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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
656
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • You're just bad owners at this point

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  • My old dog was a puppy when the local baseball team won the world series. We took him outside after the game, and our neighbor behind us started lighting off some pretty big fireworks.

    The first one or two startled him a little, but he saw that we weren't reacting and quick settled down. Then he started to enjoy them. He'd watch the neighbors light one up, watch it shoot into the sky and explode, and then back to the neighbor, tail wagging waiting for another one.

    After that, any time he heard them going off somewhere he'd run around to the windows trying to get a better look. If he could find a good angle he'd happily stand there and watch the entire show.

    My current dog just doesn't react to them at all. We got her at about a year old, so I don't know what, if anything, her previous humans did to desensitize her, but at most she just kind of groans and rolls over if they're close enough to disturb her nap. I actually use them as a good excuse to take her for a walk because she is kind of dog-reactive and I know no one else is going to be out walking their dogs during the fireworks.

  • Top AI Researchers Terrified of a “Chernobyl Moment”: a Mass Casualty Event, or Worse, That Turns the World Against AI Forever

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  • I don't think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a "Chernobyl Moment" maybe almost literally.

    We have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn't seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn't and starts to hallucinate?

    If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)

    Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I've already seen that idea being floated)

    Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.

    Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two

    Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight

    If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI

  • Bill requiring owners to lock up guns advances to Pennsylvania House over GOP objections

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  • And the bill includes a carve-out for that, if you're close enough to readily retrieve it, it doesn't need to be locked.

  • Bill requiring owners to lock up guns advances to Pennsylvania House over GOP objections

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  • I believe that's left up to the manufacturers and state law.

    I believe that PA Law already requires handguns but not long guns to be sold with a lock, and I believe that only applies to dealers, not private sales (in most circumstances you would still need to go through a dealer to do the transfer of a handgun for a private sale, but I don't think they need to provide a lock in those circumstances)

  • Bill requiring owners to lock up guns advances to Pennsylvania House over GOP objections

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  • In PA, where this bill is from, the state police already give out free gun locks, many other local police departments and community organizations do the same

    A simple cable lock can be had for about $5 from Walmart and fills the requirement, and you can find them for even less if you hunt around a little, and this bill is also making gun locks and safes exempt from sales tax.

    There's also at least a handful of gun brands that include a lock as part of the standard equipment their guns come with, and at least a few gun stores that will happily give you a free lock with your purchase.

    And while you may not have children, can you truly say that there will never be a child in your home? Do you have friends or relatives with kids or who may have them someday? Is it possible that they may stop by someday and your attention may be distracted from the kid for 5 minutes while they wander off and find your unsecured gun? Do you maybe have a neighbor with a special needs child that might wander into your house when you left the back door open to air out the kitchen after burning your dinner? If you don't, can you say that will always be the case?

    Could you live with yourself if that happens and the kid kills himself knowing that you could have prevented it with a $5 (or free) lock?

  • Remember when 30° was considered tropical?

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  • At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that's a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.

    As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it's a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he's dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it's kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.

    And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.

  • Remember when 30° was considered tropical?

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  • I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they'd cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.

    This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.

    My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.

    I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It's only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it's only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I'd ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.

    I've never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I've seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they'd break right through if they tried.

    These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that's totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.

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  • This will vary a lot of course, but in a lot of cases your local library may not be just your local library.

    The library in my town isn't anything too special, it's a little small and doesn't really have a lot of the cool things people talk about libraries having these days (though I am occasionally surprised, they have mobile hotspots you can borrow for example)

    But it's part of a network of libraries from around my county, so I can go check things out of around 30 different libraries and some of those other branches have a lot more cool stuff than mine does

  • Men in pink collar positions, what's your experience?

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  • It's not the pinkest of pink collar jobs, but I work in 911 dispatch, which does skew a bit more female, and sort of evolved out of a more secretarial role which are of course more female-dominated.

