. I’d always thought it was a fine system, but people were pretty decent anyways.

Then during corona because of hygiene reasons shops could only reopen if they cleaned the trollies after every use and that meant not using the coin system. Later the cleaning part was delegated to customers using facilities from the shop and then got rid of entirely. But the coin system wasn’t put back due to hygiene.

To my surprise people would just dump the trollies everywhere. They would not care one bit where they put them. Some people put them away neatly, some just shove them sort of in the right place. Others would just leave them on the parking lot or shove them aside to end up in a ditch.

As soon as possible the coin system was put back into place. Later some shops got rid of it again, because it’s easier for customers. But only in select places where people are decent I guess, or the shop puts in the effort to monitor and handle the carts. You would think it’d be the crowded inner city parts where the coin system was needed. But near me in a rich part of town they use the coin system because rich folk just leave the carts in the parking lot, feeling like putting it back is beneath them or something. In a more crowded normal part of town one shop I go to doesn’t use the coin system and I’m surprised every time. The carts there are always perfectly placed. Although that shop has an issue with people using the disabled parking spaces if they need to run in and out quickly, which is a terrible thing to do.

This whole experience changed my view of humanity. I used to think almost all or at least most people were decent. Trying to do the right thing, with only a few assholes spoiling stuff for the rest of us. It showed me that a tiny little coin, not really worth anything is all that stands between a functioning neat system and total chaos. And it’s not just a couple of people, it’s more like half of them. A lot of people are lazy and inconsiderate, caring only about themselves. If it costs them money, no matter how little, they will do what’s required (because money is everything in this fucked up capitalist world). But if it doesn’t cost them money, they will just do whatever and not care.

This experience, along with many other during the past 10 years have spoiled my view on humanity. I tend to assume everyone is a total asshole in some way or another, which is honestly kind of a sad way to live. So I make an active effort to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it can be hard and a lot of people shortly prove they are indeed assholes.

I once went down the rabbit hole of thinking about how the targeting works on the TNG kind of transporter. Like they need to know to the molecule where your body ends and the rest of the universe begins. And you want it to identify clothing, because you don’t want to end up nude on the other side. Plus it needs to identify what creepy crawlies are a part of you and which were just randomly wandering by. We don’t want any of those pesky Fly problems now do we? This might sound easy, but is actually extremely hard. The human body is very complex and like a ship of Theseus what is part of the body is a bit nebulous and can change. All of the microbiome in our gut is essential for us to stay alive. And more importantly we don’t want to leave behind a puddle of crap every time we transport. Plus what happens if we come out the other end, do our intestines just implode? Or does the transporter fill them with air, leaving you to fart uncontrollably until you die?

And how does it know what clothes are? If I’m wearing shoes, does it know where the shoes end and the floor starts? What if I’m wearing skies? What if I’m barefoot on a carpet? What if it’s a leather carpet? What if I’m wearing shoes made by folding carpet around my feet?

The only thing that makes sense is a super powerful AI system that can real-time scan every molecule and figure out what’s what. And it doesn’t only need to be smart, it also needs a lot of real world knowledge. It needs to know what is “logical” to include in every situation. This means it has to be an AGI, has to be superintelligent (at a minimum speed wise) and would most likely be sentient. Them being used for this one and only purpose is really cruel.

This leads me to the conclusion TNG style transporters are basically slavery and put a whole different spin on the morality of the people in that universe. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I’ve had great experience with Axis in the past. However in the past they used to have planned obsolescence where the flash they used had a very limited number of write cycles. With the Linux based OS they run it writes to the flash all the time. This would cause the thing to start dropping writes and misbehave. When ran 24/7 they usually died after about 4 years. The place I worked at just threw them away and replaced them whenever that happened, to not have downtime for cameras. Once I asked if I could have a couple to diagnose the fault and I found out the flash was out of write cycles on all of them. Maybe they are better nowadays, but it was pretty fucked up to see such expensive cameras be destroyed because of a few cents of flash.

Most anti-cheat doesn’t take kindly to running in a VM as well, so if that’s the reason it won’t work.

Worf worked in security and got to be first officer of the Enterprise. After that became Strategic Operations Officer on DS9, which is command even though it’s still ops related. As a bonus he became first officer on the Defiant as well.

Upvotes to the left?

It’s one banana Michael. What could it cost, $10?

Holy shit, new nightmare unlocked.

