Also anything Alex Jones. This right here, is EXACTLY why he does what he does. No PR is bad PR for him. The dumbest move is trying to tell people about how dumb this guy is. It’s only feeding him. This is how Trump won. Keep your name in the Zeitgeist. Keep gaslighting your victimization and the victimization of your constituency. Gish. motherfucking. Gallop.
Seems I found the first thing you’re ignorant about. Perspective.
I’m sure it would.
No doubt. Every friend I have is a trumper, but my best friend believes in the cabal. It’s tough and it’s heartbreaking. But I decided I’m just going to be an example of tolerance if nothing else.
🙏 Good on you. Thanks and same to you. Luckily I used to be petulant and conservative so I can fit in when I need to. And my income is used by my partner to raise a child surrounded by love, understanding, and encouragement. So I feel like I’m filtering a portion of capitalism into raising a little communist. 🤣 It’s enough to keep me gritting through the xenophobia. 😬
I think this type of thinking is just as toxic as the thinking of the ones you so quickly call “idiots”. Not only do you fail to affect the situation in any positive way, but you harden the commitment of those that fell for the grift. Furthermore, you’re blatantly wrong. I’m sure there are things you are ignorant about. I’m positive I could find things that you think that I could demonstrate to be wildly inaccurate (mostly because I work in a very niche field that very few people do). None of them would make you an idiot. It’s okay to not know something. I’m not saying you should pander to anyone, but patience is a balm. Have some.
Closeted socialist here. I work in an extremely remote 24/7 process industry. They play Newsmax on the TVs in the chow hall and the only time they don’t is when they are replacing tvs. EVERYONE here is a degree of an alt righter. Some were at J6. Some have “Alex Jones was right” on their thermos’. I honestly believe some would kill me if I said I’ve read Marx. Not a single one of them could accurately define a political, economic, or social system without distracting with tropes, jingoistic rhetoric, or whataboutisms. Academic education is brainwashing. Christianity is a brand-name but you don’t have to read the Bible to be a christian. I made the mistake of expressing my disappointment of Trump because of what he has said about veterans. I was mocked for believing propaganda and over time I have become known as “the liberal”. That was all it took.
It’s frustrating, and I daily struggle with unchecked bigotry. But most people here do not wake up and choose to be racist or evil. They are doing what their wildly misled moral compass is telling them to be righteous. In their eyes, the pandering of the media that we see is absolute and total corruption to them. The media does lie, they have lied. Most of them couch it In ignorance and a whispered redaction, but that’s all it took. If they can lie about anything, then they must be lying about the unflattering things. There’s a bit of head-in-the-sand and delusion, but in their eyes the rape, the lawsuits, the theft from taxpayers, all of it is exactly what they would say if they were trying to make him look bad. That’s enough for them.
I honestly don’t blame them. They have fallen for grifts, lies, and propaganda that goes back at least 200 years.
My favorite was finding out that bit locker was enabled on a forced update. The key was saved to the Microsoft account that was used to set up the lappy. Except, I didn’t use a Microsoft account because I’m not some tech marionette lemming who needs Gates hand shoved up my ass to tell me how to use my fucking computer. So I used a local account and disabled bitlocker via bios.
Nothing was lost, but it was still a pain in the dick hole.
There’s a timing tolerance you can program. So if you only want to count double axles or get the speed data based on a presumed axle spacing, you can program that in. But, if you feel you must spoof it, listen to the sets of tires as they cross the hose and match that timing while stomping on the hose. You need to stomp pretty hard to get the hose to compress enough and you need to generate an air hammer pressure wave within the hose. This and the intensity is what is measured by the device and recorded as an event.
But these modules are left for weeks to months. So if the counts are all in the, let’s say, 300 range daily but then one single day shows 1000, that day’s data is typically removed from the set. Outliers can happen for all kinds of reasons (e.g. failure, hose break, weather, loss of solar power, unusual or atypical activities, children young and old). So, if the counts are wildly different than prior years’ counts, daily/weekly/monthly inconsistent, beyond comprehension, or obviously defective; they can set up more than one device if they need and some devices can receive more than one input. They can also program the device with multiple inputs to only record data within a specific range of parameters. So there are lots of ways to limit the shenanigans in the data.
And you’d be surprised at how much traffic some roads get. Even some residential roads would see thousands daily. So if you really want to bump up the priority of the road, you would be better off driving over it all day, every day until it was removed; because you’d destroy your leg trying to stomp on it that many times. And you’d have to do this on all adjacent and feeder roads to support that data. And you’d have to ensure that you do this every year until you recognize the desired effects of your endeavor, and then you’d have to continue this practice in perpetuity. Or the jig is up!
Sure, they’re nothing special, but they were intense at the time. Especially for a bunch of summer interns that had the misfortune of needing to find employment during a recession. I was an engineering student and my cohorts were all in the sciences as well. For being a job that required hammering, measuring, and not getting hit by traffic it was one of the more stimulating jobs I’ve ever worked.
So the typical process for us was to drive to the site, usually it was just a road segment from a list (3-5 year annually rotating lists). We had a truck bed filled with precut hoses, solar powered counting modules, spikes, and then wire mesh hose retainers. We would get the appropriate size hose, slip on retainers, hammer in the spikes, and attach and program the module.
One day a fellow in a pickem’up truck followed us from one road to the next telling us that we had no authority to be there and he would sue if we didn’t take our computers and leave. The next day, at a completely different part of the city (honestly, I have no idea how he found us) he jumped out of his truck and racked a shell in his shotgun. We all just left everything and got in the truck and drove away with him standing there shit talking. The equipment was gone but the police knew the guy. They got our stuff back. They didn’t get my buddies coffee thermos though and he was pretty bent out of shape about that. I think it was old or his dad’s or something. But never saw that guy again.
