An anonymous neighbor wanted to control the appearance of my yard without speaking directly to me. So whoever they are, they filed a report that I have weeds and I was cited.

I wanted to understand what law was being used against me, so I looked it up. It turns out the law is in a body of statutes covering health and public safety. So my 1st thought is: that’s bizarre.. an ugly plant is a health issue?

WTF is a “weed”?

In common language most people are making a value judgment by regarding ugly plants as weeds. But the legal definition is not so subjective. It’s plants that have toxins and allergens. So things like Poison Ivy. The law names 6 or so examples but is not limited to those.

So the law is perhaps reasonably written to control health hazards, not so people can control the appearance of other people’s property. But the enforcers were either clueless about this or they were intellectually dishonest in hopes that those cited would naively create a pretty landscape for the demanding neighbor without first reading the law.

I might have been willing to do a landscape had the process of telling me the yard looks ugly not been as rude as sending cops to bully me.

A citation generally saying “you have weeds” is likely typically a false accusation. They should be writing on the citation exactly which plant specie is toxic or hazardous, just as a speeding ticket says how fast you were measured at.

Please tell me if it is feasible to design a catapult that satisfies these requirements:

• must be able to launch a European¹ washing machine with a range of ~2 meters more than the distance from the street to the front window of Beko headquarters
• ideally it would accept an unmodified payload, which is a machine with the heavy stabliser bricks installed (all components working apart from the control board which is trapped in an error state because Beko will not disclose the secret unlock code)
• must be able to move fast after launch because the machine would ideally be re-used for the next set of requirements:

Nice to have:

• ability to launch a Zanussi refrigerator through the window of AEG headquarters with all components installed (the only thing broken is a cheap proprietary relay switch that is no longer produced)

I actually have two washing machines to return to Beko in this manner of projectile delivery system, both of which have an artificially shortened life due to designed obsolescence. They could perhaps both be launched together or in quick succession. I wonder if it might make more sense to use a crane-like design for a wrecking ball, which could perhaps be delivered multiple times. The complicated task would be releasing it at the righ moment on the final delivery.

¹ The signficance of European washing machines is they are much heavier due to stabilizer bricks. By contrast, American machines tend not to have them, although I’ve never lifted a front-load machine in the US so it may be more related to front-load vs. top load.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27222607

After my bicycle was stolen, the police could not be bothered to look at video surveillance recordings around the scene of the crime. Yet surveillance remains a form of oppression against everyone as police fixate on victimless crimes (drugs, undocumented people, traffic violations, etc).

So new rule:

If police refuse to review surveillance video at the request of a victim, the video camera must be removed.

I noticed two communities where centralised concentration of power is antithetical to the purpose and topic of the community, despite side-bar promotion of the imperial Cloudflare empire:
https://slrpnk.net/post/25302329
https://slrpnk.net/post/25302230

The first voter bias

The problem that emerges is a 2nd asshole kid comes along and up-votes the first asshole without doing a quick and simple check of the facts (whether the msg was sent all over the place). Then the next up-voter thinks: the post got up-voted, so it’s probably true that it was sent all over the place. So they cast their up-vote because there is another up-vote (or simply because they are just like the 1st asshole). And in little time, you have ½ dozen up-votes from people who assume other up-votes signal that the lie must have been verified by someone. So the up-votes influenced by other votes pile on and make the voice of a fool louder than the more civil discourse -- And we have garbage floating to the top.

It’s the same with down votes. If the first voter down votes, the 2nd voter is pulled in that direction. They think if someone votes to suppress, there must be something wrong with the msg so before they even start reading the bias already has inertia. It only takes 1 or 2 downvotes before some readers lose interest in even entering the thread. I know this because I have the same tendency myself, as I am managing my time and I don’t have time for garbage and have to make snap auto-pilot decisions.

Remedy to 1st voter bias

Lemmy servers can be configured to wholly disallow down votes. Some wise admins like that of beehaw (and a few others²) are aware of the problems under the status quo, so they disable down votes. It’s crude but it’s the best result with the blunt tools we have.

It could have a smarter implementation. E.g. The first ~6 or so down-votes could be hidden and only revealed all at once after 7th is cast. Or revealed sooner, one at a time only to offset up-votes.

The bias of demographics

The philosophy of decentralisation drove early engineers to focus on the nuts and bolts of implementing federated networks. The optimism of the Lemmy experiment drove the idea that if hosters simply have ability to control which nodes they federate with, a power balance will sort itself out. It was deployed without the foresight that network effect is still in play because countless users don’t have the insight, principles, or discpline required to do their part in maintaining balance. Fair enough, but it’s a design defect to neglect human factors.