I’ve had some horrific shit done to me for medical purposes. What got me through it was remembering two things. First of all, this is all to fix something else, it may get bad but it will get better. Second of all, pain is only temporary and exists only in my body/mind, it holds no power over me and it will pass.

Hope you had have fixed whatever was wrong, that makes something like that worth it.

Stitches that desolve are excellent. I hate the kind that needs to be monitored and removed manually. But I hate it even more when they use the staple kind, there is something just not right in using staples on a human being.

I’ve had one of those super long hairs be ingrown. It just coiled in on itself. I thought it was a black spot, so I dug it out with a sharp pair of tweezers. Once I got it and started pulling, it just kept going. Hair and puss came out and it felt terrible. Once I got it out it healed very quickly and felt much better, so I’m glad I did it, but that feeling still creeps me out.

It’s a variation on the default post causes masturbation copy-pasta. I think there are at least a couple dozen variations and most of them are glorious.

PLEASE put an NFSW tag on your post.

I immediately started masturbating furiously in the bus in front of 43 people. They realized what was going on, opened Lemmy to this post and all 43 started to fap furiously too. Even the 64 year old Malaysian nun on the front seat couldn’t contain herself - her entire arm was up her vagina as she screamed with pleasure.

I was so horny that my phone flew out of my hand & broke through the window, letting in a relentless tide of horny pigeons who were instantly fucked to death by the passengers. The nun shoved an entire pigeon family up her v. Now there is a bus full of exhausted passengers, dead pigeons and buckets of cum and squirt, all because you posted this.

Honest question: Do people think stars look like the star shape because of diffraction spikes in refractor telescopes? I thought the star shape pre-dated any refractor telescope. And I don’t know how many people would have seen refractor images back in the days to make it so culturally engrained?

The post-processing used in astronomical observations is a really interesting topic. I’m following the debate around the black hole images with great interest. I don’t know enough about the specifics to have an opinion, but it is very interesting and has overlap with some of the things I do for work.

This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.

This is a hardware issue, no OS can fix this.

Just to add my 2 cents, it’s more likely a filter/drier from a refrigerator. Those are much more common, even though a sensor/thermal bulb looks very similar.

Depends what you mean by “use”.

The Americans are the only ones to have used them in terms of destroying enemy assets (and sadly in that case it was used against civilians). But as a deterrent it’s been used by a LOT of countries all around the world and is still being used for that purpose right now.

An argument could be made the Cold War could have been an all out world war if it weren’t for nukes, with the short peace after WW2 be considered just a break and not the end.

I hope nukes won’t be used, but Ukraine is in trouble and if they are backed into a corner and facing destruction who know what they will do. Same could apply to Iran before long, if they have the ability to get nukes somehow, it might be their only hope. Just please let it be as a deterrent and not actual nuclear war.

It’s the yeti invasion isn’t it? I will send my thoughts and prayers your way. I’m atheist, so the prayers will probably work about as well as those of a religious true believer.

Well once the US stops support and drops out of Nato and Putin starts steamrolling across Eastern Europe countries after they decimated what’s left of Ukraine, I’m sure all the borders will be closed.

Not that it does much good. If the option is get tortured and killed or try your luck with an illegal border crossing people will always try. Even if the border police starts shooting like at the North Korean border, people would still try.

It’s actually a plastic ribbon with a metallic foil in a zigzag pattern on top of it. It’s extremely cheap and does a pretty good job. It usually sits on top of a metal bar that can deflect a tiny little bit.

You can read all about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_gauge

The main effect is that the resistance depends on the geometry. So as that changes, the resistance changes as well.

That’s because of the way these scales work. They use a material that deforms under stress and when it deforms the resistance changes. By putting current through this material and measuring the voltage drop, it can be mapped to how much stress the material is under and thus how much weight is on the scale.

This is a pretty roundabout way and has a lot of caveats, but it is very cheap. So cheap scales always work this way. That’s why they aren’t super accurate and have deviations depending on things like temperature. Another big downside is any permanent deformation ruins the calibration, giving incorrect results. That’s why you never put more weight on kitchen scales than it says, it will break them.

The issue you are running into is the way it measures. It applies a very specific voltage and current in order to get the result. The lookup table it uses is only valid within a narrow range. When the battery voltage goes outside that range, it can no longer perform the measurement. Even though there’s plenty of juice for things like the little processing chip and the LCD display. They don’t need a lot of power and can do with low voltages. But it can no longer weigh anything so it just errors out with a low battery warning.