Sinking in your parking spot is a load bearing failure, caused by insufficient subgrade thickness and/or substantial water saturation of the underlying soil. You already suspect this, although “it got washed away” isn’t plausible.

The necessary thickness of base depends on your soil composition - see later in the linked video where he talks about the “force cone” spreading downwards to the native soil. The thicker your base, the larger the area of soil that force applies over and the more durable it is.

But you want actual numbers and you’re a homeowner with a relatively small job talking to possibly shady contractors. I can’t really help you there. Reliable numbers will only come from an engineering firm and they would be doing soil sample analysis. The contractors all just want to do a Good Enough job and they know that homeowners are very sensitive on price so they will skimp economize for you where they think they can.

Everyone should be offering “class II road base” under the asphalt, which is a mix of sizes in crushed stone, all with sharp/angular edges to resist movement.

Not a complete answer but hopefully that gives you a better baseline understanding in future conversations. Good luck!

throwing away your old ICE car

But most people wouldn’t send their old car to the scrap heap, they would sell it on the secondary market to someone else (or a dealer, who would auction it into the secondary market). The old car would then continue to burn gas for likely many more years, until it “falls apart” anyway.

Stepping back, your old car may be the first in a chain of older (or more falling-apart) vehicles getting traded out, all the way down to one that really does get fully retired, or replacing one that was totaled in a collision. So choosing to keep it deprives someone else of its availability and thereby drives up used prices slightly.

For any study of this type of net effect, the authors need to pick a boundary for what gets considered. How many secondary market transactions do you study in that replacement chain, and what do those buyers substitute when the original ICE vehicle is not replaced with an EV? How far do you go in the pollution and other supply chain effects of manufacturing a new vehicle? I didn’t read a machine translation of your Swiss link, so I don’t know where the study authors drew the bounds, but I suspect it’s easy to choose and defend framing that supports either conclusion.

In my personal calculation, I can only see one step down the used chain, wherein my old vehicle would continue to be driven by someone else, so replacing it with an EV wouldn’t make a substantial difference. I love my old car with no surveillance, so I’m in no hurry to switch even though I’ll presumably buy an EV eventually.

Ultimately this is just one more example that that’s no ethical consumption within capitalism.

I’m kinda looking forward to the collapse of the Ai bubble.

Once upon a time, a lot of telecom bubble startups went under and left behind lots of dark fiber optic cable that others snatched up for far less than the capital cost of construction. But eventually, over subsequent decades, most of it was put into use. I expect these AI data centers will be similar, except a bunch of them are being built in stupid ways like with their own on site electricity generation.

I’m not that excited about what people will do with all of the super cheap bankruptcy auction surplus (formerly AI) data compute capacity. But at least it will be a novel problem.

If LLMs don’t turn into AGI and instead the AI bubble pops, maybe some of the data centers don’t get finished. Even so, many of the rest will likely continue to operate and consume water.

The US federal government will soon start decreeing how the overdrawn Colorado River will be resolved and things will get very ugly. Western water rights law is an unsustainable construct and all real solutions hurt rich people (even as they also hurt everyone else). Maybe the current administration is waiting until enough of the data centers are built before “solving” the water crisis by prioritizing AI over crops and humans in the name of national security.

But we’re still living in a bad B movie. If AGI actually works and we get SkyNet in the end, then the water infrastructure in most of those regions is probably plenty for the machines once all of the humans are gone.

Autoclanking

There are almost certainly several such instances, gobbling up content and feeding it to LLM training, ignoring all deletes.

Not to discount the usefulness or complexity of curl in any way, but it’s not one of the larger codebases out there. It’s also pretty darned good. Firefox seems to have a very positive experience with Mythos, but they also had their own internal test harnesses from prior work, ready to utilize LLM analysis at scale. It was far more intensive than having a third party run something on their behalf and produce a report.

Clankers gonna clank

Autoclanking

Never trust a sharkbite for long term use. Never seal it behind drywall. It may be code compliant but that’s a disaster waiting to happen.

I’ve had 50 year old copper develop pinhole leaks from internal corrosion but it depends on your water quality. I would replace everything that’s easy to access while you have it all open. That should be a relatively moderate additional overall expense and could save you huge regret later.

But if you sweat the copper yourself and do a mediocre job you could regret it much sooner. It’s not excessively difficult but there is a bit of an art to it. Watch some videos and practice on scraps first.

Clean the copper ends very well. Especially on the ends of the existing pipe. Buy tools to make that easy. Use flux (apply with an acid brush). Wash off the flux residue after the joint cools. It’s corrosive, but you really only need to wipe it away with a wet rag. A simple propane torch is fine, but you need to hit the correct temperature. Watch the rainbow color changes in the copper while you practice. Also buy a a flame cloth/heat shield to protect your structure (not strictly necessary, but you’re a beginner).

Copper is expensive these days, but don’t cheap out with M-type. Use L, which is slightly thicker. K is only needed when buried outside.

PEX B is pretty easy (except for tight spaces), but you need to ensure you get correct alignment of the crimp rings, and use the checker tool to ensure correct crimping. The plastic degrades in UV light and is a flood risk when accessible by chewing rodents in breached attic or crawl space. Use copper stub outs if you go with PEX. You can crimp onto those, but you’ll still need to sweat on a copper/PEX adapter at the point you cut the existing pipes.

PEX A requires much more expensive tools and it’s only appropriate for professional plumbers. Same with ProPress (crimped copper), which I think is inferior to sweat fittings anyway. It’s optimized for installation speed & reducing labor costs, and the seal comes from embedded EDPM gaskets rather than solder.

My favorite option is that they don’t access the encrypted communications, they access messages before encryption takes place and send copies home for safe keeping. With a closed source client they can do anything they want to the plaintext even if they handle the ciphertext appropriately.

Political divisions tend to use rivers as borders because they’re naturally difficult to cross, but mountain ranges/watershed boundaries would make much more sense for self-sufficiency among the divisions without excessive squabbling. Although BC/Alberta did a good job in that regard!

So yes, it’s mostly Northern California that could join the Cascadia party. Hence my qualifier of “intact”. Unfortunately, NorCal is predominantly on the red team politically.

It wouldn’t be as devastating (or possible) to cut off the Pend Oreille or Spokane rivers from adding to the Columbia.

California can’t survive intact without the Colorado river, so you need to convince at least NV, AZ, UT, and probably CO to come too. If California left but Nevada was still part of Trumplandia one of the first things they would do is shut off all outflow from the Hoover Dam.

I didn’t see anything in there about forcing authoritative TLD DNS servers to censor SOA records of disfavored domains, and it’s quite easy to run your own recursive resolver at home. It’s trivial, for example, to configure pihole to use unbound to do recursive resolving locally, and of course that gives you a bunch of ad blocking as well (although not nearly as good as UBO).

I wonder if this ruling will lead to an uptick in French usage of pihole and similar projects. It would be funny to see a future lawsuit from an advertiser or their trade group arguing against the copyright folks.

If you’re deliberating between Apple Maps and Google Maps, the only advantage Apple ever had was the lack of ads. Apple’s data is worse, routing is worse, navigation UI is worse (which of the lanes should you be in right now for your next turn), etc. It’s astounding that Apple would enshittify this right now when they’re not even close to being a decent replacement for the primary competition.

This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:

The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.

This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

Long live Signal!

That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of kite photography. Modern camera tech should make it especially light and awesome.