All those folks in the 50+ age group that grew up with "Russia is enemy #1" are probably cycling through waves of intense work and prolonged orgasm.

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the first things considered in strategizing any armed conflict is whether they want Russia and China to know that we have X or are capable of Y. Russia has shown their hand. If they could do more, they would have by now.

It has also taught NATO that Russia is still in the barbaric tactics mindset. Hospitals, schools, churches, shipping centers - they're all valid targets. If Russia wants a position, they'll level the entire town. That certainly changes the plans, of anyone thought they would abode by the Geneva Conventions.

I got around 5 links deep for each of the links in the admin's post, and fuck if I know. There was an argumentative user, but they were articulate and thoughtful. Not dropping slurs or wasting space nonsense, but still bordering on "edgy". The person pushing the defederation appeared to be bullying them and on a power trip.

It was embarrassing. That's all I took away. (My opinion can change if someone digs through the shitpiles of nothingness to pull up some actual naughty posts, but that's not going to be me.)

I almost thought I had written your comment and completely forgot about it. No, I just almost made the exact comment and want that hour of my life back.

If there was some over the top racist rant, I sure didn't see it. And the admin pushing for the defederation sounds so bizarre. Bizarre is the best word I could come up with because "petty" makes me think it was like high school politics. This is closer to a grade school sandbox argument.

The worst I saw was "defedfags" and it was used in a way that was meant to highlight how they never said anything offensive. Like saying, "If you thought what I said before was offensive, let's see how you respond to something intended to be negative."

The crazy thing is that the decision is being made because the admin just liked a post. It's not even because of the post content - which has nothing controversial and appeared maybe 8 times in my Lemmy/kbin feed yesterday.

Editing to add that this is the article: https://kbin.social/search?q=wakeup+call

Well, terrorists became boring, and they still want the loony wing of the GOP's clicks, so best to back off on Nazis and pro-Russians, leaving pedophiles as the safest bet.

I've seen nothing about neurodivergent harassing here.

Harassing assholes? Sure. Perhaps yo have trouble separating the two?

Just thought I'd add this report from the AZ health department. This breaks down the factors MUCH better and comes to a similar, but not quite as extreme, conclusion. Only part is normalized for population, but it gives an idea of how to scale the numbers.

I'm 110% on board with global warming, but this graph is misleading.

The author needs to at least correct for population changes (heat deaths per X residents). Even better would be to account for changing demographics, like age and county. From this random stats website, it looks like there has been a dramatic increase in proportion of older residents since 1970. Old people are more likely to die, so more elders = more deaths.

If I wasn't about to head to bed, I might try to fix it, but.... sleep.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure there has been an increase in small plane crashes in AZ. The hot air is much thinner than most pilots are used to, so they tend to forget accounting for changes in thrust and climb rates. I'm pretty sure a couple happened in just the last few weeks.

Probably based on the Cap'n Crunch whistle pay phone hack.

Someone correct me if I've missed a few bits, but here's the story...

First, a little history.

Payphones were common. If you're younger, you've probably seen them in movies. To operate them, you picked up the handset, listened for the dial tone (to make sure no one yanked the cord loose), inserted the amount shown by the coin slot, and then dialed. You have a limited amount of time before an automatic message would ask you to add more money. If you dialed a long distance number, a message would play telling you how much more you needed to insert.

There were no digital controls to this - no modern networking. The primitive "computers" were more like equipment you'd see in a science class. So, to deal with the transaction details, the coin slot mechanism would detect the type of coin inserted, mute the microphone on the handset, and transmit a series of tones. Just voltage spikes. The muting prevented the background noise from interfering with the signal detection. Drop a quarter in the slot and you'd hear the background noise suddenly disappear followed by some tapping sounds (this was just bleed through).

It's also relevant to know that cereals used to include a cheap, little toy inside. At one point, Cap'n Crunch had a whistle which had a pitch of 2600Hz.

The story goes that someone* figured out that the tones sent by the payphones were at 2600Hz - same as the whistle. You could pick up a payphone handset and puff into the whistle a certain number of times, and ti would be detected as control signals (inserting money).

That's right! Free phone calls to anywhere. I'm hazy on the specifics, but I'm pretty sure there were other tricks you could do, like directly calling restricted technician numbers, too. The reason the 2600Hz tone was special had to do with something like it was used as a general signal that didn't trigger billing.

It knocked the idea of phone hacking, or "phreaking", from a little known quirk, to an entire movement. Some of the stuff was wild and if you're interested, look up the different "boxes" that people distributed blueprints for. Eventually, the phone companies caught on and started making it harder to get at wires and more sophisticated coin receptacles.

If you've ever seen the magazine 2600 back in the 90s and early 00s, that's the origin of the name.

All that is to say, if you knew nothing about technology and watched a guy whistle into a phone to get special access, you'd probably be freaked out. Who knows what that maniac could do with a flute!

