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Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • https://www.google.com/search?q=disregard+definition

    Works for me. My top hit is this:

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disregard

    The AI response at the top of the page is:

    I have reset our conversation. Let me know what you would like to talk about or ask! I am ready to help with whatever you need.

    So it's probably not useful for AI results, but seems fine to me for searching the Web.

    EDIT: Oh. That's actually what the article is saying too. It's just saying that the top result in the AI result (and, in fact, they show a screenshot of the Mirriam-Webster result), and saying that users might not scroll down to see other results. That...seems kind of clickbaity. I mean, if that's your bar, you could equally claim that Google doesn't return Web search results, since the top result is the AI-generated response.

  • So, there is actually a point there in that there is a lot of movement data harvested from cell phones, and I think that we could probably improve on the situation there if we wanted. The town government level is probably not in a great place to do that, but compared to ALPRs:

    • Cell phones can be turned off.
    • Cell phones can have their GPS stuff and/or location services disabled, though I realize that a limited number of people are going to actually do so. You cannot legally cover up a license plate.
    • For Android (and I assume iOS, though I haven't looked at the situation there), the OS permission system permits restricting an app permission to data that would permit it to infer location. It may not be perfect --- for example, I've seen research projects that try to do things like use accelerometer data and match it to street maps to try to figure out where someone is without access to Bluetooth/WiFi beacons or GPS data. But certainly there are real efforts to limit that.
  • There have been cars that can manage it.

    https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/amphicar-president-johnson-1960s/

    The Amphicar was manufactured in West Germany and first made an appearance in America at the 1961 New York Auto Show.

    Originally designed by Hanns Trippel, these amphibious cars hit the US market from 1961 to 1967. Most notable for their ability to cruise on land and operate in the water, these cars were a fun new invention in the car world for that time.

    One of the most famous owners of the Amphicar was President Lyndon Johnson. Those leisurely rides created the opportunity for a clever prank that Johnson enjoyed playing on his passengers.

    It involved barrelling the vehicle down a hill into a lake and exclaiming to his passengers that the brakes had malfunctioned, while they had no idea the car was designed to float in water.

  • www.businessinsider.com

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider

    In 2023, Business Insider shifted its organizational model, adding multiple artificial intelligence (AI) products in 2024, and reducing its staff by nearly 40% between April 2023 and May 2025.[7]

    I suspect that the author is more likely to be impacted than most of the people involved.

    Journalism's been having a rough time for some decades from technological change, though that predates AI as we know it today.

    First --- in the US, not sure about everywhere else --- there was a shift away from local news towards focusing on national news. You don't need as many journalists to cover a limited number of national stories. IIRC, that started before widespread Internet adoption, but the Internet accelerated it a lot:

    https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/local-news-democracy-risk/

    The appearance of news deserts across counties and communities in the U.S. has been a widespread phenomenon in recent years. But why? In an interview with the HPR, Jeremy Meserve, the Staff Producer and Archivist for the Belmont Media Center, pointed to the over-corporatization of media consumption as a cause of the decline in quantity and quality of local journalism.

    The rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has fundamentally changed how people consume media. Social media platforms like these have spelled the end for many local newspapers as people have shifted their media consumption priorities to more convenient options. Meserve believes that part of the downfall of local newspapers had to do with the old business model, where many local papers were free. So when social media emerged, people stopped reading, as social media platforms provided faster and equally free media. As a result of this, newspapers lost their audience and their benefactors which led to that old business model being unsustainable.

    Second, Google basically took over the ad market that a substantial amount of journalism relied on for revenue. Sure, some money came from subscriptions, but a lot of magazines and newspapers relied on their ability to put ads in front of a broad demographic's eyeballs. You don't want to pay a newspaper for relatively untargeted ads when you can pay Google, which can hit exactly the demographic that you want to advertise to.

