-
7 votes
-
US civil engineers bent the rules to give New Orleans extra protection from hurricanes
9 votes -
At least 216,000 children were victims of sexual assault by the French Catholic Church
13 votes -
100% CPU: my fault?
9 votes -
Don’t be surprised about Facebook and teen girls. That’s what Facebook is.
12 votes -
ChessCoach – A neural network-based chess engine capable of natural language commentary
3 votes -
Telegram founder says over seventy million new users joined during Facebook outage
15 votes -
Smoke alarms, deadly differences
7 votes -
Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet
11 votes -
TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here. Please just try to provide fair warning of...
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
6 votes -
What's your smart home setup?
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup? I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart...
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup?
I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart door locks. I bought a house and it now remotes, motion/door sensors, light switches, and more.
After trying all of the platforms you can think of (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Homekit, Homekit + Homebridge, Home Assistant, and more), I settled on Home Assistant earlier this year. As I've bought stuff over the years, I've tried to get things that support more than just one platform to avoid being too locked in to one ecosystem. Apple's Home platform is nice, but I can't use it if I want to switch to an Android phone.
Like many of us, I've had some free time during the pandemic, so I put some work into getting Home Assistant up and running. It's definitely not for the average consumer. It requires quite a bit of manual editing of code to get it working perfectly but I've spent the past few months learning how to customize it and get things working just how I want them.
I've also been working toward replacing the few components that rely on cloud services with equivalents that can work locally, so I'm not beholden to a cloud service that could disappear eventually.
I also started automating more and more things:
- I added a Zigbee controller and a bunch of motion sensors to automatically turn lights on and off as people enter/leave rooms.
- Turn on the lights for my dogs if no one is home at dusk.
- A very nice bedtime routine that turns off all the lights in the house, turns on the bedroom TV, arms the security system and then turns on the bedroom lights and slowly fades them out over the next half hour. That last one has been great for helping me get to sleep.
- My favorite is an NFC tag hidden under the living room coffee table that I can scan. It turns on the TV and receiver, switches to the correct inputs and turns on the light strips I have around the living room. If my wife isn't home, it also turns off all the other lights in the house.
I'd love to hear what other people have been doing.
10 votes -
Super Smash Bros.™ Ultimate – Battling with Sora – Nintendo Switch
12 votes -
Four things I liked in Q3
1 vote -
A case study in NIMBY entitlement: The former mayor of Beverly Hills is so mad about duplexes
12 votes -
Is it me or are "news" articles on the web getting more and more irritating to read
I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some...
I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some information over and over again 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways. My most recent experience was this article about some hackers selling information on billions of Facebook users.
The article starts off with the title "Personal Information of More Than 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum". Straightforward and to the point. Next we get this paragraph in bold:
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.
Next is a bullet list of the highlights of the incident:
Highlights:
- Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
- Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
- Data appears to be authentic.
- Personal data obtained through web scraping.
- Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
- Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.
This rehashes the number (1.5 billion) and place (Facebook), but does contain new information like what was leaked, and some unsubstantiated claims about whether it's authentic and how it was obtained.
The next paragraph repeats the 1.5 billion number a fourth time, and repeats that the data is available on a hacker forum. Two paragraphs later, we get another list of bullet points which are identical to the 2nd bullet point above; namely that the info contains:
According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:
- Name
- Location
- Gender
- Phone number
- User ID
At this point I stop reading because I mistakenly think that I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It's an incredibly unpleasant experience.
Is anyone else seeing this? I've been seeing this not just on smaller sites like the one linked here, but on major news sites like CNBC and CNN, too. I know that news sites are having their budgets slashed, etc., but I literally can't read articles like this. I mean my brain just won't let me complete them because it thinks it's caught in a loop or something. It's hard to describe.
18 votes -
Covid, in retreat
13 votes -
Jony Ive on what he misses most about Steve Jobs
4 votes -
Japan's Parliament elects former diplomat Fumio Kishida as new PM
7 votes -
Many economics experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including the importance of inflation expectations
12 votes -
When I ran for US President, it messed with my head
13 votes -
The NYT's partisan tale about COVID and the unvaccinated is rife with sloppy data analysis
2 votes -
What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at...