• I could have sworn it was Mitnick, but might have been someone else.

If you're missing Reddit, here, I'll give you that fix...

"I don't know what you're talking about. All my posts get 14million+ replies. Git gud."

"Ackshully, what you're calling Lemmy is the server software, which is only a part of the ActivityPub protocol... (4 paragraphs of technical stuff)."

"And my Axe!"

"Wait, what's a Lemmy?"

"Have you considered that these feelings might be a sign of depression? I took half a semester of a psychology class in college and..."

"Bro, don't doubt yourself. Fuck the haters."

"Bro, you doubt yourself because you know it's true. Get alpha."

"I thought this too, but then I got (some worthless product) and it fixed everything! I'm not affiliated in the sense that it is my product."

"You could post to both! Step 1: Post to Reddit. Step 2: Post to Lemmy. Step 3: ... Step 4: Profit!"

"Man, this sub doesn't stick to its own rules. He doesn't even mention federation. Someone ban this clown!"

"I am so insulted by this that I'm unsubbing, throwing my computer out the window, building a rocket, and flying off to Mars."

"I am so insulted by all these replies that I'm unsubbing, throwing..."

"Oh no! I have too many social media platforms to post on!" There are kids dying from space-based lasers all across the world. Talk about first world problems..."

"Hey I think this is the thing that is in more of for every in the past inside."

Feeling better?

It might be worth noting that the platform is stable, but still growing. Expect little quirks; we're dealing with a big influx of new users.

For example, I joined during the first big wave of signups and the servers were having trouble keeping up with the sudden spike in activity (10 to 1000x+ new posts/users/instances). I would sometimes see federated content, sometimes not. After 12 hours and a massive effort by the devs, everything became MUCH more stable.

There will be bugs, but they are actively being squashed at breakneck speed.

For example, one that I encounter regularly is leaving a thread open in a background tab too long (on Firefox) eventually stops syncing with the server. When I eventually get to that tab, the data is old and attempting to interact (click arrows, reply, subscribe, etc.) send me to an error page. The fix? Refresh the page if was open more that 30 minutes ago. It's a minor bug that will eventually be fixed, so give it time.

I also wanted to throw some advice out there, in case it's useful...

If they're ever confused, there are plenty of support communities/magazines. First, check if others have posted about the same problem. If they haven't, feel free to ask. The NoStupidQuestions community hosts a ton of simple Fediverse-related questions posted by users, and it has some of the highest engagement on the platform. I know the reluctance of posting may have been ground into you by Reddit, but (a) this isn't Reddit, and (b) we're all new here.

There is a slight learning curve, so canoodle around a bit to get a feel for this new Reddit-esque multiverse. Read a few FAQs, skim the support communities, follow a few rabbit holes.

Here's what I suspect is a semi-normal new user experience (because it was mine :) ):

• To start, you'll want to register an account, so you do. You'll click a few stories, try to comment, and find you're not logged in and can't log in. You'll notice you're not on the original server. Do you have to register a million accounts? That makes no sense! The answer is no.

• Next, you'll want to understand why. That post you clicked took you to another instance (think of them as servers). So, how do you post a comment on another instance? Ah, from your home instance. So, did it matter where I registered? Yes and no, but mostly no.

• • Keep going down the account rabbit hole and you'll read about the pros and cons of running your own instance, how federation/defederation works, and other instance-related topics,
• • Or, hop back out and proceed to comment on the post you read. Wait. My comment has no votes. The path forks again.
• • • Is there something like Reddit's karma system? Down the voting/rep rabbit hole!
• • • Is it considered bad form to vote for my own comment/post? (There's no consensus right now, so don't worry.) Down the Lemmy/Kbin etiquette rabbit hole!

You'll eventually go back to hit on those forks in the path you didn't take. Follow whichever path suits you best and expand from there.

So, we have the Free Russian liberation group wandering around and taking random towns from Putin. Then we have part of Wagner literally rolling up to military headquarters in tanks, forcing the head to flee. Right now, AFAICT, they're cruising up the highway to Moscow, which is being carved up by trench diggers of the Russian army in anticipation of the convoy. Then there are statements by Kadyrov that seem to support Putin, making it a double coup (though I haven't seen anything between the Wagner subgroups).

I think this is a Civil Double Mu-terr-coup-tionary Attack (mutiny, terrorist attack, military coup, revolution). Fucking Wild.

Whatever, nerd.

Haha just kidding. I agree. I bumped into some market study about Reddit (probably on Reddit) a couple months ago that found ~95% of the most upvoted comments were 2 sentences or less. So much for deep, meaningful conversation.

Makes sense, though. If you weren't getting much out of Reddit's vapid content it was probably easier to escape, along with old-ish folks like me, who have lived through this type of thing many times. Reddit became pretty shitty, and I don't see it getting any better. While purging my accounts, I took a peak at the new interface. What a hellscape without adblock and the old site on life support.

Welcome aboard!