I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he’s also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.

On the first offense, depending on circumstances. On the second offense, without exception.

Most cheap non-dimmable LEDs have drivers that use resistors to determine the current to drive through the LEDs. As a rule, these are always set too high to overdrive the LEDs (sometimes as much as twice their rated current) for marginal brightness gains and to burn out the bulb prematurely. I’m obviously unable to actually see directly into the operation of the great minds that design LED lightbulbs but logic leaves me with only those two plausible conclusions, I’ll let you decide which motivation you think is a bigger factor for most manufacturers.

Conveniently, most manufacturers carefully fine-tune this value to prematurely destroy the LEDs at just the right time, which requires careful balancing of resistors, and even MORE conveniently (for us) the cheapest way for them to do this is typically to use two resistors. And MOST conveniently (for us), if you were to carelessly break one of the pair of resistors they use, and leave the other one intact, the current would immediately drop to a very reasonable and appropriate level, generating much less heat, drawing much less power, making LED death extremely unlikely, and only modestly reducing brightness in many cases, because LEDs have non-linear brightness and the heavily overdriven ones are typically FAR beyond the point of diminishing returns. In some cases the reduction in power results in basically no visible difference in light output. In some cases it can be argued they’re literally stealing extra power from your electricity bill and using it as an electric heater for no purpose other than to burn out your own light bulbs prematurely so you have to replace them.

The good news is, like I said, removing one of the responsible resistors instantly solves the design flaw and is usually quite easy even without any special tools or electronics knowledge. BigCliveDotCom calls this “Doobying” the bulbs after the Dubai bulbs that were mentioned in other comments. If you watch some of his videos about LED bulbs you should be able to see the pattern of which resistors to remove, if they are on the board they will basically always be right next to each other and relatively small values (typically in the 20 ohms to 200 ohms range). The only modification I make to his procedure is that I prefer to remove the HIGHER value of the two resistors instead of the lower one, which results in perhaps somewhat less lifetime preservation (still much more than the original setting) and less power savings, but more brightness, and is usually adequately good for my purposes. I also use sturdy tweezers to remove the resistor instead of a screwdriver which seems to me that it would have a higher risk of collateral damage.

Is it a lot of work for a single light bulb? Kind of, yes. But once you get it done a bunch of times, you’ll probably rarely have to do it again, as these bulbs last almost forever. In fact, I have yet to have one actually fail, I am mostly just replacing the occasional old unmodified LED bulb from time to time.

This will not work with dimmable bulbs or certain fancy high end bulbs. Also some are much, much easier to modify than others. Clive calls the ones that are relatively easy “hackable” and it’s really a crapshoot to find them. Some have covers/bulbs/diffusers that are nearly impossible to remove without catastrophic damage to the bulb and/or your hands. Others simply use a different circuit design that doesn’t have resistors. Some only have a single resistor, meaning to change the value you need to solder a new one in its place. In my experience, the bargain-basement, junkiest, least reliable bulbs tend to be the easiest to hack this way and often skimp on things like “gluing the lens on” so it’s easy to get off. But you’ll have to experiment to find a brand and style that works well for this.

So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

The end result is exactly the same.

The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn’t work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar “web” and “offline” installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.

To be fair, in the case of something like a Linux ISO, you are only a tiny fraction of the target or you may not even need to be the target at all to become collateral damage. You only need to be worth $1 to the attacker if there’s 99,999 other people downloading it too, or if there’s one other guy who is worth $99,999 and you don’t need to be worth anything if the guy/organization they’re targeting is worth $10 million. Obviously there are other challenges that would be involved in attacking the torrent swarm like the fact that you’re not likely to have a sole seeder with corrupted checksums, and a naive implementation will almost certainly end up with a corrupted file instead of a working attack, but to someone with the resources and motivation to plan something like this it could get dangerous pretty quickly.