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
8 votes -
Bangle.js 2 is a hackable, open source smartwatch that runs JavaScript
12 votes -
Military declares coup in Guinea
11 votes -
India’s power outage risks increase as coal stockpiles plummet
7 votes -
Ludum Dare 49 - Theme: Unstable
8 votes -
A decade of sore winners
3 votes -
Shower thought ... Maybe everything else is mutating, too?
My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the...
My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the same thing). Presumably, just your random cold/flu-type bug. A remote co-worker (400 km away, both of us in EU) has been experiencing a similar illness for over a week now, still not over it.
It took the three of us almost 2 weeks to get over it. The symptoms kept changing every 1-2 days (sore throat, then harsh cough, then chest/lung pain, then gas and intestinal issues, then headache, then back to coughing); had a false "I'm all better now" moment halfway thru, then Phase 2 kicked in. On top of which, I don't get sick much, and when I do, it's usually very mild and I'm over it very quickly.
So, I have a hypothesis. Thanks to all of the social distancing, OCD hand-washing, masking, etc for the past 18 months, "regular" colds/flus/germs have probably been going through some pretty extreme evolutionary stresses, just like Covid ... and are probably mutating/evolving a lot, just like Covid. Except all the researchers and specialists are pretty much completely preoccupied with Covid research/work, so no one has been paying much attention to all the other day-to-day respiratory illnesses.
I've seen a fair bit of news about how colds/flus have been much less common of late, due to the Covid-precautionary measures, but I have not seen any research or discussion about how those measures might be impacting other non-Covid illnesses.
Thoughts?
10 votes -
Massive oil spill sends crude onto Orange County, CA beaches
6 votes -
In an open letter, five Nordic sports ministers have urged the International Handball Federation to review their uniform rules for female athletes
11 votes -
Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”
11 votes -
Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of September 27
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the...
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
7 votes -
George Washington and the first mass US military inoculation
6 votes -
A German power plant just ran out of coal in latest energy shock
8 votes -
Pandora Papers - Billions hidden beyond reach
26 votes -
DeepMind worked with UK weather forecasters to create a model that was better at making short term predictions than existing systems
9 votes -
The decreasing cost of renewables unlikely to plateau anytime soon
13 votes -
What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do...
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
6 votes -
Finally, on CBS, the football matches the business cards
2 votes -
US phone companies must now block carriers that didn’t meet FCC robocall deadline
18 votes -
Groups don't show unsubscribed topics
On https://tildes.net/groups it looks like at least on Firefox 88 the normal link color: a.link-user:visited, a.link-group:visited is overriding the unsubscribed color:...
On https://tildes.net/groups it looks like at least on Firefox 88 the normal link color:
a.link-user:visited, a.link-group:visited
is overriding the unsubscribed color:
.group-list-item-not-subscribed a.link-group
4 votes -
How close is nuclear fusion power?
8 votes -
The poisons – real and fictional – used in Bond films
7 votes -
Whoops, Tildes joins the list of sites that forgot to renew their SSL certificates
Tildes was inaccessible for about 2 hours today because the SSL certificate expired, and I wasn't at home at the time to be able to fix it immediately. I'm going to blame it on Let's Encrypt (the...
Tildes was inaccessible for about 2 hours today because the SSL certificate expired, and I wasn't at home at the time to be able to fix it immediately.
I'm going to blame it on Let's Encrypt (the organization that I get the certificates through). They've always sent multiple warning emails starting weeks before the cert expires, but for some reason this time they didn't send any at all. I'll set something else up for future expiries and stop depending on them to be my reminder to renew it.
63 votes -
Why California is shutting down its last nuclear plant
8 votes -
Tildes Game Review Journal - October 2021
Thanks to all who posted to or read last month's trial run of this topic. Let's try another month! This thread is for when you're done with a game and you want to give your finalized overview of...
Thanks to all who posted to or read last month's trial run of this topic. Let's try another month!
This thread is for when you're done with a game and you want to give your finalized overview of it. Did you enjoy it? What did it do well? What were some of its frustrations? Would you recommend it to others? That sort of thing.
For ease of readability, please bold the title for the game you're reviewing.
Also, please mark all spoilers as well using the following formatting:
<details> <summary>Spoilers</summary> Spoiler text goes here. </details>
5 votes -
Mathematician answers chess problem about attacking queens
8 votes -
Linux (In)security
10 votes -
Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness
7 votes -
What is something you've changed your mind about recently?
What's something you've changed your mind about recently? What prompted the change?
44 votes