Ernest

*we have a typographical source that claims it means azimuth, but no known usages of it

I think Wikipedia’s summary of “unconfirmed branding” is a fair description.

The article is actually written informatively, but for anyone else who may have assumed from the title that this is some failing of Unicode–it is not, the goal of Unicode is to encode all human writing. This includes “nonsense” glyphs that have been widely used or interchanged between computer systems, including the (in)famous “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW” (⍼).

in an ideal world, ipv6 would solve that problem…

😔

their phones do tend to have that already…

e: at least the lower end ones I’ve had

they’re already using “awfuls”; I wouldn’t bet against them straight up calling people “race traitors”

that’s what I thought

is there anything preventing the usual cracking/packing tactics from being used? Create enormous completely red districts consisting of large swaths of rural areas, and then split the urban areas amongst their surrounding rural areas just enough to have a relatively safe win. Yes, the districts would be ugly as hell (and vary hugely in size), but assuming we’re okay with gerrymandering that was probably to be expected already

I think your starting point (allowing bot user agents to crawl the web has overlooked benefits) is a good one, but things aren’t black and white–there are clear drawbacks, too. Bots obviously have an orders of magnitude higher potential for abuse; to the point where bot traffic–as it currently stands in the real world–is qualitatively different from human traffic.

we should expand these protections from intentional/unintentional ddos irrelevant of user agent.

Sure, but targeted regulation based on heuristics (in this case, user agent) is also a widely accepted practice. DUI laws exist, even though the goals (fewer murders and safer roads) are already separately regulated.

Would it be nice if we didn’t have to do this? Or there were some other solution? Sure, but I have no idea where to even start, unfortunately.

but that sounds like “sewer”

(you’re probably looking for “plaintiff”)

iirc, gitea was forked from gogs, and forgejo is forked from gitea

unfortunately, it’s a disturbingly common belief that if you split your ticket like that it means you’re being “reasonable”/“moderate”/“centrist”.

wait until you hear about the number of people who don’t turn over their ballot in elections where the choices don’t fit on one side…

Or why not just use (big) mirrors?

I mean, this is a thing with solar concentrators already, haha

and for those the heat is a feature :p

You can shape them that no matter how the light falls on it, it will align to the center. Kind of like how satellite dishes work but in reverse.

how do you do this, actually? I’m curious about the details because I just watched a video on compound parabolic reflectors, haha

a regular (ideal) convex lens with a single focal point will have the image move around as the light source moves across the sky. AFAIK satellite dishes tend to be paraboloids, which focus parallel rays onto the focal point, and if you change the angle of the light source, you’ll start losing focus. Stuff like the DSN and radio telescopes absolutely do have to aim and track their targets (or are forced to follow the rotation of the earth).

satellite dishes that are aimed towards geostationary satellites don’t have to move (because their targets are stationary in the sky), while stuff like starlink tracks targets with a phased array.

well, adding lenses kinda requires motorizing the panels to track the sun, right? otherwise the “hot spot” is going to move around across the day/year

is there a way to shape the lens to mitigate this?

action is the antidote to fear.

just wanted to add another answer to the wonderful ones you’ve gotten already.

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.

I don’t really have a good answer on how to find joy despite the bleak violence of reality, but I know that we must still try to find it, because hope and joy is exactly that which they are trying to snuff out.

reading their scathing dissents is one of the things that helps me stay sane; god bless the work they do–I don’t know how I’d put up with going to work having to deal with blatant gaslighting for the rest of my life

and like, one of the options would be for live service games to say “we are planning to operate for {number} of years” and people would know to spend their money accordingly

it would be transparent and informative and people would be empowered to make their own decisions

My read on this is that he’s an idiot who wanted to air a contrarian opinion ('cause that’s how tech CEOs be), and focused in on a very literal/pedantic view of the issue without taking into account the context (which is that the Trump regime is facist and also just… lies, like, all the time).

Whether or not being a pedantic idiot is better or worse than being a Trumpist (or if it’s even a meaningful difference) is up to you, of course.