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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’m not a mathemagician or a physexiest, so it’s safe to assume my assumptions are wild and my calculations suspect.

    • Blue whales weigh between 90,000 and 180,000 kg. Let’s go right in the middle at 135,000 kg.
    • A deviantart post from 2014 says Blue whales are as dense as water (approximately).
    • According to an online calculator, seawater weighs 1,021kg/m^3 (I figure whales are salty, because of climate change and the centuries of being hunted to near extinction).
    • If we assume that weight equals volume, then the same calculator puts our whale at 132.1m^3
    • And, obviously, that doesn’t work for my porpoises. So we grind the whale into a slurry, and freeze it into a ball. Using an online tool to find the radius of a sphere from the volume, we come up with 31.6, which I assume is meters.
    • Doubling that (in my head!) to get the diameter, we’d wind up with a ball that is about 63.2 meters across.
    • Using this online calculator of unknown provenance, we put in a diameter of 63.2m, a velocity of 9.8m/s (earth’s gravity!), an angle of 90 (because our masticated and spheroidified whale would of course be dropped from space like a cartoon anvil), and selecting ice as the material, it says the crater would have a radius of 324 meters, with ejecta spread about twice that.

    Not enough to destroy the whole thing, but enough to wipe out St. Peter’s Basilica, and do a lot of damage to the rest of it.


  • Many years ago, I discovered that my then-employer’s “home built” e-commerce system had all user and admin passwords displayed in plaintext at home/admin/passwords.

    When I brought this to the attention of leadership, they called the “developer” in and he said “oh, well, that’s IP locked, so no one on the web can access it!” When I pulled it up on my phone, he insisted my phone was on the work WiFi, despite it being clearly verifiable that was not the case. (The same work WiFi that had an open public connection, which is the one my phone would have been on, if it were on it…)

    He did fix that, but many other issues remained. Eventually a new COO hired someone competent as his ‘backup’, replaced our website and finally suggested he pursue other employment opportunities before he could no longer voluntarily pursue them. (There was concern he might sabotage.)







  • A good day, I think. My wife’s best friend came over and the dogs love her. She sorta moved in with us, but she’s been crashing elsewhere the last week, so they’ve really missed her.

    The dogs had their nails done, which is usually an ordeal. They are freaked out by the click of the clippers, and usually don’t like to be kept still while having their nails clipped.
    Our anxious one was given trazodone, and then they’re snuggled on the couch with treats (my job) while my wife cleans their feet and trims their nails. Our non-anxious dog has hyperkeratosis and ingrown/impacted hairs around her paw pads, which both require extra maintenance.
    Suffice to say, the dogs are not fans of nail grooming day.

    Recently we started using this electric nail file thing my wife got for shaping press on nails. It’s like the Dremel pet nail file device, but smaller and with way less power. It doesn’t make nearly as much noise, and goes slower taking off bits of nail. The Dremel also freaks out the dogs (at least - the older one. We never attempted with the younger/more anxious one). It’s been a great experiment so far. Because their nails are too long/they’re awkward about clipping them, it’s hard to maintain the steady progress needed to get their cuticles to retract. For the second week in a row, we’ve managed to give them nicely rounded (no jagged edges from the clipper) nails that are slowly getting shorter. In about a month, if we can keep this up, we might be able to drop the frequency and still keep them at “fresh from the groomer” nail lengths.

    This is a game changer for our anxious dog. He’s got black nails with long cuticles that are a real challenge to deal with using clippers. It’s hard to see the quick when he’s all wiggly and anxious - accidents do happen. He’s so much calmer with the little file. Between treats and his happy hoodie, he only let out a few grumbles this time — because he wanted to lick off the foot balm!


  • Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
    Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

    Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
    From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.

    And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.



  • The difference is that I’ve only ever received notifications from automod as a reaction to something I did, and those notifications came in either as a comment reply or as a direct message.

    I looked it up - the last time I interacted with this community was 5 months ago. I’m not a subscriber, either.

    I can understand the importance of casting a wide net for awareness, but I think your scoping and your approach was wrong.

    If I may offer a few suggestions - I don’t think the idea is wrong, but I think that the messages should have been direct messages to users that clearly explained why that individual user was receiving the message, plus whatever else you needed/wanted to say.
    I would have had more rigid criterion for inclusion, too. Subscribers, certainly, and perhaps people who have interacted with the community a minimum number of times within a limited time period. For me, 3 times in 3 months seems generous enough to cast that wide net while also not being overly-broad.
    So if I were executing this, I would have had the bot direct message people, and say “Hello, I’m a bot acting on the behalf of X community. You are receiving this message because you are a subscriber or have recently interacted with the community. We wanted to let you know that the community is moving! It can be found at Y.”

    The bulk tagging action was, I think, especially egregious. Posts with massive amounts of tags are a very common spam technique and people automatically have a negative association with them. Pair that with non-specific criteria and relatively non-descriptive explanations, and I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for folks to have adverse reactions.

    I hope that you consider the above as fair, and not overly critical. I’m not trying to throw stones. Everyone is human here. Well, except for the bot. But even it makes mistakes.



  • Oh, see - due to the lack of investment in education, the normalization of ever-increasing tuition rates, and the social/economic stratification of U.S. society there isn’t really a thing such as a ‘cheaper’ school.

    My local commuter college wanted $25k a year for their masters program over a decade ago - and that’s after obtaining a 4 year degree. (Which I obtained through a combination of community college and undergrad classes at the same university, but not without incurring about $20k worth of debt for the previous 4 years.)

    Add to that, the U.S. doesn’t have the economy or social supports. You either earn a living wage, find something workable through familial support, or go hungry. The U.S., mandates that companies pay less than half of what is needed to support one’s self.

    This isn’t like, poor planning, or governmental stupidity. This is actually on purpose by conservatives in the U.S. government. (Sorry, that site is kinda weird, but it has the quote I was looking for.)
    Nevermind that an educated populous is a matter of national defense/national security and having the brainpower to propel the country forward is one of the ways that the U.S. dominated on the world stage in the latter half of the last century. (In addition to timely and fortuitous control of a lot of resources, and a shitload of foreign meddling - lets be real here.) But whatevz, who needs that when the voters disagree with you? The people who set this in motion will be dead by the time the people that are going to be utterly fucked by that figure it out. (perhaps slowed in that realization by their faulty education. Hah.).