I think that it’s an underlying Spotify issue for sure, namely that an album is often present as an explicit and censored version. But I feel like Zotify should be able to deal with this.

While songs show up in Zotify with the [E] you usually just see multiple copies of the album without any identifiers. One of these will be the “real” album, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to filter the others.

So uh yeah as we all know a lot of amphetamines have already been “open source” for a long time.

And we also know the DEA really doesn’t approve of private production… Vyvanse itself only really was created as a produg because of their control of the amphetamine market and their desire for products with lower abuse potential.

If we could get the DEA out of the way anyways, it would make more sense to just make dextroamphetamine as it’s simple, cheap and effective.

Interesting to see the charts there showing a steady 25% against. Even when asked if a majority government should have the support of a majority of voters!

Who are these guys! Its hard to believe that a quarter of people surveyed appear to not want our democracy to function.

Coal plants can be fairly easily repowered to natural gas, which decreases CO2 emissions but more significantly drops local particulate emissions nearly to zero. China’s air quality is famously poor so this would be a smart move.

China still needs baseload generation and converting coal to NG is far cheaper than nuclear or advanced stack scrubbers.

More like “novelty pricing” IMO. Pay a premium to drink the exotic milk of the day.

Oat milk is just oatmeal in disguise, it’s as cheap as they come. The sad thing is that as overpriced as it is, as fake milks go, it’s pretty much the best! My ex drinks it because she’s lactose intolerant, and unlike almond or soy it’s actually palatable IMO.

Real Asian style fresh soy milk is excellent btw because it doesn’t pretend to be cow milk. It’s more like a hot creamy bean soup. Makes a great breakfast, if you happen to be in Taiwan

There’s no point in having incredibly qualified MPs if they’re all whipped on every vote. And that’s the way Canadian politics works - an MP is just a glorified seat filler.

Get us an electoral system that breaks up the majority rule and allows MPs to actually represent their constituents, and I’ll fully support a gratuitous salary.

For now, I think paying the median wage in Canada would serve just fine to try to motivate these mushrooms to improve the working conditions of the 99%.

Even with external volumes, I don’t think there should be any mechanism where a container can escape a bind mount to affect the rest of the host fs? I use bind mounts all the time, far more than docker volumes.

As I said,

C/++ with renewed appreciation

No such thing as eval in non-interpreted languages. Unless you’re crazy enough to invoke the compiler and exec() the result.

I used eval too in my Perl days which is why I specifically called it out. IMO any time you see eval used there should be another, more proper way to do it.

I love the term “write-only code”, it’s perfect. I used to love Perl as it felt like it flowed straight from my brain into the keyboard. What a free and magical language.

So it turned out I had ADHD. Took meds, went back to C/++ with renewed appreciation, haven’t touched Perl since as it horrifies me to look at it. What a nightmare of dangling references and questionable typing. Any language that allows you to cast a string to a function and call it really needs to sit down and think about what it’s doing.

If you don’t want memory-safe buffer overruns, don’t write C/C++.

Fixed further?

It’s perfectly possible to write C++ code that won’t fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it’s far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.

I’ll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.

I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I’ll be honest I’ve forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.

Stimulants? My doc tells me he has to be paranoid because basically if they found out that anyone took a single dose of amphetamine for fun, he would lose his license. Any other drugs, here, have a sack of them and a lifetime supply of renewals. But not stimulants.

I actually run my own streaming setup where I stream off my computer through VPN, local buffering on the phone, it works really well in the truck where service is usually not interrupted for that long.

However a lot of people don’t realize just how many hours of music you can burn through when you’re putting in 12hr+ days in the field or even the mental effort in picking what to play next when your eyes are up front (I don’t run autosteer on anything). So just turn on the radio and get the job done!

Out in the tractor radio is pretty much the only option, cell service comes and goes over the hills but the radio is always there for you!

They would sell the spectrum before they did something like that. Prime real estate for longer range, medium speed ISM type communications.

VPN and have them punch in to a cheap or free cloud instance that acts as a hub router.

You give them a config file and they feed it to their device or router, use a private subnet in the 10.0.0.0/8 range because everyone is on 192.168.1.0/24 and then they just hit it at 10.0.0.1 or whatever.

I like Wireguard but you might have to use something with layer 2 support if you want service discovery to work for true zero config.

