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.

It’s always been inconsistent for me and I’ve usually suspected it to be the fault of the instance but I don’t know.

But the Fediverse is very public so of course somebody else is recording and republishing all the data:

Here’s your voting history

Or stealing lit cigarettes out of human mouths. That’s a kind of comedy gold I can get behind.

Kermit, so fancy! I remember the excitement of discovering ZMODEM and how much better it was than the old standard of XMODEM.

Mine seems to be sorted by most recent for items with sufficient positive scores (seems like >10). If I scroll back far enough, then the feed continues with lower scored items (1-10) also reverse chronologically. Eventually that reaches as far back as my account age, then it starts over yet again with a different set of low positive score items (1-6), again going back a long time reverse chronologically. The net negative items never show up at all unless they are very recent, maybe less than one week old.

Are you saying that’s not the intentional design when looking at your own profile feed?

I don’t have enough volume in my history on other instances to make a reasonable comparison.

Are you just clicking on be middle icon at the bottom of your voyager UI (the one that is labeled with your home instance name)? That feed seems to be a mix of your comments and posts with an undisclosed filtering algorithm applied to it. If you click Comments at the top of that feed then it should show you all of your comments. My experience has been that comments with low or negative points tend to get filtered out of the main profile feed after a few days, and my guess is that the decision was motivated by trying to keep you from dwelling on any times when you get strongly downvoted.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.