Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

I had a physics professor tell me about free energy. Having a degree is not 100% effective in curing stupid.

There are physicists that don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, and that is to be expected because that subject isn’t in their wheelhouse; it isn’t their bread-and-butter, and that isn’t their day job that they work on for 2,000+hrs a year for decades on end. So they are lacking a lot of the data that would allow them to make correct decisions regarding factuality.

But when most of an academic field is saying the exact same thing about a core subject that is at the foundation of their discipline, imma not gonna be arrogant enough to presume that they’re wrong. I’m going to take them exactly at their word.

sure thing, incel

Tell me you know nothing about that word without saying you are ignorant AF about that word, and are only throwing it around as a weapon in an attempt to publicly shame me into being quiet.

So: nice ad hominem. You clearly have absolutely nothing of substance in which to counter the message, so instead you attack the speaker.

Truly an effective way of winning arguments! /s

I would honestly say your friend misunderstood the message as well if that was her takeaway.

Unlikely - she was and still is a professor teaching women’s studies at the local university. Published, too. She’s hardly a nobody.

“Hey, want to go to spoons later?” isn’t going to result in legal action.

But making an unsolicited approach, and wholly lacking the experience and social expertise to recognize that the woman wants nothing to do with you, and is actually embarrassed by your presence, confers a non-trivial and very real risk of police presence.

And that is while also being wholly non-threatening and totally harmless. Absolutely oblivious to social conditions, sure, but also absolutely not a danger and receptive to clear and unambiguous language – which was never provided until the cops provided it for her.

Yes, actually saw this happen IRL. Poor dude was absolutely mortified, which likely made him think thrice of ever making another unsolicited approach and definitely nerfing any possibility of becoming more experienced at interacting with women.

These kinds of men don’t just spring out of holes in the ground, fully formed. They are shaped by supremely negative experiences like that one, which could have been trivially avoided by adequate communication on the part of the woman.

For the average man making unsolicited approaches, the latest stats I have seen tend to bounce between the 1-in-300 and the 1-in-1,500 range of a successful approach per total attempts. And this is just first-date-is-successful territory, it gets a good magnitude worse if you are looking for an LTR.

From what I understand, the flip side is a lot lower: an average women making unsolicited approaches to men seem to be hitting a 1-in-5 to 1-in-20 success range, depending on conditions

So yeah, being a man outside of the desirable 10% is indeed playing on hard mode. And from what I can see, things have only gotten much, much worse for the average man in the last few decades since I was young. I don’t envy young men these days, at all.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong

You are suffering from a lack of experience.

Women have the ability to learn by proxy, when having intimate conversations with sisters, mothers, aunts, and other female role models. This gives them a massive buff long before they ever begin dating, because they are able to gain an emotional roadmap of how things go down, and then build on that with experience.

Men don’t have this same transfer of knowledge, nor are we even psychologically set up to build one, so in aggregate we are massively nerfed straight out of the gate. This means our only way of learning is via direct experience and sheer volume: you need to circulate and learn from your experiences in order to percolate. It sucks, but that’s the breaks. The rare guy will get lucky straight out of the gate. The vast majority, however, will have to approach and be rejected by many hundreds to even thousands of women before they “find their groove” enough to catch a break.

And your own insecurities are working against you: being nervous, desperate, or unsure of yourself is something that women - again, through that buff of intergenerational information transfer - are able to “smell” almost instinctively. If you want to vanquish those issues, you quite literally need to work on yourself, to focus on improving yourself and gaining confidence within yourself by overcoming obstacles and challenges that you set for yourself.

Stoicism can assist in helping you become a better version of yourself, in becoming intrinsically motivated such that companionship shifts away from being a clawing need to merely a value-added proposition.

It wasn’t “Do not, under any circumstances, speak to a woman”

Actually, as explained to me by a woman, it was exactly that.

This was well after I had married, somewhere in my fifth decade, so I was off that particular playing field for quite some time by that point. But on a lark I had asked a feminist what this “leave women alone” refrain meant. And some of it made perfect sense: don’t hit up cashiers or anyone doing their jobs, they’re just being nice and friendly because they are being paid to be polite.

But it also meant don’t approach women when they’re shopping for groceries, as they’re probably tired from work and just want to go home. Don’t approach women on public transportation, as they’re just trying to get home and don’t want to be accosted in a cramped public venue. Don’t approach women when they’re out with friends, because they are with friends and don’t want to be cleaved off like how a predator isolates a member of a herd.