Supply chain attacks are increasingly becoming a serious risk, and we do need to start looking at upgrading security on things like the checksums we’re using to harden them against attackers, who are realizing that this can be a very effective and relatively cheap way to widely distribute malware.

I really like what they’re doing to GIMP lately and I am looking forward to 3.0!

DC adds an extra layer of isolation if something goes wrong, and an extra place for it to fail safely in a nicely enclosed metal box. It takes a really catastrophic failure for a 28A DC power supply to go much beyond 28A for very long. A mains supply can do it all day long unless there’s some other form of protection like a fuse or isolation transformer.

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.

Keep the gray plastic. Remove black clip around the vertical wheel post in the gray plastic. Remove wheel and wheel post. Buy new wheel. Installl new wheel. It will be easier to find a new wheel once you have the old wheel out so you can take measurements. but it’s likely something pretty standard, off-the-shelf. Wheels are something that companies buy, they rarely build them themselves. They typically come as a castoring assembly with wheel, axle, spindle, and attachment post in a variety of common sizes and with a dizzying variety of actual wheels.

Clearly Russia has no idea how to censor different things in different ways to create a specific narrative for people to buy into. They’ve never done anything like that before, they aren’t masters of the craft of disinformation or anything.

Totally unrelated joke, how do you know if a Russian is lying? You don’t, sometimes he could be telling the truth just to trick you.

And I’ll throw in one of my favourite exchanges between two characters:

“Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?” “My dear Doctor, they’re all true.” “Even the lies?” “Especially the lies.”

Trusting something coming out of Russia to be true is foolish, just as foolish is trusting it to be false. Nothing that say is reliable in the slightest or should be used to make any useful conclusion about the real world.

a) Forecasts are very resource-intensive, they are performed on a specific schedule using a computational forecast model. Updating the predictions would require inputting new data and running the model again, and by the time they do that, the next forecast will already be out.

b) Do they know it’s wrong? Where did you get the temperature? From an official weather station? If not, there is no reason to imagine that someone is noticing that this one particular model run was wrong in one particular spot across the whole country and trying to fix it in real time.

c) If you did get the current temperature from an official weather station, that IS your update for it. Real time data from official weather stations is always going to trump the forecast model. What would be the point of updating the forecast when the current measured data from the weather station is now available? That’s like driving down the highway and saying “I was predicting my speed would be close to 65mph, but due to the heavy traffic I’m seeing today, I’m going to re-estimate my speed to be 45mph” when you have a perfectly accurate speedometer right in front of you telling you exactly what speed you are going at all times. Forecasts are only useful for the future, and they can be wrong.

Almost like the context matters and the world isn’t entirely made up of black and white binary choices because we’re not robots or computers and discrete logic does not apply to human moral arguments.

It’s the difference between your friend making you a cup of tea, and Putin making you a cup of tea.

They’re only lying as long as people can continue to over and over find their way around the obstacles they place in the way, and it gets harder all the time. They have more money and more resources and more organization than the hackers trying to defeat them, they’re winning the war of attrition. We may be able to make small breakthroughs here and there, but overall we continue to lose more and more territory, because the amount of effort is disproportionate to the goals. Most of what’s left of the custom ROM community has given up on the losing battle with manufacturers and providers and changed focus to the various freephones but even they have their own troubles and are fragmented and short-lived. Between carriers, manufacturers, and content providers the whole mobile ecosystem is designed to be impenetrable. It is intentionally a fortress full of deadly traps and open source supporters have no hope to breach it anytime soon.

Nuclear weapons in the current era of mutually assured destruction are strictly a deterrent, only useful in a hypothetical retaliatory strike but not as a realistic offensive weapon. The hypothetical situation where this would hypothetically be used would be after Seoul has fallen to the enemy and defeat is inevitable. By having such an ability, this makes it very unattractive for any enemy to try to conquer and fortify Seoul or put any existential pressure on South Korea by any means, since doing so enables the use of a retaliatory nuclear strike, since in such a hypothetical situation there is no chance of regaining Seoul left for South Korea to worry about. Therefore, as a consequence, Seoul is protected in a very material sense by a weapon that will never have to be used in any actual strike ever.

