Yeah they’ve got a point. I don’t Google things anymore either. Fuck Google.

Kessler syndrome seems increasingly inevitable as we potentially approach some of the great filters that explain why we’ve never met or detected any other civilizations in the universe. It’s been a fun ride, folks, but it seems like we might not have threaded this particular needle, finding it was ultimately narrower and our thread thicker and clumsier than we expected and we might instead be reaching the end of the road on our multiplanetary ambitions. Will we get to Mars? Maybe. Will we survive and thrive there? Doubtful.

You mean a bunch of advertising and media companies that control and gatekeep the news are hyping something that’s making them trillions of dollars? That seems… so unbelievable!

Russia can’t steal it, if we steal it first!

I recommend Librewolf, it’s a lot more privacy-aggressive out of the box, and you can turn that down a little bit if you need, but otherwise it’s just a more trustworthy Firefox fork as far as I’m concerned. It supports Firefox sync as well (which is telling, because Librewolf takes privacy very seriously and isn’t going to provide too many easy opportunities for you to completely compromise it) Like the other person said sync is E2EE and the hosting server has zero-knowledge of any of your unencrypted data. If Librewolf trusts it, I trust it, and I think you can rest assured that with Librewolf, it’s probably never going to be sabotaged either, which as you imply, is not necessarily true with Firefox.

I don’t recall whether they use Firefox’s sync server directly or if they have their own, but either way, like I said, the server has no knowledge of or access to your unencrypted data.

Most of the countries in the western world have spent so long not really being at risk of being at war that we really have no idea how to react to potentially actually being at war. We are so incredibly unprepared in such incredibly profound ways. Imagine being in a war and not having anti-air defenses around your most important strategic nuclear sites and having to rely on troops shooting at incoming aircraft with what I suspect were simply their service weapons, and almost certainly not even dedicated anti-drone weapons. Yes, drones are sort of new, that’s not really an excuse. New things will happen during a war. You have to be able to react quickly to defend your critical assets at a moment’s notice. The fact that we’re still not doing that properly is a perfect demonstration of how far behind the curve we really are.

I hope this changes soon with the sprawling investments being directed towards defense budgets, but I remain unconvinced, will it just result in more hyper-capable, hyper-expensive techno-wonderweapons? It’s the cheap, good-enough, high-supply things that are currently threatening us, and both history and the present seem to tell us it’s usually the cheap, good enough, high-supply things that both win wars and enable effective defense. Spending money seems like it would imply seriousness, but I don’t think we’re actually taking this seriously enough, yet. When you really get serious about war and defense you need to be asking the real questions about what it’s going to take to win, not just throwing money at the problem.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they’re just sandbagging and waiting for the right moment to reveal our true defensive preparations, but I know a lot of people in various western militaries, and I honestly don’t think so at all, and neither do they. If we are more prepared than we look, it’s a pretty goddamn well-kept secret.

My old LG SmartTV seems most reliable at playing mkv files but I think mp4 is pretty standard.

It’s very unlikely you are infected by anything unless you were using some crazy settings or addons, or unless you were hit by some extreme 0-day exploit that hasn’t become widespread yet. Firefox does not and normally cannot execute files it downloads automatically nor are videos a likely risk for remote code execution now that we have technologies like data execution prevention built into processors, if you’re attacked by malware it will rely on some other vector or trickery to get you to execute the file. I would expect that your performance issues are unrelated, but you should also check Firefox’s addons and extensions as well as your task manager startup tab to make sure nothing has obviously been installed without your knowledge.

One thing that sticks out at me is the fact that you only mention the file’s “title” and if you haven’t already you should make sure Windows Explorer is set up to ALWAYS show full file extensions, that’s like a basic safety measure that really should be on by default but isn’t, and it’s really mandatory if you’re messing around on the darker parts of the web. You have to know what kind of file extension it is because that affects what Windows is going to do with it, and when it’s supposed to be one thing and Windows is going to do something different with it that’s a huge red flag that it’s malware trying to trick you into running it.

You can upload the file to virustotal if you want to scan it but it doesn’t sound likely that it even ran unless you did something bad by accident.

The first problem would be the height of the intervening terrain and even if you could overcome that, you still have to contend with friction inside the pipe which is a factor most people don’t think about for short distances but when you start trying to carry water long distances through a pipe, friction becomes massive. An ideal siphon inside an ideal pipe is simply a question of height between source and destination. However in the real world, a siphon isn’t unlimited or ideal. There is a height it can’t overcome and it’s actually not very high at all, geographically speaking. The maximum height of a siphon is only around 10 meters. The terrain between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea is pretty flat, but it’s probably not that flat. I’m not going to pretend I’ve done a precise survey of potential routes, but I’d expect there’s probably some bumps in elevation along the way that’s realistically going to need say, 100 meters of lift to overcome. But even 11 meters would simply end the conversation. There’s simply no way around that for a siphon.

