Thurstylark

Ever since I got into radio, I’ve definitely found that there’s nearly always some wild shit to be found on the airwaves if you know where and how to look for it. In my teen years, I would spend hours on good ionosphere nights sitting on my front porch with a handheld CB just listening to people being absolutely unhinged on channel 6.

If you have even a passing interest, do yourself a favor and pick up a RTL-SDR for cheap, and take a look around.

There is a title he currently holds, and which deserves a higher rank by mere exclusivity’s sake…

Impeached Former President

To be fair, free broadcast tv and radio is still a thing, and they are an integral part of the US’s disaster alert system. With the right equipment (read: basic cheap radio available almost everywhere), you can still listen to weather information (both general and severe) directly from the horse’s mouth 24/7 for free.

In a disaster situation, these services will still stand because they require less infrastructure per person reached than is required to deliver high-speed internet to the same number of people.

These services still exist, and will continue to, but the knowledge of them has atrophyed from disuse. They won’t go away, they’ve just been replaced in general usage because of the convenience that the internet provides us.

TL;DR: Get you a weather radio, get free weather for the life of the equipment. Even if it’s not your daily driver, get one anyways, because you’ll be able to hear the most relevant info in the worst situation.

Some extra fun details from the staff discussions around this: Valve is not interested in control of the distro, but are mainly interested in funding work on projects that are chosen by Arch staff, and are already things that Arch staff wants to implement. The projects chosen are indeed things that Valve also want to be part of the distro’s infrastructure, but the process has been totally in the hands of Arch staff.

I gotta say, it’s been really cool to see Valve go through the process of considering OSS as not just a useful tool or worthwhile target, but as a robust collaborator.

First, they build and maintain their client on Linux, and build their games to run natively on Linux, learning that things aren’t actually as difficult as it’s commonly made out to be, and the things that are more difficult than they need to be can be fixed by working with and contributing to the existing community.

Then they consider building their own hardware, but try the half-way approach of building SteamOS on top of Debian, and depending on existing hardware vendors to build machines with SteamOS in mind, learning that there’s a lot of unnecessary complexity around both of those approaches to that goal.

Then they learn how to develop and build 1st party hardware with the SteamLink and Steam Controller.

Then they put the lessons from the Steam Machine project into practice by dumping loads of time and effort into Proton, knowing that they won’t have the market unless they can get Windows games to run on Linux in a reliable and seamless way.

Then they put all that knowledge and effort together to do the impossible: unite PC gamers of both Windows and Linux flavors under the banner of the SteamDeck, a fully gaming-focused, high-quality, and owner-friendly piece of kit that kicks so much ass that it single-handedly pulls a whole category of PC hardware out of obsurity and into the mainstream.

And what do they do with that success? Literally pay it forward by funding work on the free software that forms the plinth that their success stands upon.

Good on Valve.

It’s not about actually caring about making minors safer on their platform, or caring about giving tools to guardians to help keep minors safer on their platform.

It is about having something to point to the next time Meta is called in front of a congressional subcommittee to discuss proposed regulations. Look, we did positive things to our platform in the name of protecting minors, and we did it voluntarily, despite what losses we saw in that demographic! We definitely can (and so totally do) put the control of those protections in the hands of parents, where it belongs! We don’t need to be regulated, because we’re doing it ourselves already!

1. Set even more alarms. Annoy yourself into being awake. Identify when you want to be awake, and start your first alarms at that time. Increase frequency as you approach the time you need to be awake. Make your wake up time harder to ignore.

2. Involve multiple senses. Sound alone isn’t doing it? Add sight, touch, taste, or smell to your alarm regimen. There are several products that can do these kinds of things. For example, I have Home Assistant turn on my room lights to full when my phone alarm goes off, and I could easily add a diffuser, or a vibrator under my mattress. Bonus points if it takes multiple steps to reset your alarm. Which leads me to…

3. Increase alarm reset difficulty. The more you have to conciously engage your brain to reset your room to sleep mode, the harder it will be for your brain to automate the snooze button. Put your phone across the room, use an app that continues to scream until you scan a QR code in another room or solve math problems, make a deal with your partner that they get to spray you with cold water unless you correctly answer these riddles three, anything. Make it difficult for your brain to remain in sleep mode when your alarm goes off.

4. Enlist the humans in your life to help. Ask, cajole, or haggle with your parent, partner, sibling, roommate, friend, or whoever else you’ve got available to help you wake up. Be it pleasurable reward or punishing annoyance, whatever they can do that is hard to ignore and can get you going will be better than one phone screaming into the void.

