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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • Recently saw a video where the boss of a contracting company, apparently a good guy, looking out for his employees and honestly trying to help everyone prosper from their shared work, explained that he hired new people at the 10th percentile wage from BLS statistics for their job description, raised them to median after six months, and eventually worked them up to 90th percentile over a few years.

    On the one hand, making sure his people are paid a fair wage for their work. On the other, participating in an information sharing scheme to fix wages. BLS data is generally a year out of date, so he’s actually paying people last year’s wage, but the sense of implicit collusion only increases as the data becomes closer to real time.

    Glad the Biden administration is closing the loophole, but I’m skeptical that it will really work in today’s information-rich environment.







  • 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.



  • It sounds like his teacher thinks games should be evaluated for their development of tension and consistent messaging. It sounds like they would penalize a game for having a story with twists and surprises, because those either break messaging consistency or deflate tension. And, of course, quicksaves are evil.

    I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but it feels like a very academic, navel-gazing place, akin to pretentious art critics talking about color, composition, and allusion to past masters, or a film critic talking about Dutch angles and long takes. Things that may contribute to the artistic quality and even the enjoyment of a piece, but are not components that us rubes actively look for. The fact they try to lump BG3, soccer, and chess all together under one system of evaluation tells me that they’re going to use some really bizarre criteria.




  • Another non-marginalized person here.

    Restricted spaces are necessarily smaller than non-restricted. Less content. Less interaction. Less everything. If hateful content is really rampant, then that can be a valid tradeoff, but separate systems are never equal, and it is always the minority/marginalized system that suffers. You’ve described exactly why: “I would find a new instance and continue to be receptive to LBGT+ discussions that come up on Lemmy.”

    As I look elsewhere in this thread, the comments I see people reference as “against Beehaw goals” are just people being rude assholes, not misogynist, racist, or homo-/trans-phobic. Creating a space where everyone is polite and universally friendly seems a very different objective than creating a space where marginalized people feel safe. If that - universal friendship - is the real goal, then Beehaw very definitely needs to close off interactions with non-vetted, pseudonymous users, and accept that it will look like a virtual ghost town. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether it stays with defederated-by-default lemmy or moves to some other forum platform.

    The middle ground, where you accept that some people are just rude, but still provide a forum where marginalized people feel they can share their experiences without threats or repercussions, needs strong, active, focussed moderation. Have to be able to block users and communities from other instances, delete posts/comments that originate from other instances, and do local moderation of communities hosted on other instances. Have to have enough moderators to respond quickly to user reports, and probably an automod-like system to catch serious issues before users do. It sounds like that is not within the current capabilities of lemmy. So, I can see why the admins think that the lemmy framework is incompatible with their objectives. Probably, a lot of the people who joined post-Reddit are incompatible and uninterested in those objectives.

    I can see where the lemmy framework worked when no one used it, and I can see why it would immediately fail in the face of hundreds of thousands of new users. If millions are coming, it will only get worse. No doubt, the admins are aware that they’ll lose 80, maybe 90% of their userbase if they leave Lemmy, but it’s not so long ago that their userbase was only 10-20% of what it is today.

    If I lose this little window into cultures I would not otherwise see, I will be a lesser person for it, but I can accept that it was not meant for me in the first place.