Honestly it sounds like Canada (minus the transgender panic). Trump is a POS but that doesn’t mean that the declining quality of education is not a real problem.

My wife teaches college and trade school and the quality of incoming students declines every year as since Covid for some reason the public schools have had very low requirements for passing a grade level. Some can’t even add fractions. Most can’t rearrange an equation. A large fraction panic and have anxiety attacks when taking tests, and just stare at the paper like a deer in the headlights.

My daughter is now in grade 5 and they were teaching them practically nothing and not even grading them. Just “good” “adequate” or “poor” based on how well the teacher “thinks they know the material”. No discipline, no challenge. And it honestly seems true that they’re teaching more cultural topics and less core math/science/English.

Thankfully she has a teacher and an engineer for parents, is a voracious reader and we’ve taught her math and programming at home. Pulled her out of the public system this year and she’s suddenly telling us what she learned and is excited to go to school…

I wouldn’t even say “before relatively recently” as it depends where you are. Up until my daughter was like 5 or so she was just fully naked or in a swim diaper at the beach and like you say nobody considered that to be “nudity”.

But we’re in rural Canada where we don’t have the pedo paranoia that seems to have taken over America, and we just let our kids run free like we did.

Though it’s growing in the cities and small towns now, not long ago in a nearby town there was a Facebook panic over a man in a white van driving slowly around town. Unsurprisingly he turned out to be a plumber looking for the right address.

beats dealing with android studio

It’s been years since I went near Android for this reason, I’ve had some decent ideas for stuff I’d like to do on mobile but was so turned off on developing for the entire platform. Maybe I’ll have to take a look at some of the new frameworks.

My trouble is I would prefer to write in an embedded style C/C++ for the agricultural stuff I want to do, and all this Java/JS stuff and heavy focus on fancy UX is really not my vibe.

Hah you got it, I used to be a “Chevy guy” when it came to domestic trucks but this was the truck that finally made me say enough, it’s riddled with embarrassing faults and bad design decisions in every system. The Ford truck we also have is an example of new tech that works well and the Chevy just can’t compare.

Simply the stronger it is, the less you need to move, and the easier it is to smuggle.

Then you just cut it back to “standard” strength or attempt to do so. This is a big reason fentanyl displaced heroin, and why you see otherwise undesirable drugs like carfentanyl out there that are even stronger.

Don’t forget classics like Fuck_this_shit1! Fuck_this_shit2!

Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.

And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.

Canada was built by immigrants. But I don’t care what colour someone’s skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can’t even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?

Hopefully you don’t do much driving in the dark, the backlight on our new work truck’s console display glows so brightly even with the display “off” that it ruins your night vision.

Modern would be fine if even half a moment of thought went into non-typical situations, but it’s always some stupid oversight like this. Or the 5000k LED dome lights with a visible PWM frequency. Literally painful.

I prefer to drive with old incandescent dash lights dimmed to nearly nothing, yes I live in a very dark area with no lighting and many road hazards. On a moonless night, the area lit by the headlights is literally all you can see. We run extra lightbars, turning lights etc.

More light outside the truck, not inside. That’s my rant

Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren’t) as you’d need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.

Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren’t on the public net, they don’t even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.

Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.

For the readers that don’t realize exactly how old school, Sam & Fuzzy has been around since the dialup era.

It’s been through just about every phase a comic can go through, he used to write decade-long story arcs, lately he seems to be enjoying drawing simple cute dog comics. I suppose a guy needs a break sometimes from a career like that!

I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn’t know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

If he follows through he’ll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess

You don’t understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are “self-cleaning”.

Kessler Syndrome doesn’t even mean that we can’t fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.

In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.

I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I’m able to post this. It’s been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I’m all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I’m less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.

Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

It’s a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

And yes, it’s terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it’s interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

It’s also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I’m sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.

That’s practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)

They are barn cats though and that’s their job so it’s a little different from the pet cat situation.

So uh yeah as we all know a lot of amphetamines have already been “open source” for a long time.

And we also know the DEA really doesn’t approve of private production… Vyvanse itself only really was created as a produg because of their control of the amphetamine market and their desire for products with lower abuse potential.

If we could get the DEA out of the way anyways, it would make more sense to just make dextroamphetamine as it’s simple, cheap and effective.

I picked up some gel airsoft guns and have been playing steady with my kid.

Anyways I just picked up a rifle which freed up both pistols we had for one person to wield. And let me tell you, dual wielding automatic pistols not only is completely non-functional but also makes you feel like an idiot just holding them. Completely the opposite of Halo.

Same place as ever, impressions and click-through. The theoretical goal here would be to offload all the processing to the user’s PC, making delivery of this customized ad content close to free.

However the largest advertising targets are now mobile by far, and those platforms don’t have GPU to speak of, especially from an AI perspective. So so far not feasible.

Likewise Dunlop makes everything even slightly rubbery, from tires to tennis racquets, golf balls and hydraulic hose

If you live in the right area you may already have one!