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Joined 14 days ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • I think it’s a joke about physicists not understanding tolerances.

    I remember hearing an old story about a company buying signs from a contractor. The contractor produced all kinds of things, so it was fairly straightforward to send them the CAD file and stop worrying about it. One manager did an audit, and realized they were paying hundreds of dollars each for these basic signs. They weren’t fancy or anything, and were just signs throughout the facility that got updated regularly. So why the hell were they paying so much for what should have been a simple print job?

    After some investigating, the manager discovered it was because the company didn’t want to hire an artist to design the signs; They just had one of their engineers do it. And the engineer who did the design forgot to change their default tolerances from 3/1000 of an inch. So to comply with the order as written, the contractor was busting out calipers and meticulously measuring the spacing and sizing on each letter before it shipped out the door.


  • The biggest thing you can’t move is posts and comments, but comm subscriptions, block lists, tags, saved posts etc are all easily exportable and importable to another instance

    Some apps even have this built in directly. Voyager, for instance, has a Migrate option in the settings. Also, many people see the lack of post/comment migration as a bonus. I would burn my Reddit accounts every year or two, simply to avoid any accidental build-up of PII that could be compiled to dox me. Hell, I’ve been on Lemmy for about two years now, and this account was only created a few days ago because I just recently burned my old one.







  • The shelves aren’t even empty. There are thousands of eggs in my local grocery stores. Every single store near me has eggs that are nearing expiration, which means people aren’t buying them. People are seeing the asinine prices, and opting to eat less eggs.

    But the issue is that producers have realized they can blame the specter of inflation or supply chain issues to charge whatever the hell the want. Let’s say they charge $2 per carton, and can reliably sell five cartons at that price. Or they can charge $6 per carton, and reliably sell two cartons. With the latter example they make more money and pay less in shipping since they only had to ship 2/5 the stock. So why wouldn’t they just find an excuse to sell them at $6 per carton? That’s just economics 101.



  • Yeah, the only feasible way to do satellite warfare without creating a ton of debris is to mechanically attach to an enemy satellite and drop it out of orbit.

    Like imagine an autonomous attacker satellite that clamps onto the target satellite, and uses thrusters to drop itself (and the target) into the ocean. Any kind of kinetic weaponry to destroy the target satellite will just end up with a debris cloud around the earth, making future space travel impossible.

    But no country wants to invest in satellites just to intentionally drop them out of orbit. Every single attack would be prohibitively expensive when compared to just firing a missile at the satellite.


  • Holy shit, I had forgotten about SOLDAT. My friends and I used to play that on the library computers in middle school.

    IIRC it had a portable version that you could boot from a flash drive. Or at least the installation happened on your local user account, so it didn’t require admin rights from the school IT team.

    Also, the old Dungeon Siege games. IIRC, 1 and 2 both had LAN multiplayer, where each person took control of a different character. It was basically the groundwork for the gameplay that Dragon Age Origins built upon.


  • Calibre doesn’t natively support reading DRMed files, but there are anti-DRM plugins which are trivial to install. You need to provide a legitimate Kindle serial number for Amazon DRM, as it uses that to de-encrypt the files. When you add the file(s) to your library, the plugin automatically runs as a file conversion. It basically converts it from a DRM-locked .epub/.azw3 to a DRM-free .epub/.azw3 instead. Since Calibre already has file conversions built in, the plugin simply uses that existing system to spit out a DRM-free version of the same file, then it adds that to your library instead.






  • Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.

    I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.

    Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.

    To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.


  • Probably worth noting that castle designs at the time basically screamed “this is a trap”. Castles were designed with a courtyard inside of the first gate. Then there was a second gate on the other side of the courtyard. Attackers would be funneled into the courtyard, where they would be surrounded by archers on the tall palace walls. Notice this palace has several courtyards arranged in series, with gatehouses between each one:
    Aerial photo of a chinese castle, showing several courtyards with large gatehouses between them.
    Sima Yi’s fear was that if he had his army enter the gate, it would be closed behind them and they would be trapped in the courtyard. It wasn’t just a sarcastic “Hey come on in” signal as a Hail Mary. It was a very clear “My hidden archers are going to chew you up as soon as the gate closes behind you” signal.