    Side-note, generally speaking, we do still tend to be classified as clerical positions instead of protective services like first responders, which does have an effect on what kind of benefits we receive, when we can retire, etc. there's been a few attempts to reclassify us, I believe most recently at the federal level it's being called the 911 SAVES act, so if that's something you'd support maybe talk to your senators/representatives about passing that.

    I don't think there's any particular bias, at least at my center, about who gets hired, promoted, etc.

    You do see some difference in how we get treated by callers and field units and such. You get the occasional caller who is a real asshole to a female dispatcher but is polite and respectful when they get a man. Also some creeps who say some really inappropriate stuff to my female coworkers.

    But overall there's nothing much else that really jumps out at me as being partially interesting about working here as a man.

  • Concerns over therapy ferrets used to kill rats at UK’s largest children’s prison

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  • First big issue is that this facility has rats in the first place. That should probably be the primary focus of this article, that's totally unacceptable.

    But moving beyond that.

    It's insane that they're using therapy animals for this purpose. If these were two separate programs and they were using dedicated rat catching ferrets, I could get that. That's what ferrets do, and it sure beats scattering poison around. But those ferrets are also potentially being exposed to diseases and parasites and such from the rats and so they shouldn't be used as therapy animals to make sure that they're not spread to the children.

    I have no experience with ferrets personally, but it also seems to me like you probably don't want the animals you're training to chase/bite/kill rodents to be the same ones you're using to soothe kids with trauma and such.

    As far as children being involved in and witnessing ferrets being used for pest control, I think that's a bit of a mixed bag depending on the kids.

    At the end of the day, some animals eat and kill other animals. Pretty much everyone knows that from a pretty young age, how many children's cartoon and nursery rhymes and such are about cats chasing/eating mice after all?

    Now actually witnessing that can absolutely be distressing for a lot of people who aren't used to it.

    But on the flip side, I do think that introducing children to that, if done properly, can often be beneficial to them, give them a better understanding of life/death, the food chain, responsibility etc.

    Not that it sounds like they were doing this in an appropriate fashion. And of course if we're dealing with children with various kinds of trauma, that topic needs to be broached even more delicately.

  • It's so expensive to upgrade...

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  • There's of course a ton of variables at play here, and I'm gonna preface this by saying I'm by no means a graphics/performance snob and I'm mostly playing older games.

    But anecdotally, there have been some cases where Linux has been a night and day difference for me.

    My computer is basically 12+ years old, it's basically the same computer my wife built before we started dating crammed into a new box with a couple upgrades along the way. It has a pre-ryzen AMD processor, and a 2060, so it's definitely not technically meeting required specs for a lot of games but it's holding it's own and chugging along managing to run most of what I try to throw at it on (what I think are) acceptable settings.

    I got Helldivers 2 to run on it exactly once on windows, every time after that it crashed on the loading screen when I tried to join a game no matter how I tried to get it running.

    Since switching to Linux it's been playable. Not necessarily the smoothest experience, but certainly good enough for my needs.

    That's probably the newest game I've tried to run, I'm cheap and tend to wait a couple years to get games on sale. All the older games I've tried to run so far have pretty much run the same as on windows as far as I can tell.

  • TIL about springfield

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  • Let's not forget about Springfield Township (Montgomery County, PA)

    Or, for that matter, Springfield Township (Bucks County, PA)

    EDIT: for good measure because your link didn't play nice with some anti tracking extensions I'm using Springfield Township (Delaware County, PA)

    I make no guarantee that there aren't others. I can't be bothered to look.

  • Have you ever had a time a food so good it "converted" you?

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  • I think you're lost, bud, this ain't twitter.

  • Have you ever had a time a food so good it "converted" you?

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  • I'm similarly not a fan of seafood, and I've given it plenty of fair shakes, and will continue to do so, I'm not a picky eater by any stretch of the imagination and I want to like it, especially since I love fishing

    But I do personally find raw fish to be more palatable than cooked. I wouldn't say it's good, but it's not bad, I wouldn't seek it out but if it's what's available I wouldn't be mad about it.

    I also, in general, find freshwater fish to be better than saltwater. At least around me I don't tend to see a whole lot of freshwater fish on menus or in grocery stores, if you're in a similar boat, that might be another avenue for you to investigate the next time you decide to give seafood a chance.