5. #4 part 2: Involve medical professionals. Sleep is a process that involves your body, and when your body isn’t working as you expect, you take it to the Body Shop. If nothing is working, talk to your doctor about your struggles with waking up when you want. They can help you narrow down the root cause and supply treatment if necessary. This treatment can range from sleep hygene coaching, to OTC medication recommendations, to prescription medication addition or adjustments, or even doing a whole-ass inpatient sleep study to figure out what’s going on. If nothing else is working, present your problem to a licensed Professional Human Animal Mechanic.

6. Don’t give up. This is a problem that can be addressed. It may take adjustments to your life that are unusual or unpleasant, but remember that, just like exercise, you are trading one unsustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: employment problems due to chronic tardiness), for another sustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: going to bed earlier, or changing your sleep environment)

You can even find radioactive shit sold on Amazon as health products. So radioactive, that it can incur the wrath of federal agencies.

It’s 65% more bullet per bullet!

I see we have a volunteer

Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.

The complexity is the point. The less people willing or able to jump through all the necessary hoops to receive their healthcare through the system, the less money they have to pay out. Adding more complexity in the form of yet another opaque approval system adds many more hoops to get through, which is actually the entire purpose of that system. Deloitte knew this going in.

Yes, I have sympathy for the individuals who have to build this system, however I have absolutely zero sympathy for the company that put it into practice.

Yes, the medicare system is needlessly complex, however Deloitte decided to replace manpower with cheaper automation which had the side effect of saving them work by increasing rejections.

The world also happens to be complex. Enough so that both things can be true.

It’s like a little sibling. I’ll shit talk my own culture all day, but you make fun of it, then fuck you from here to next Wednesday.

I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.

It’s challenging, because he’s challenging to listen to, even though his message is important

…ya know… whatever that is…

'Member when apple didn’t launch the iPhone with native app support and used the argument that HTML5 could do everything you could ever want, and they were wrong, but actually right as well?

Yeah, I 'member…

My city recently renamed a street after Nelson Hackett, who was a local slave, but more notably, was the first and only escaped slave to have made it to Canada, and then be extradited back to the US. The road was previously named after Archibald Yell, the governor of Arkansas at the time, who wrote the extradition order. Canadian laws at the time forced the government to respect the extradition, but they found this situation so distasteful that they immediately changed the law to basically make Canada a safe haven for escaped slaves.

Lots of locals didn’t know who Archibald Yell was, but now they do, and the road is now named after the slave whose case laid the groundwork for the Underground Railroad because of the governor’s actions.

Not just a correction to the person who should really be celebrated, but also an S-tier snub, if you ask me.

Allow me to translate:

We are inviting you to work for free because our content moderation team isn’t focussed on actually moderating harmful content… Well, only if you define “harmful” as “harmful to advertisers’ brands.” And by “moderation” I mean adding notes to things a la twitter, or X or whatever… Doesn’t matter, we just think that Elon was onto something when he outsourced the responsibility of fact-checking to unaffiliated users who can be duped into free labor as long as we dress it up as “making the community better” (like we actually have a platform that actually fosters anything close to a “community” lol). Hopefully you’ll steer unearned traffic towards incorrect information so we can make the case to those users that YT is OK with that kind of content without having to say the quiet part out loud, and make the case to advertisers that it’s worthwhile to stop caring what kind of content their ads get placed near. Your contributions will be ignored by the general public, especially those who are seeking out inaccurate content, but you’ll get the feeling of superiority that comes with hitching a ride on the coattails of someone shittier, yet vastly more popular than you could ever hope to be. Together, we can make Youtube even more money.

I’m having trouble finding it, but there’s a clip of a left wing commentator (I believe it was Sam Seder) saying that they were going to dinner with right wing commentators after some sort of news appearance. He was continuing to talk about the subject at hand, when the other person told him something along the lines of, “Hey, just leave that on the field, man.”

It’s clear that they don’t believe the bullshit they’re spouting. They’ll run propaganda and interference for whatever side gives them money and attention regardless of what they’re saying and how it harms people.

Then there’s the case of the pilot riding in the jump seat who had been taking magic mushrooms to deal with grief and depression, and genuinely thought the best course of action was to crash the plane. (he didn’t report his condition prior to resorting to elicit substances in fear of losing his career, which is a whole other rant. For those interested, this video goes more into that side of the story)

Granted he wasn’t flying (and didn’t try to fly, per-se), but I doubt that a single pilot could subdue someone who is tripping balls and keep a commercial airliner in the air simultaneously.

Or the many, many, many other cases that don’t make headlines in which a warm spare became imminently critical for the safety of hundreds of people (both in the air and on the ground). The reason they don’t get media attention is because “Situation on Plane Ended in the Good Way, System Worked as Intended” isn’t a headline that get clicks.

Hell, even aircraft themselves are built with redundancy for critical components. How in the fucking world could one even begin to justify not doing so for us squishy humans?

It’s not that this idea is just stupid, this idea is dangerously stupid.

Alright! New player! >:D