    Then, my understanding is that some stuff --- like "business news" articles, where one just wants a summary of earnings reports or someone talking about the general movement of stocks and a vaguely-plausible explanation attached --- became largely automatically generated some time back. This predates the LLM boom as well:

    searches for an example

    https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/automated-earnings-stories-multiply/

    The Associated Press, working with Automated Insights and Zacks Investment Research, is now automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter, a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously. Here, Assistant Business Editor Philana Patterson, who has been overseeing the rollout of this process in the newsroom, gives an update on AP’s automation efforts that began last summer.

    That might sound like something happening today, but...that's a story from June 2015, over a decade ago.

  • roughly 3,800 internal repositories

    I suppose that part of the moral here is to compartmentalize information internal to a company. Like, if you're not on the team working on X, then you probably shouldn't have repository access to X.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv06KicxKdc

    Biologist: Norwegian lemmings are different to other lemmings and to other voles in that they are very, very aggressive.

    BBC Narrator: Like the Vikings, these Nordic inhabitants are bloodthirsty, hairy berserkers.

  • That's an interesting thought.

    thinks

    Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.

  • But is $130 actually fair?

    Well, a flat fee doesn't take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.

    But...I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.

    EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too --- fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle's VIN, and I'd be very surprised if charging companies aren't monetizing that data.

  • It wasn't called "the broccoli haircut" then, but it reminds me a lot of some haircuts from around 1990-ish, and WP says that that it's just a revival of some 1980s/1990s styles (though none of the WP examples look that close to the broccoli haircut to me, or quite like what I'm thinking of). I don't find it objectionable. It feels a little disconcerting to see so many people that look like they're out of the 1980s running around all of a sudden, I suppose.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli_haircut

    During the early and mid 2010s, the permed undercuts of the 1980s and 1990s underwent a revival.[10] The trend was inspired by hairstyles popular during the New Romantic movement of the 1980s, such as mullets and shags.[6] By 2018, possibly having been popularized by rapper Little T (Joshua Tate), the hairstyle had gained recognition in the UK as the "Meet me at McDonald's haircut".[2] The hairstyle achieved media exposure after a school in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk banned pupils from possessing the style.[11][12]

    During the COVID-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s, many younger Gen Z boys in the UK and United States experimented with new hairstyles at home before the barbers reopened. In 2020, Dillon Latham, a then-15-year-old TikToker, posted a clip of himself getting a perm in the style of the broccoli haircut, which prompted its early spread among teenage and tween boys. It soon became more a trend in 2021 after being worn by TikTokers such as Noah Beck, Bryce Hall, Harry Jowsey, and Jack Doherty.[5][4] That same year, it became an Internet meme and a subject of scorn online, beginning with a 4chan thread that coined the phrase "Zoomer perm" to describe it.[13]

    The broccoli haircut was especially popular by 2022 and gained further attention online in 2024 when a photo of American actor David Corenswet on the set of James Gunn's 2025 film Superman showed him with what many online described as a broccoli haircut, which was mocked by social media users.[6] GQ's Alex Nino Gheciu argued that the broccoli haircut had reached its peak by 2024.[5] Also in 2024, Marie Claire's Samantha Holender called the haircut "the TikTok tween boy hallmark".[4]

    EDIT: What I'm thinking of looks more like this "taper fade French crop":

    To my eyes, at least, looks pretty similar.

  • Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it's equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run "mount" again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE

    Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can't really be that hot, can it?

    The family exits the car

    Bobby: Oh my God! It's like standing on the sun!

    Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man's arrogance!

    EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)

  • That's a neat tidbit.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling

    The heat in the tunnels is largely generated by the trains, with a small amount coming from station equipment and passengers. Around 79% is absorbed by the tunnels' walls, 10% is removed by ventilation, and the other 11% remains in the tunnels.[3]

    Temperatures on the Underground have slowly increased as the clay around the tunnels has warmed up; in the early days of the Underground it was advertised as a place to keep cool on hot days. However, over time the temperature has slowly risen as the heat sink formed by the clay has reached its thermal capacity. When the tunnels were built the clay temperature was around 14 °C (57 °F); this has now risen to 19–26 °C (66–79 °F) and air temperatures in the tunnels now reach as high as 30 °C (86 °F).[3][4][5]

  • Nah, that's good. What I mean is, if it's in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?

  • Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

    I don't know why you'd need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?

    If an error, what happens when you do:

     
            $ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point
    
    
      

    ?

  • I was going to mention that, but also that while I'm sure that it'd handle power loss while it's unmounted the filesystem I don't know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it's in use.

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  • social creates a highly-competitive media environment

    we learn that what comes out on top in a competitive environment is ragebait, and social media sees increasing amounts of it

    It'd be nice if humanity were less attracted to outrage-inducing content and more to, say, catgirls or something.

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  • Lego itself is also a Europe-originating product. I don't know where their manufacturing facilities are, though.

    checks Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego

    Moulding is done in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, China, Vietnam and the United States. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in the former three countries and in Czechia.

    So "all over", I guess.

    EDIT: You don't seem very enthusiastic about Lego. I'll say that I have fond memories of Lego, though over the decades they've kind of shifted towards licensed stuff that is less-appealing to me. I understand that some of their spin-off licensed products, like some of the Star Wars Lego video games, are considered to be pretty decent, but personally I liked their generic "Space", "City", "Medieval", "Technics" building blocks stuff. Kind of the Erector set of a later generation.

  • why they’re letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere

    Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity.

    To harness useful energy from heat, you have to let heat flow from hotter areas to colder areas, to permit entropy to increase.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

    Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. "High" entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while "low" entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated.

    They might be able to harness energy from the flow from warmer to cooler areas, but whether or not they do that, at the end of the day, they have to let the heat go, just like a power plant that uses water-evaporation-assisted cooling. If they're near the ocean, they can maybe stick it into the water instead of the air, and maybe to some degree, you can stick heat into groundwater. But they can't just take a unit of heat and convert it into a unit of useful work and not have that unit of waste heat.

    You can, in areas that have a use for heat, make use of that waste heat. For example, district heating can make use of the waste heat from a power plant --- you pipe steam or something from the power plant that you want to be cooler to homes that you want to be warmer.

    District heating (also known as heat networks) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heating and water heating. The heat is often obtained from a cogeneration plant burning fossil fuels or biomass, but heat-only boiler stations, geothermal heating, heat pumps and central solar heating are also used, as well as heat waste from factories and nuclear power electricity generation. District heating plants can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers. According to some research, district heating with combined heat and power (CHPDH) is the cheapest method of cutting carbon emissions, and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of all fossil generation plants.

    If you live somewhere where that works, it's basically "free" heating from an energy standpoint, which is cool. Much of the US isn't well-suited to residential district heating, because we tend to have residences in low-density suburban areas that are pretty spread out and where it's a pain to transport heat around, but we do have some district heating in city cores. Manhattan, which is one area where we do have high density, famously uses steam heating.

    Today, Con Edison operates the largest commercial steam system in the world (larger than the next nine combined).[4] The organization within Con Edison responsible for the system's operation, known as Steam Operations, provides steam service to over 1,700 commercial and residential customers in Manhattan from Battery Park to 96th Street uptown on the west side, and 89th Street on the east side of Manhattan. Roughly 27 billion pounds (12,000,000 t) of steam flow through the system every year.

    For that to work, you have to actually have some use for that heating (and you probably only want heating some of the year, unless you're up in the polar regions or on a mountain or something).

    You can also use waste heat to drive industrial processes that require heat, but waste heat from a datacenter isn't super-hot compared to, say, that from a power plant, so I don't know how interesting that necessarily is. Lots of chemical processes that might require elevating something to a much higher temperature, but a datacenter --- at least using current computing hardware --- normally tries to keep temperatures from getting to something like the boiling point of water.

    Some greenhouses will also use waste heat (in the case of power plants doing cogeneration, some of the waste carbon dioxide as well) to help boost plant growth.