According to this, as of 2022, in the US, only 175k households were still using dial-up Internet service from any provider. That’s not a lot of people.

https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-households-are-without-internet-connection/

Around 175,522 households use dial-up internet at home.

I’m guessing that many of those realistically have other landline options and just haven’t switched.

kagis

The amusingly-named-given-the-context dslextreme.com apparently continues to offer nationwide dial-up service.

https://www.dslextreme.com/dialup/residential

I suppose that someone who was determined to use dial-up access and didn’t want some form of wireless service and didn’t want or couldn’t get access to non-POTS landline service and had been using AOL could switch to them.

EDIT: It looks like it’s still possible to get POTS modems on Amazon. I suspect that that’s mostly for people using fax systems.

Maybe. Presently, the savings in human time is not worthwhile, but the value of human time does tend to rise over time, and it’s possible that someone might find cargos for which time savings are more valuable.

AOL will end dial-up internet service in September

…the end of September

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

Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.

The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

56K (or slower) screeching modem into.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k

Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube

As well as:

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/28/g-s1-36142/australia-social-media-ban-children

The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.

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

It sounds like, from my quick skim, that their criteria would also apply to the Threadiverse, as I don’t see any sort of userbase size or revenue restrictions on their definition of its scope. Here’s the bill text:

(1) For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:
(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
(ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
(iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
(b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).
Note 1: Online social interaction does not include (for example) online business interaction.
Note 2: An age-restricted social media platform may be, but is not necessarily, a social media service under section 13.19
Note 3: For specification by class, see subsection 13(3) of the Legislation Act 2003.

Subsection (6):

(6) An electronic service is not an age-restricted social media platform if:
(a) none of the material on the service is accessible to, or delivered to, one or more end-users in Australia; or
(b) the service is specified in the legislative rules.

I’m sure that there will be more discussion on this that will probably clarify it.

For the moment, I’m pretty confident based on past case law that the US legal system won’t consider a US-based Threadiverse instance that isn’t actively doing something like advertising to users specifically in Australia or selling products to Australia to be within the legal jurisdiction of Australia, as it won’t be doing business in Australia, so the US legal system will not enforce Australian law against it. Australia might block a node but shouldn’t be able to fine someone, so blacklisting Australian IP addresses or the like probably isn’t necessary. One notable issue: I don’t know off the top of my head whether instances accepting donations from Australian users could be affected.

I don’t know what the EU’s position on Internet jurisdiction is.

That might be a much more substantial problem for Australia-based instances, like — to name one that comes to mind — aussie.zone.

Create a FUSE library to use that as backing storage for a filesystem, and you can make use of the infrastructure for free cloud storage. Maybe twityouhubfs.

If I understand aright, the concern here is that if one finds some form of way to corrupt memory, then one could use that to corrupt memory in the program to cause the program to jump to some other code used in a coroutine in much the same way that a buffer overflow in code modifying a variable stored on the stack could permit an attacker one to overwrite a return address on a stack to jump to arbitrary code.

These weren’t obscure, edge-case vulnerabilities, either. In fact, one of the most frequent issues was: Cross-Site Scripting (CWE-80): AI tools failed to defend against it in 86% of relevant code samples.

So, I will readily believe that LLM-generated code has additional security issues, but given that the models are trained on human-written code, this does raise the obvious question of what percentage of human-written code properly defends against cross-site scripting attacks, a topic that the article doesn’t address.

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

Substitute natural gas (SNG), or synthetic natural gas, is a fuel gas (predominantly methane, CH4) that can be produced from fossil fuels such as lignite coal, oil shale, or from biofuels (when it is named bio-SNG) or using electricity with power-to-gas systems.

So we’ve got “gas” in the US (short for “gasoline”), which is a liquid. There’s liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which is also a liquid. And there’s synthetic natural gas.

EDIT: Bonus: my understanding is that in Germany, an unqualified “gas” tends to refer to natural gas, which Germany is presently importing in liquid form (liquified natural gas, or LNG).

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1lf63hv/whats_gasoline_called_in_each_asian_countries/

It sounds like it’s not entirely consistent across China and the translation is somewhat-debatable, but a translation for China might be “gas-oil”, “stone-oil”, or “steam-oil”.

Well, there’s also censorbots.

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

The Marcha Real (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾtʃa reˈal]; lit. ‘Royal March’) is the national anthem of Spain. It is one of only four national anthems in the world – along with those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, San Marino and Kosovo – that have no official lyrics.[2] Although many different lyrics have been made for it in the past, it has never had official lyrics as a national anthem.[3]

This seems, as the kids say, sus.

Historically, if you weren’t talking about the bald eagle, the US tended to be symbolized by the bison (which we in the US call the "buffalo). It got pretty clobbered too, though.

This list is probably not a complete accounting of all incidents, but it dates back to the 1780s, and has 88 cases where a brown bear killed a human.

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

Going the other direction:

https://www.fws.gov/species/grizzly-bear-ursus-arctos-horribilis

Prior to 1800, an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears were distributed in one large contiguous area throughout all or portions of 18 western States, including Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Grizzly bears were reduced to close to 2% of their former range in the 48 contiguous states by the 1930s, with a corresponding decrease in population, approximately 125 years after first contact with European settlers.

The kill-to-death ratio is pretty favorable to humans.

