I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

How can there not be rail traffic in Libya? I mean, there has to be some kind of line that runs along the southern rim of the Pacific.

kagis

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

Hmm. Apparently the map is right.

There have been no operational railways in Libya since 1965, but various lines existed in the past. Since 1998, plans for an extensive system have been developed,[1] but work has largely halted since the outbreak of the First Libyan Civil War in 2011.

kagis for an Africa rail map

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fzewtbml8t4481.jpg

It looks like there’s rail along the south Mediterranean rim except through Libya. Doesn’t even detour south around Libya. I guess one switches cargo to ship or truck or something.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.

The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.

One possibility I’ve wondered about is whether, someday, email shifts to a whitelist-based system. I mean, historically we’ve always let people be contacted as long as they know someone’s physical address or phone number or email address, and so databases of those have value – they become keys to reach people. But we could simply have some sort of easy way to authorize people and block everyone else. In a highly-connected world, that might be a more reasonable way to do things.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I know that modern dryers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it’s maybe hard to project that.

But I don’t know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.

kagis

Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it’ll do that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1dd4k6g/my_clothes_washer_has_had_one_minute_left_for_the/

My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)

Funny… Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:

This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.

The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should’ve taken a minute or two, took 15.

A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don’t even know they have one, much less how to clean it.

In MOST modern washers, it’s behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter…

The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that’s collected on it.

Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.

If they have a display capable of it, might be a good idea for washers to suggest to the user that it’s draining slowly and that checking the filter might be in order.

You test fired a 3D printed gun you had no hand in making

I mean, I think that that’s reasonable. But that seems like a “get behind something protective and pull the trigger with a string” territory. Regardless of who printed it.

If there isn’t some kind of standard safety checklist for printed weapons, I really think that there should be if lots of people are going to be printing these things.

despite editing the .sh file to point to the older tarballed Python version as advised on Github, it still tells me it uses the most up to date one that’s installed system wide and thus can’t install pytorch.

Can you paste your commands and output?

If you want, maybe on [email protected], since I think that people seeing how to get Automatic1111 set up might help others.

I’ve set it up myself, and I don’t mind taking a stab at getting it working, especially if it might help get others over the hump to a local Automatic1111 installation.

venv nonsense

I mean, the fact that it isn’t more end-user invisible to me is annoying, and I wish that it could also include a version of Python, but I think that venv is pretty reasonable. It handles non-systemwide library versioning in what I’d call a reasonably straightforward way. Once you know how to do it, works the same way for each Python program.

Honestly, if there were just a frontend on venv that set up any missing environment and activated the venv, I’d be fine with it.

And I don’t do much Python development, so this isn’t from a “Python awesome” standpoint.

A 401k isn’t mandatory. If you’ve got an issue with having a 401k, you don’t need to do so. I suspect, however, that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a route that will provide long-term returns as solid as regularly dropping funds into an index fund in a 401k.

My brother or sister, invest in index funds, not the stock market.

I mean, while I get what you’re saying and don’t disagree, I’d phrase it as “hold an index fund rather than stock in individual companies”. ETFs themselves are traded on the stock market.

Top Gun

kagis

Apparently this is at least his second election doing this.

I’m a little suspicious that the goal is to promote his business more than running for office.

He apparently bought a furniture store and converted the whole thing into a massive gun store with a bunch of amenities with "the largest showroom and indoor shooting range in the Midwest. "

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/27/top-guns-gun-store-indoor-range/

EDIT: As I vaguely remember, when US legislation went through restricting unsolicited telemarketing and such, there was an exception for political campaigns.

checks

https://www.donotcall.gov/

The National Do Not Call Registry gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls

• You can register your home or mobile phone for free.

• After you register, other types of organizations may still call you, such as charities, political groups, debt collectors and surveys. To learn more, read our FAQs.

Yeah. Thinking that might be the angle.

[email protected] for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.

The feature list of the language is so long at this point that it is pretty much impossible for anyone new to learn C++ and grok the design decisions anymore.

Even if it is possible, it’s a high bar. The height of that bar matters in bringing new people in.

I have seen decades of would-be “C++ killers” come and go. I think that in the end, it is C++ that kills C++. The language has just become unusably large. And that’s one thing that cannot be fixed by extending the language.

goes to find a table of Category 5 storms

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

This has the number of hurricane strikes on the US in each strength category, binned by decade.

Not for vegetarians or Muslims!

I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

I did like Sim City a fair bit.

• Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just have it delete them from specifically that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can set cookies, then some bad actor will. The dialogs that sites put up talking about it are pointless. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.

  I have my browser delete all cookies on exit. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I permit to keep cookies and track me. Every one of those is one that I need to log in to use anyway – so I could be tracked with or without a cookie – and the only thing the cookie does is buys me not needing to log in every time, doesn’t have privacy implications.

• Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.

• They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.

  If you want to have some kind of tax-funded news site, go advocate for that. Yelling at them isn’t going to get you there.

  If you want to just view news done by volunteers, something like WikiNews, then go visit those sites instead. Maybe contribute work as well. I don’t think that volunteer news is going to realistically compete with commercial news, but hey, there was also a point when people thought the same thing about volunteer-run encyclopedias, so maybe it’ll get there.

I’ll also add that I’m going to be generous to the EU and assume that the goal of their “cookie warning” law, which is why many European websites show these, was to raise awareness of cookies and privacy implications by having warnings plastered all over, so that it starts people thinking about privacy. Because if the goal was actually to let people avoid cookies, then it is costly, disruptive and wildly ineffectual compared to just setting a setting in the browser, makes actually having the browser delete cookies more-annoying, and duplicates a browser-side standard, P3P, that already accomplished something similar, and was just all around a really bad law.