We would constantly get approached by homeless people who wanted to know what we were doing. I always tried to be as informative as possible but most of the time the basic concept was too confounding. The orange vests were always a problem. One guy asked me why I only have one cone. I still laugh about that today. Just the question. Fucking hilarious. The things you don’t think to ask. It was completely legit too. We were daily put in situations where we were inches from traffic. A single cone and a truck were the only things between oncoming traffic and our faces. Why only one cone? We had to cross roads to attach the hose on the other side. If we require a cone for traffic going this way, why don’t we require one going that way? Is the cone FOR THE TRUCK?!?
What a treasure of a memory that was.
EDIT:
I forgot, there was a contractor who did the leftover work that was occasionally needed the rest of the year, but he was always out of work during the summer and he didn’t like that. So one night I was driving past one of the modules that we set up the week before and there was a frumpy looking guy walking back to his car that was parked very near it on the sidewalk. So the next day I found out who he was from the supervisor and went to the site to check it out. He had unlocked the module and slipped in a piece of paper that just said, “you’re a bitch”. Fucking ROFL.
Allow me to share some personal experiences when setting those up. Nimby’s would approach us and rant about how we were only there to justify a new stop sign or speed bump. A few times we were approached by ding dongs wielding weapons. And every once in a while people like to sabotage or steal the equipment. But once they tamper with the equipment enough times they basically get put on the shit list so their road doesn’t get serviced they don’t get plow service they don’t get anything. Maybe this was their goal maybe not who knows they’re idiots.
Honestly, highway data is used for all kinds of things but mostly for planning repairs, upgrades, and modifications. Redesigning things like intersections, traffic lights, and stop signs are rarely the result of this sort of highway data collection. It’s reported collisions and fatalities that drive safety interventions.
But again, we’re talking about nimby’s who are all fucking idiots.
Look, I hear what you’re saying. And no offense intended, but people like you crow about things like fediverse not being supported… All the while, these applications are not supported by their own developers. And unfortunately, not unlike the majority of my experiences with Linux issues, every time I reach out for help I’m told the same old hat story, “this isn’t meant for beginners”.
And the “pains that come with learning about self-hosting” are so unnecessary and in my opinion quite apparently avoidable.
"Well, did you change the port number to this number that isn’t referenced anywhere in the documentation? It’s pretty obvious to anyone that’s been doing this for 20 years - who would be able to recognize that it’s a step everyone would need to do to deploy - so there’s literally no conceivable reason why that would be included…
###IN THE TUTORIAL
…Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this."
Well, as someone who has been trying to launch a functioning Lemmy instance for nearly a year now, I can tell you, knowing not the slightest thing about funkwhale, that I would eat my hat if the documentation isn’t an all but absent shit show.
My favorite part was learning that my domain was creating a completely new cert from lets encrypt with each deployment and no way of recovering them at all. So after 5 attempts, you have to wait 60 days (or whatever) for them to expire. That was awesome. I messaged the devs about that one and they literally said “we didn’t think of that”… 😑
And so much shit goes tits up if you don’t deploy it perfectly the very first time. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fediverse, but JTFC I hate the fucking fediverse.
Yeah, I’ve started to feel a bit of that on windows. At least with MS deprecating things that people used, or constantly changing your settings with every update. I guess a terminal script is no different than a magic black box in the same way that a program or driver is. Hmm. Good point.
On-screen keyboard
Nice try Linus 😂
And on windows, you can do all of this without touching the keyboard…
For me, a few things keep me from sticking with it. The community used to be a problem but it’s not as bad as it used to be. Seeking help online regarding anything related to network services are still rife with the “git gooder” useless fucks. Two months ago I was told, “you shouldn’t be doing this if you need a guide.” I was trying to deploy a Lemmy instance… Using the guide provided by Lemmy devs… That they recommended for beginners… FML with a curling iron…
Another big one for me is access to solutions. I have never encountered a problem with windows that I couldn’t find a solution or at least an explanation for. But I frequently find issues with linux that I am apparently the first to ever experience.
And lastly, it seems like not using a terminal at all to do completely normal things is even remotely possible. Powershell allows all kinds of things that would be otherwise burdensome or impossible, but none of those are required for use. On the flip side, it feels like everything I want to do in Linux tends to require me to copypasta a terminal command, open the terminal, and run. Why? Why is there no “control panel” style settings tools? Why is every setting scattered to the .conf fucking wind? My kingdom for a distro that I don’t have to nano my fucking way through.
Software compatibility??? That is a problem I would love to have when it comes to trying to switch OSs. That would mean that everything else is already working and only MS products are acting up. Also… who switches to Linux but still requires MS Office??? Why does this person exist? Lol
Anyway. Haven’t tried the switch in a few years and it seems like things have changed a lot in that time comparatively to the preceding years, so I may be a bit out of touch. But that’s why I quit last time. I would love to not need windows ever again. But my worst windows day is still better than my best Linux day.
Thanks for that. Astute and insightful.
Oh, interesting, thanks! I’ve dabbled with Linux so I’m familiar with it. I believe my nas is NTFS, but I could be wrong. But if so, I wonder if it’s possible to mount an NTFS location to a Linux server… Something to research while working tomorrow 😄
Well, someone was apparently awake during wonk class. Spot on comrade.