The reason for this height limitation has to do with the atmospheric pressure required to keep the water liquid, because once it no longer has enough pressure on it to keep it liquid, it simply vaporizes before it reaches the height it needs to and the siphon is broken before it even starts. In a vacuum, at standard temperature, water instantly vaporizes. The external atmospheric pressure (which is acting on the entire water column up to its highest point, to get it over the hill) is all that is keeping the water in its liquid form inside the siphon. The higher you go, the more work that external pressure is doing, and eventually the weight of the water column exceeds the pressure at the bottom of the water column and again, the siphon breaks.

The friction is the other problem. Even if you could limit your route to no more than 10 meters above the Red Sea, you’re also asking the siphon to not only lift it to that height, but also carry that water through 200 kilometers of pipe or more. We don’t think of pipes as having friction, but they do, and it’s very significant at those distances, especially when your power source (gravity, in this case) is already operating near its absolute limits due to the height problem we already discussed. What you hoped would be a gusher of a siphon will end up being a trickle, if anything at all, with most of the water just sitting idle in the pipe to maintain the siphon while a little dribbles its way slowly through to the destination.

Finally you’ve got all kinds of other more obscure effects at play at those scales, like water’s surface tension, variability of flow rates, possible pinhole leaks in the pipe that will introduce air, offgassing of dissolved gases in the water or even from the pipe itself, and temperature gradients inside the pipe. All of these are going to play havoc with the ability to form and sustain a reliable siphon.

In short, siphons are actually pretty limited, we don’t see much of those limitations on the small scale, but on the larger scale of this project those limitations become very serious, very quickly and basically remove the possibility of using a siphon for any realistic practical water relocation project. Almost all of those go away very quickly when you pressurize the system with a pump instead of relying on atmospheric pressure alone. It’s a fun thought experiment, but in practice a simple electric pump turns out to be a pretty cheap way to solve a lot of otherwise really complex hydrodynamic problems, and when that’s the case, it’s not really worth teasing out a solution to those problems with all kinds of complicated engineering. Just throw a pump at the problem and call it a day, job done.

Ah yes, the famously reliable, safe, and effective Russian submarines, workhorse of the Russian navy. What should they buy next? Some guided missile cruisers? How about an aircraft carrier?

You may not agree with what the military does, but you have to respect them for that reason alone, above all else.

This premise must be rejected. You do NOT have to respect them for that reason alone, and certainly not above all else.

Did Nazi soldiers deserve respect, because they were just following orders and they followed those orders and what options did they really have? Were they not also facing the potential of harsh punishment if they did not?

Not having good alternative options is not an excuse for following orders you know are wrong. Respect is earned when your morality supersedes your orders, despite the potential (and sometimes very real and significant) punishments. Your intentions only get you so far, eventually you need to act or else any remaining respect for you will be gone.

I find it hard to accept Clippy as being too friendly and nonthreatening to adequately demonstrate my unfathomable rage towards technology companies.

The US is not “discovering” the corruption, the US is creating the corruption.

Ukraine meanwhile is caught between two (self-styled and failing) superpowers through little to no fault of their own, and that is obviously not a great place to be.

Sounds great, I’ll plan on waiting a year or so until I’m convinced they’ve got the bugs worked out, and then buy it just before they announce a new and upgraded version, as is tradition.

Xi understands that Trump is a stupid man and they think they can manipulate him into doing something stupid to advance their interests, which, honestly, they probably can, unless he just does something so stupid that it backfires. Everything’s a gamble with Trump.

According to the protocol they share (ActivityPub) communities and hashtags are essentially the same thing, they’re a grouping containing many posts. Typing out a hashtag is how you tell Mastodon to add your post to that “hashtag group” (and you can add your post to multiple hashtags). In Lemmy, the community you post in IS the group (and you can cross-post it to multiple communities). The result is the same. They’re the same thing, just different ways of connecting your posts into them, and displayed in very different ways depending on which part of the Fediverse you’re using.

Hey don’t make fun of him too much, he might have to buy another yacht to make himself feel better.

It was, and still is. It hasn’t moved to the US, it just also opened a nonprofit there, so the US donations they receive from US people are tax deductible in the US. If I remember correctly they have also opened a non-profit in Belgium which is I think where they are intending to actually move their assets and do most of their work going forward as I think they’ve had various issues with the German organization also.

So far, I think you’re safe!

Will this become Lemmy’s “test post please ignore”? I guess we’ll see.