• 0 Posts
  • 153 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • Moscow, ID is fighting to keep the city public while local cults try to buy everything up.

    Churches with no tax burden have huge advantages when they start commercial enterprises and then use tax free money to help their parishioners start/buy business after business with cheap loans and local support. Eventually the town is owned (directory or by proxy) by the church/cult. Then they take over city council and it’s a religious city by proxy.

    Fun times for everyone else who are then abused by the cult for still living in the city and now joining their org.


  • It’s only illegal if someone enforces the law, a judge holds a trial, and an actual punishment is meted out.

    Given how little taste our justice system has for holding rich people accountable, it starts to get fuzzy around what is illegal or not. As President GW Bush said: “The Constitution is just a piece of paper.” While he’s wrong about the material, he was correct that unless people believe in the ideals and rules laid down by the Constitution, then actually build a nation who follows and enforces their ideals, the Condition just sits there as a pile of material.




  • I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

    The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

    The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.




  • I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.

    I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.



  • Ranked Choice Voting (or ANYTHING with preference polling) would be vastly better than our current system. It would enable 3rd parties to thrive without being nearly the spoilers they are now.

    Every voting system as it’s flaws and edge cases, but our current First Past the Post system is a trainwreck crushing the Republic by degrading into two majority parties (as it demonstrably always does) and then letting other countries and dark money prop up spoiler candidates to hurt their opponents.

    We either fix our voting system or we eventually lose the Republic.






  • This voting season has a very different feel from 2020. I’ve been trying to understand what’s up.

    Because there’s not the same kind of public displays of right wing movements, I feel that it seems like a safer situation on a large scale. The tradeoff is that the right wing nutjobs don’t have the same public visible groups to join and yell about life with. They’re likely going to be much more likely to lash out through terroristic acts and to be more individually violent.

    So, while there’s not nearly the same quantity of truck convoys of deplorables driving around waving flags, that same energy is going to be distilled into a more potent sludge of evil under the surface.


  • Your perspective might be why I enjoy microcontroller work. I love getting to know everything about the system, reading hardware documentation, and getting the low level parts to work in a highly deterministic way.

    I use ATTiny85 cores when a ESP32 costs almost the same, but the 85 only has 256 bytes of SRAM and five I/O pins so I can track it all and ensure it will do exactly what I want.