Context: For those not familiar, the Fallout video game series has a spoofed version of the California state flag:

Oh, we can’t take all the credit.

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

Brown bears could once be found across most of Eurasia, compared to the more limited range today. General habitats included areas such as grassland, sparsely vegetated land, and wetlands.

Although included as of Least Concern on the 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (which refers to the global species, not to the Eurasian brown bear specifically), local populations, specifically those in the European Union, are becoming increasingly scarce.[16] As the IUCN itself adds: “Least Concern does not always mean that species are not at risk. There are declining species that are evaluated as Least Concern.”

The brown bear has long been extinct in Britain (at least 1,500 years ago, possibly even 3,000 years ago),[17][18] Denmark (about 6,500 years ago),[19] the Netherlands (about 1,000 years ago, although later singles rarely wandered from Germany),[20] Belgium and Luxembourg, with more recent extinctions in Germany (in the year 1835, although singles wandering from Italy were recorded in 2006 and 2019),[21][22] Switzerland (in 1904, although a single was seen in 1923 and since 2005 there has been an increasing number of sightings of wanderers from Italy),[23][24] and Portugal (in 1843, although a wanderer from Spain was recorded in 2019).[25]

The largest brown bear population in Europe is in Russia, where it has now recovered from an all-time low caused by intensive hunting.

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

The Bear Flag is the official flag of the U.S. state of California.[2] The precursor of the flag was first flown during the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt and was also known as the Bear Flag.

The 1911 statute stated:

The bear flag is hereby selected and adopted as the state flag of California. … The said bear flag shall consist of a flag of a length equal to one and one-half the width thereof; the upper five-sixths of the width thereof to be a white field, and the lower sixth of the width thereof to be a red stripe; there shall appear in the white field in the upper left-hand corner a single red star, and at the bottom of the white field the words ‘California Republic,’ and in the center of the white field a California grizzly bear upon a grass plat, in the position of walking toward the left of the said field; said bear shall be dark brown in color and in length, equal to one-third of the length of said flag.

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

Grizzly bear meat became a mainstay on restaurant menus in the San Gabriel area; according to Mike Davis, “The paws from adult bears and the flesh from young cubs were deemed particular delicacies.”[39]

In 1866, a grizzly bear described as weighing as much as 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) was killed in what is present-day Valley Center, California, in the north-central area of San Diego County. The incident was recalled in 1932 by Catherine E. Lovett Smith, who witnessed the bear’s killing on her family’s ranch when she was just six years old. If its measurements are accurate, this particular bear was the biggest bear ever found in California and one of the largest specimens of any bear species ever recorded.

Extinction

The last hunted California grizzly bear was shot in Tulare County, California, in August 1922, although no body, skeleton or pelt was ever produced. Less than 75 years after the discovery of gold in 1848, almost every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed. In 1924, what was thought to be a grizzly was spotted in Sequoia National Park for the last time and thereafter, grizzlies were never seen again in California.

Apex predators tended not to have evolved the instinct to hide, which served them poorly when Earth’s superpredator decided that they were delicious.

goes looking for the issue

PostgresSQL has a limit of 65,535 parameters, so bulk inserts can fail with large datasets.

Hmm. I would believe that there are efficiency gains from doing one large insert rather than many small — like, there are probably optimizations one can take advantage of in rebuilding indexes — and it’d be nice for database users to have a way to leverage that.

On the other hand, I can also believe that DBMSes might hold locks while running a query, and permitting unbounded (or very large) size and complexity queries might create problems for concurrent users, as a lock might be held for a long time.

EDIT: Hmm. Lock granularity probably isn’t the issue:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/758945/whats-the-fastest-way-to-do-a-bulk-insert-into-postgres

One way to speed things up is to explicitly perform multiple inserts or copy’s within a transaction (say 1000). Postgres’s default behavior is to commit after each statement, so by batching the commits, you can avoid some overhead. As the guide in Daniel’s answer says, you may have to disable autocommit for this to work. Also note the comment at the bottom that suggests increasing the size of the wal_buffers to 16 MB may also help.

is worth mentioning that the limit for how many inserts/copies you can add to the same transaction is likely much higher than anything you’ll attempt. You could add millions and millions of rows within the same transaction and not run into problems.

Any lock granularity issues would also apply to transactions.

Might be concerns about how the query-processing code scales.

Consumer acceptability is key, acknowledges Mr Eiden. Most people don’t want to look like cyborgs: “We need to make our products actually look like existing eyewear.”

looks dubious

I can believe that most people want something that they consider stylish. However, I’m skeptical that most people specifically want something to look like existing stuff. Clothing has shifted a lot over the years and centuries; it’s not as if every person putting something on their body said “it has to look like the stuff that’s come before”, or present-day vision equipment would look like this:

Or this:

Every time that radial border division map of Europe centered on Vienna comes up, now we’ve got an American answer in the form of a striped border division.

https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/maas-utopian-european-union/

An extraordinary map of a proposed European Union … in 1920!

A striking, enigmatic and very rare map illustrating a complex utopian scheme for a prototype European Union after the First World War. It was produced by “P.A.M.,” an elusive figure, probably laid in loose to a 24-page pamphlet (not included here) describing his plan in elaborate detail.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/dc2da395-9cf6-4a84-9325-81f8d11bf032.jpeg