This went on and on, to some pretty ridiculous lengths. Whereupon I asked, “how is any man supposed to do an unsolicited approach to chat up a woman?”, to which she said - and no, not kidding at all - “They shouldn’t. Any man who we’re interested in will understand when we’re interested in them.”

Like… telepathy.

Literal
f**king
telepathy.

Sure as shit, this is what a woman said to me.

Most men get absolutely zero life experience in decoding super-subtle hints, and now they’re supposed to miraculously become an expert in navigating a potentially life-destroying minefield, where the only two outcomes is magically getting it right, or risking a non-trivial probability of incarceration and a criminal record when they (invariably) get it wrong?

No wonder so many men are saying “thanks, but no thanks.” That the juice - the outcome - is just no longer worth the squeeze - all the effort and risk that is shouldered. I don’t blame them in the least. They’re the smart ones.

And those who are slightly less smart are at least asking the $10,000 question: why aren’t women making the first approach? I mean, isn’t that what this whole “equality of the sexes” shtick was all about? Why don’t women put their money where their mouths are, and ask MEN out, for a change? Because I can guarantee that while any normal woman will experience a certain level of rejection, it will still be several orders of magnitude less than what a similarly-normal man experiences.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans

That’s actually a common misconception. We aren’t really all that nice. We just do passive aggressive really, really well.

That still doesn’t solve 99.9% of my issues, it just tries to solve a problem for which I already have a solution actively in-place: a KVM.

In that way it’s become adversarial.

Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.

Why are the contents of that sack shaping it into what looks like a nutsack? Are there, like, two soccer balls in there?

Exactly. And when you look at warming trends, we just went completely off the reservation, BEYOND the worst-case-scenario path. Humanity and science are very much in uncharted territory at this moment, and indications are that we will get shockingly close to +3℃ by about 2035… yes, we are now seeing an unprecedented and terrifying acceleration in warming.

So what does +3℃ entail?

Think lethally high wet bulb temperatures striking most regions between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where 4B people live. Not constantly lethal wet bulb temps, but frequently enough and for long enough that it becomes a “migrate or die” proposition. For FOUR BILLION people.

Think chaotic weather, bringing either too much or too little precipitation to the entire planet, when over 80% of all agriculture is absolutely dependent on getting the correct amount of rainfall at the right time. Extremely conservative projections are seeing up to 2B - one quarter of the world’s population - starving to death before 2040. And that’s just in the equatorial belts, where food insecurity is highest.

And those are just two of the high notes. We have additional calamities that have become foregone conclusions, such as the collapse of the AMOC - with a “most likely” date by the 2050s - that will plunge most of Northern Europe into a deep freeze and play additional havoc with weather around the planet as it whiplashes into a “new normal” over a decade or three.

I thought that most of the plunge of modern civilization would occur after I die of old age. Even with a functional healthcare system I will be lucky to make it to 2045, much less later. But with America in the active process of collapsing, and threatening to export it’s madness and chaos to other countries like Canada, it looks like I’ll have a front-row seat after all.

The MacOS link for Iridium Browser goes straight to a 404.

Anyone have a direct link to the latest DMG?

In order for markup to generate a correctly-formatted bullet list, it needs to see the asterisk as something other than an italics mark - so you put a space between the asterisk and the text.

So going,

*text

Makes the system think you want italicized text.

Going,

* text

Makes the system realize that you want to generate a bullet point list. All you have to do is leave one blank line before the list proper,

• and
• the
• list
• will
• be
• bulleted.

You can format bullet points better by having a space between the bullet and the text.

Actually, that is how you trigger markup to create a proper bullet list.

With no spaces, you have to explicitly put a blank line between every “bullet point” item to keep them from paragraphing into one large block. With the spaces, proper formatting will take over and no blank line is needed to keep each individual bullet point item on it’s own line.

I know. It’s an exceedingly horrible path, but the alternatives are turning out to be immeasurably worse, and we are rapidly running out of non-catastrophic options.

I am in the northern hemisphere, in a city that is virtually 100% guaranteed to be nuked if such a conflict arises. It’s not an option I want to reach for unless all the other ones are even worse. But “much worse” is likely to occur, sooner rather than later.