• 1 Post
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • It’s not just the people in power, though. When I look at primaries, where people actually have some hope of affecting outcomes, they consistently vote for the worst people. I mean, it’s hard for normal-ish people to even get to through the party structure to get on the ballot, and then they just get crushed. In 2020, Dems could have had Bernie, Warren, Buttigieg, even Klobuchar, but Biden won pretty handily. That’s on people people.



  • If it’s the control you find clunky, Kodi does support LIRC, and USB infrared receivers are like $20. You should be able to convince it to listen to your TV or universal remote for menu navigation, volume, etc, which will make it feel a lot like a normal/smart TV. I use the Kore app on my phone.

    But UI is the Achilles heel of most open source software.


  • There’s mythtv, but it’s significantly more complicated than kodi and doesn’t have the streaming plugins. IME, mythtv makes a nice backend for Kodi, especially if you want to capture live TV OTA/cable. For just watching stuff, Kodi is great. It doesn’t really honor any file hierarchy you might set up under its “Movies” or “Music” tabs, but you’ll find that structure preserved in “Browser.”

    I’ve found OSMC, which is just a dedicated OS wrapper around Kodi, a little wonky, but that could be just me. I’m used to ssh-ing in to systems to maintain them, and it took me a long time to understand OSMC’s connman network manager. I think it’s probably fine if you intend to interact only though Kodi’s on-screen controls, but osmc feels like a ‘weird’ linux. Doesn’t even log to /var/log/syslog



  • People who don’t realize they’re trans until adulthood aren’t really the target for people making rules for high school sports. Even college - if you’re a competitive men’s athlete, only to realize in your junior year that you’re trans - do you just give up on the men who’ve been your team mates and peers for years and try to form new relationships with the women’s team (if there even is a women’s team in your sport)?

    We’re whittling down what was already a small minority of trans athletes to essentially unique hypothetical individuals. I don’t really think it’s possible to make rational rules to address every possible set of circumstances with such a poorly understood phenomenon. Best you can do is offer some guidelines, and minimizing distortions due to sexual dimorphism is a decent guideline. If there’s a male not beyond the size of competitive females, then that trans-woman seems fair to play with cis-women. If she’s the size of Jason Momoa because she’s been playing football as a man for 20 years, I doubt that a course of HRT will make her any less overpowering to competitive cis-women.

    Maybe it’s just a sacrifice she will have to make, to postpone her medical transition and keep playing football, or begin her transition and accept that it will cost her the starting position on the men’s team without access to an equivalent women’s team. I mean, few of us can have everything we want, and most competitive athletes have to sacrifice some other aspects of their identity to be competitive.


  • I think we really need to know why sports are segregated.

    If it’s because males have physical advantages over females, then you really want to separate by some kind of size or strength criterion. Weight classes, like wrestling or boxing.

    If its because we don’t want children titillated by seeing the opposite sex change clothes in the locker room, then you need to come up with some way to address people with same-sex attraction.

    If it’s just because that’s the way sports were when you were a kid, then let the two transgender kids play with the 10,000 cisgender kids.

    FINA already bars trans-women who went through male puberty from competing as women, and that seems like a pretty fair compromise. At least until you pile on states trying to ban medical care for transgender youth - i.e. puberty blockers - or other difficulties many trans-youth have in obtaining such care. My understanding is that HRT after puberty doesn’t come anywhere close to the biological effects of actual puberty, in terms of strength, size, and speed.




  • Since the 4 hands are all equal multiples, you should only need two shafts and a bunch of 16:1 reductions, like couples of 10 and 160 teeth. Second hand 10-tooth gear drives a stub 160, coupled to a 10, which drives 160 on the 4-minute hand, coupled to a 10… In my head, gear trains get more complicated when they need more shafts, because making sure all those different shafts are aligned and non-interfering is hard. Just stacking more 10/160 gears on longer shafts is pretty straightforward. Your clock would be deep, but not necessarily large.

    If you have a 3D printer, you can download models of gears from places like https://mcmaster.com and print them out. Or modify them and print them. A 3D printed clock isn’t likely to last until 2038, but it’s great for prototyping.




  • I think the HSA is a big attraction for the GOP - tax advantaged encouragement to get more people investing more money in stocks. Practically, though it also means more people effectively self-insuring. My deductible is $6500, but I’m allowed to put $3500 into HSA, so 2 years’ HSA savings covers the deductible. Fine, for individuals that are reasonably healthy, but it reduces the pool of money that insurers have to pay benefits to people who do have claims.

    Essentially incentivizing individuals to sabotage the system.


  • There’s definitely an arms race - if it’s cheaper to pay an SEO to get your pages shown, then you pay the SEO; if it’s cheaper to pay Google advertising, then you pay to play. I’m sure Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to filter SEO techniques to get better, authentic results, but it seems like a losing battle at this point.




  • This is just an extended rationalization for apathy. I’m sorry to say, but government is boring. Politicians are boring. An exciting politician is probably trying to sell you a line of unrealistic, unachievable bullshit, and in the system the US has, by the time it gets down to the general election, your choices are Donkey, Elephant, and several flavors of Don’t Care. You can have more excitement and a greater sense of choice in the primaries, but voting twice in a year is too much work for even many ‘political’ people.

    If positive messaging got people to the polls, I guarantee you would see positive campaigning: even 10% of the non-voters would be enough to swing any competitive race.



  • I would not be surprised if this is an experiment to see the effect of killing API on the event. I mean, really, not many accounts have left reddit (a lot have showed up on lemmy/kbin, but a small fraction of reddit), and I remember a lot of complaints of bots in the last place. It’s just 3 months since the last one, so they should get great data on the effect of API charges on their bot access.