Install a modchip, or as we used to call them a “remote starter” lol

I’m sure someone still makes a product that you can splice into the wiring harness. And if they don’t… There’s a market for it

Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.

We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.

Futurama did it too. Though I remember it being actually funny, without all the associated culture war baggage.

More of a commentary on Bender’s poor impulse control and minimal ethics than on society I would say

You can download from Spotify using Zotify. Albums, playlists, if you set it to Artist unfortunately you will get a bunch of singles and EPs that you have to clean up.

If you have Premium you can download at high bitrates, otherwise you get Ogg Vorbis at around 150 ABR. You can automatically transcode to whatever format you want, then I feed it to beets to catalogue and deliver it with Ampache.

I like the moderate bitrate OGGs myself, as I often stream from Ampache to my phone and our mobile service is quite slow. So this system works great for me.

The image generation can be cheap, but I was imagining this sort of watermark wouldn’t be so much a visible part of the image, but an embedded signature that hashes the image.

Require enough PoW to generate the signature, and this would at least cut down the volumes of images created, and possibly limit them to groups or businesses with clusters that could be monitored, without clamping down on image generation in general.

A modified version of what you mentioned could work too, but where just these specific images have to be vetted and signed by a central authority using a private key. Image generation software wouldn’t be restricted for general purposes, but no signature on suspicious content and it’s off to jail.

In this specific scenario, you wouldn’t want to remove the watermark.

The watermark would be the only thing that defines the content as “harmless” AI-generated content, which for the sake of discussion is being presented as legal. Remove the watermark, and as far as the law knows, you’re in possession of real CSAM and you’re on the way to prison.

The real concern would be adding the watermark to the real thing, to let it slip through the cracks. However, not only would this be computationally expensive if it was properly implemented, but I would assume the goal in marketing the real thing could only be to sell it to the worst of the worst, people who get off on the fact that children were abused to create it. And in that case, if AI is indistinguishable from the real thing, how do you sell criminal content if everyone thinks it’s fake?

Anyways, I agree with other commenters that this entire can of worms should be left tightly shut. We don’t need to encourage pedophilia in any way. “Regular” porn has experienced selection pressure to the point where taboo is now mainstream. We don’t need to create a new market for bored porn viewers looking for something shocking.

The only inflation they’re concerned about is wage inflation, this has been proven multiple times and is even the official stance of central banks. Wage inflation cuts into corporate profits, which hurts “the economy”. Why do you think the main indicator they watch is the unemployment rate?

They just don’t usually say it out loud, and people aren’t listening anyways. But the cat is out of the bag now with people spreading the word to the working class. Fucking us over is the goal, not a side effect.

Thanks for your input, C# is a language I never really considered but it does sound like a good middle ground and possibility a good successor to Python for her. Very popular, powerful and a better approach to a “true OOP” language than Java IMO. Though as you state modern Java has come a long way from its origins.

overusing global/shared variables

I see you’ve been reviewing my Python code, lol. The structure of the language does lend itself to using globals as a shortcut when they shouldn’t be… And as a primary embedded dev I will admit that I’m already a heavier user of globals than most. But I agree being able to declare global variables inside a function is pretty gross, as is the scoping/declaration issue where you can easily end up with global and local variables with the same name without even throwing a warning.

if you are trying to learn software engineering it is not a good language to start out with

Curious what options you would suggest instead? I’m an old C/++ embedded diehard, but I do use Python and have been considering it as the next step for my 9yo daughter after Scratch.

Python feels like the modern replacement for Basic that I grew up with as a kid. Interpreted, garbage collected, good library support, sane typing and not too wordy or confusing. Lots of options to do fun things with it from games to robots.

IMO for a young beginner the C-likes are too strict and segfault-y, Perl is too permissive and could breed sloppy habits, Basic is obsolete, all the web languages are way too application specific, I haven’t had a chance to get into Rust yet, and fuck Java as a matter of principle lol.

As the other commenter said, it’s all about depth of discharge. A 10kWh Lifepo4 bank gets you almost 10kWh every time while you should treat a 10kWh lead-acid bank as if it was a 2kWh bank for any sort of decent life, with deep discharges being limited to emergency situations.

All lithium chemistries are practically maintenance free while you are probably familiar with water level monitoring and equalization of lead acid.