They may only be a deterrent but they continue to be an extremely convincing and effective one.

It’s tough, but I hope you can make it work, because we love having you here!

Big cities are where the good jobs are, but they’re also where all the people are, and not nearly enough housing or land area for all of them, so it basically quickly turns into an unaffordable nightmare unless you have generational wealth/inherited property, which of course you won’t. Unfortunately it seems this is largely where the default “Canadian immigrant experience” will put you, and it’s really not working for anyone as far as I can tell.

I’d argue that you will do better to find yourself a small town to move to that’s more remote. Not necessarily somewhere far north or completely outside civilization (although there are many such places in Canada, and in many cases Canadian government will actually give you extra money if you live in these areas as they can be both extremely remote, extreme weather, and extreme cost of basic necessities) But you can find many small less urbanized areas throughout the country, some are farming communities, some are industry towns (lumber, pulp and paper mills, mining, etc) some are better connected and serviced than others, but generally speaking the further away you get from the major cities and capitals, the cheaper housing will be. Other stuff gets more expensive though, but housing is such a dominant cost of living problem right now that it’s still the main factor you’ll benefit from trying to minimize. Anywhere outside the major cities, jobs will probably suck, but there will be some jobs. They won’t be jobs that take advantage of any education you have, they will be simple jobs in hospitality, services, sales, business administration and other less skilled labor that don’t necessarily pay very well. Cost of living is much lower in more rural areas of Canada – depending on how you are willing to live. It can be a harder life, especially if you’re used to city life. If you can get some support in the community and are willing to sacrifice some conveniences I think it is probably one of the better and more cost effective ways to live for many people right now. But it’s not for everyone, and it may be especially tough for an immigrant as small communities can be insular and isolating. If you can find towns with a Ukrainian diaspora, that would be ideal, and there are already lots of them (and more every day!). Especially in the prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) which have long had a significant Ukrainian community well established.

For jobs I’m really not sure what the outlook is for a Ukrainian immigrant. I know there’s a lot of bureaucracy and obstacles in getting education and skills recognized over here, which is really a shame. I seem to find a lot of Ukrainian people working in hotels and restaurants for example, because it requires no formal certifications or proof of anything to get such a job, however often these people have extensive education and skills. It’s a shame for everyone involved, but a job’s a job, and you need a job to pay the bills, so at least there’s something. If you can find a way into something like the trades or industry, the money is crazy good and people are desperate to hire right now, but again, the process for getting people trained and certified is long and probably very frustrating.

I don’t know what you expectation of standard of living is like. I know Ukraine used to be quite a poor country overall, but I think it was quickly improving before the war, and like Canada, I think there was quite a significant variation between the relatively wealthier cities and the remote rural towns. I think you will find it overall is similar here, although the prices and scales will probably be much different.

Wish you all the luck, and hope you have a great experience here.

It’s adorable that they think this is “the west’s best efforts”. This is more like the west throwing some speculative bids at a penny auction to see if they can score some easy wins and if not then at least they piss off the other guy who’s bidding. If they think this is all the west’s got to offer they’re in for a real big fucking surprise.

Just like tobacco companies were (and still are) fighting to deny the harm caused by their products, there is no surprise that we see the same from plastic, chemical and oil industries. They will scream even louder every time we try to prevent them from killing us, and they will never feel a twinkle of remorse about it. They will murder millions to get at our wallets, they truly don’t care about the consequences as long as they make money.

That’s kind of like seeing a story where a car crashed into someone’s living room and saying “I don’t see the benefit of having houses” even though:

• This is very rare
• Not all sites have equal risk of this happening
• The alternatives you would likely propose have even bigger risks.