    I've also played around making some oddball non-fish sushi since my wife doesn't share in my dislike of fish and is a sushi fiend, so it's a way to scratch her itch for that while also making something I'll eat. Probably my best creation has been a spam, pineapple, and jalapeno roll.

  • Have you ever had a time a food so good it "converted" you?

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  • You'd rather we cut the steaks off of a still living animal? Seems kind of cruel.

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  • My wife generally says that she's bi, but if she were coming out today she's said that she'd probably call herself pan, that just wasn't really a common term when back when she did come out so she's spent most of her life calling herself bi, and she just kind of identifies with that label more at this point.

    To her, the term bi does kind of imply that someone is attracted only to males or females and would tend to exclude non-binary gender identities (though not necessarily trans people, being MtF or FtM does still kind of line up with a traditional gender binary, a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman)

    Which doesn't really describe her, she'd be cool with any identity, which to her is more pan, but again she's just been calling herself bi for so long it just feels weird to change that, and since she's off the market at this point it's a little bit of a moot point anyway since she's not trying to get in anyone's pants but mine.

  • What’s the most tone-deaf advertisement or marketing campaign you’ve ever seen?

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  • I'm from the US and live in the suburbs, so public transportation is nearly non existent around me.

    Visited Montreal a couple years ago for the solar eclipse, took Amtrak up from New York (technically it would have been a little faster to drive but not by a whole lot.)

    And then once we were there, I felt absolutely no need for a car. The subway and a short walk got us everywhere we wanted to go, and we never found ourselves waiting around long for the next train. We didn't end up needing to take one but we saw plenty of buses around too.

    And the bike lanes- actual protected bike lanes! They even had little plows clearing the bike lanes when we got a bit of snow while we were there. I could actually see myself choosing to get around on a bike if I lived there, there aren't many parts of the city or suburbs where I live where I'd feel safe to commute on a bike.

    I spent a week there, and even with probably some extra traffic from eclipse tourists I felt that there was never much traffic in any part of the city we visited and we got around a lot.

    And with RESO you can cover a lot of ground downtown on foot and barely need to step outside.

    I haven't traveled abroad much, I'm sure there's other cities in the world that have all that and more, but it definitely blew my mind as an American.

    I'm not usually much of a city person, but I could absolutely see myself living in Montreal. If I thought my dog could adjust to city life well and I spoke at least passable French, I might have considered relocating. It's probably the only city I've visited so far (again, not that I've traveled much) that I really look forward to visiting again someday.

    If you're in the northeastern US looking for a vacation, get to new York, take the train to Montreal, and just experience it for week. Open your eyes to what we're missing out on.

    And not for nothing, all of the food I had while I was there was absolutely amazing. It's worth it just for that.

  • What’s the most tone-deaf advertisement or marketing campaign you’ve ever seen?

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  • I work in 911 dispatch, and there's a couple crematoriums in the county I work for. Once in a while they call to give us a heads-up when they're doing a cremation in case anyone calls about smoke.

    We enter it as a "controlled burn" notification for our fire department, which I suppose it technically is, but it makes me chuckle a little that we're entering the same way we would as if someone was burning yard waste or having a bonfire or something.

    I don't know how often they actually do cremations, I assume it's pretty frequent, and I'm not always the one getting the call, but based on how often I've seen these calls go in I don't think they do it for every cremation. I remember hearing somewhere through the grapevine that when the deceased is extremely obese they tend to really smoke up, so I kind of suspect those are the ones where they give us a heads-up.

  • Warrior, rogue or mage, why?

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  • Is games I tend to gravitate towards a warrior, I'm a simple man, I don't care to learn a whole lot of different spells and moves and theorycraft on how to best use them, i want to just hit things with my sword and move the plot forward.

    IRL, I'm sort of roguish, I have a whole lot of random skills and knowledge, specialized tools, I'm pretty good with my hands, etc.

    In my weirdest fantasies, mage, because fuck you, I cast fireball.