Note that all site built lithium banks MUST have a balance mechanism as this is their “automated maintenance”. Without balancing on every charge, lithium cells will be rapidly destroyed.

“Deep cycle” batteries are the best of the lead-acids for the task. But they are still obsolete and you should source lithium if at all practical.

However if power interruptions are short, loads are low or you have an external power source like solar or wind, inferior batteries can do the job.

I use a bunch of old car batteries at my house for my battery bank. It’s more of a big capacitor, but it’s almost always sunny here and kW of solar are pouring in.

My critical equipment i.e. starlink, home and farm automation and monitoring, cell booster and HMI/SCADA only take a couple hundred watts, so no big deal. Most of the solar power goes to keeping the freezers cold.

Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.

Ugh, Gnome 3… I used to be all in on Gnome, then went to Mate after the Gnome Shell days. Last year I came full circle to KDE and for whatever reasons I had to dislike it in the past, KDE Plasma is a damn good environment these days.

Gnome used to be better for being simple and effective. Now you have to tweak it so much to get what you want, you might as well go with KDE.

Qt feels more dominant in the cross platform space these days too, with more new projects choosing Qt over GTK

What you describe sounds almost exactly like the Mass Effect 1 procedurally generated missions. But that game came out in 2007…

Thanks, this sounds like a great way to start building a library and might actually be more effective than downloading massive torrents, especially as it claims to handle metadata and tagging effectively. Definitely will give it a try!

Whaaat Soulseek still exists? Thanks, will check it out

As a farmer we haven’t even seen the beginning of food inflation. The entire country and much of the world is in drought, and we’re only entering this El Nino cycle.

I sold all my animals and my crops are a wash. Drought has crushed yields over a vast area of Canada’s agricultural land. Combining the other factors at play such as war between two massive grain producers, there’s a chance that global food demand could actually outstrip production this year, for the first time since the start of the Green Revolution.

With that said, processors and middlemen are definitely grabbing the large portion of the increased value of food at the stores. Cattle prices are up but nowhere near the extent that beef has risen, and will soon plummet as animals are dumped on the market for lack of feed. What won’t plummet is the consumer price of beef, I can almost guarantee it. And I shudder to think of what grain and bread prices could be by the end of this year. Very glad to have a freezer of meat, huge garden, a good wheat grinder and bins of grain that would last my family decades.

Despite being proud to still fly the Jolly Roger for most media I have to say that for the Linux gamer it’s nearly as cost effective just to put Steam games on your wishlist and wait for the sale notification. Lots of great games can be had for single dollars, you get support, patches, online play etc. so it’s not worth the effort to plunder them.

I found honestly it’s rare that a Steam game has issues on Linux these days and if it does, just refund it and get your $5 back. Otherwise as mentioned they are very hard to find.

So this is the first time I’ve heard of the 15 minute city concept, especially as a bad thing. I live on a farm but if I wanted to move to the city… 15 minutes to everything sounds great. Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?

My ex lives in Moose Jaw and that’s a pretty good description of it, it’s 15 minutes drive from edge to edge and it’s honestly a really nice little city. No traffic jams and you can also walk or bike most places you want to go, as long as the weather permits.

As a farmer this plague of grasshoppers is bad news for non-grasshopper insects. High grasshopper numbers means lots of insecticide spraying.

Also pests tend to increase as others decrease, because they are stronger under adverse conditions. We have few butterflies, wild bees, dung beetles and other desirables. But vast quantities of grasshoppers, mosquitoes and ticks, plenty of horseflies too.

Same for birds, we have less songbirds, purple martins, ducks etc. every year. More sparrows, starlings, magpies, all invasive pest birds.

Vim keys in vscode for the win, I’m dead serious

Another good example is the still ongoing Raspberry Pi shortage, a cheap SBC made with legacy processes that was too capable for its low cost and ended up integrated into all manner of commercial and industrial products.

Raspberry Pi is made by the non-profit Pi foundation with a very low target price, but the inability to get cheap legacy silicon made drove extreme scarcity, panic buying and hoarding/scalping behaviour. They have greatly scaled up production, but suppressed demand and continuing scalping are chewing up all production.

However at some tipping point there will suddenly be a vast oversupply of Raspberry Pi.