We now have a massive flood of Internet newcomers registering on Lemmy.World like another Facebook, without philosophical insight. Comparable to AOL users in the 1990s. The same lack of insight that eludes them on why concentrated power is a bad idea culminates with their loyalty toward their choice of centralised fiefdoms. So they bring a flood of down votes onto anything putting a negative light on their fiefdom. It’s not just loyalty to their fiefdom. This demographic brings with it a mentality that does not value digital rights in general apart from very basic concepts of speech suppression. The nuances of the anti-big tech culture, digital sovereignty, self determinism and autonomy are lost. This demographic brings votes that do not reflect the principles of the locals.

And votes have consequences. It’s not just an unmerited ego tool. Threadiverse votes have a suppressive effect meant for suppressing actual garbage.

For this reason, Lemmy.World votes on a slrpnk.net thread have relevance to other loyal patrons of Lemmy.World but to locals they just bring distortion. The example shows this clearly, where an anarchist community actually appears to be favoring centralised power contrary to an anarchist code of conduct that rightfully condemns it. From there, I’m not exactly proposing a fix for that aspect, just raising the issue in a rant.

¹ I made up the term “Trump-ian lie”, as it’s inspired by the variety of extreme exaggeration that the orange man routinely conveys despite being superficially instantly detected for what it is.
² va11halla.bar, discover.deltanauten.de, lemmy.casasnow.noho.st, links.nadia.moe, hexbear.net, crazypeople.online, lemminielettrici.it, level-up.zone, lemmy.thefloatinglab.world, lemmy.mods4ever.com, redlemmy.com, pridehaven.social, lem.ph3j.com, chachara.club, lemmy.snoot.tube, linux.community, nsfwaiclub.com, lemmy.balamb.fr, lt.harding.dev, lemmy.blahaj.zone, wolf3d.space, lemmy.curiana.net, discuss.hadan.social, libretechni.ca, beehaw.org, timeperiods.fr

I have something like this just as a sample starting experiment:

digraph unix {
        margin=0;
        ratio=0.5625; /* 9/16 */
        subgraph cluster_cf {
                label = "imperial Cloudflare empire";           
rankdir="LR";orientation="landscape";/*newrank=true;*/
shitjustworks_philly [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philly@sh.itjust.works](/c/philly@sh.itjust.works) “philodelphia”"];
shitjustworks_philosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philosophy@sh.itjust.works](/c/philosophy@sh.itjust.works) “Philosophy”"];
philosophycafe_philosophy_cafe_ja [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philosophy_cafe_ja@philosophy.cafe](/c/philosophy_cafe_ja@philosophy.cafe) “哲学カフェ（日本語）”"];
literaturecafe_Philosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!Philosophy@literature.cafe](/c/Philosophy@literature.cafe) “philosophy”"];
literaturecafe_philosophicalpoetry [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philosophicalpoetry@literature.cafe](/c/philosophicalpoetry@literature.cafe) “Philosophical Poetry”"];
lemmyworld_askphilosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!askphilosophy@lemmy.world](/c/askphilosophy@lemmy.world) “askphilosophy”"];
lemmyworld_debatephilosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!debatephilosophy@lemmy.world](/c/debatephilosophy@lemmy.world) “Debate Philosophy”"];
lemmyworld_indianphilosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!indianphilosophy@lemmy.world](/c/indianphilosophy@lemmy.world) “Hehehh”"];
lemmyworld_philos [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philos@lemmy.world](/c/philos@lemmy.world) “Philos”"];
lemmyworld_philosophy [shape=rectangle, label="🏰[!philosophy@lemmy.world](/c/philosophy@lemmy.world) “Philosophy”"];
        }
        123           [shape=rectangle, label="🗽☯[!naturalphilosophy@slrpnk.net](/c/naturalphilosophy@slrpnk.net)"];
        123 -> shitjustworks_philly [label="blocks",fontcolor=red,color=red];
        { rankdir=TB; cluster_cf}
}

The problem is that the nodes are wide due to wide labels. So they should be vertically stacked inside the subgraph. But they are horizontally all on the same line, making the graph extremely wide. I have fiddled with various rankdir settings (TB and LR), and tried orientation="landscape". These settings have no influence.

IBM Thinkpads have a cult following in part due to not just a good design out of the gate, but the fact that the original designer refused to bend to pressure to change the design every year. The parts are interchangable to large extent between models spanning what, 3—5 years? The guy was under constant pressure; was told to give consumers something fresh by changing up the design. Luckily wisdom prevailed and he disregarded such reckless advice by responding with the mantra: ”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

I’m happy to buy Thinkpads over 15 years old, often sold for ~$10 on the street, because if something is broken or breaks it can still be used for parts to fix other models of Thinkpads from roughly the same decade.

Lenovo acquired Thinkpad from IBM and gradually fucked it up around the T410 or T450 models as they gave in to the demand of consumers giving a shit about shaving off every gram of weight possible at the expense of ditching rugged rollcages and ditching features like optical drives. Watch some videos of people trying to simply remove a keyboard from a T450 to see what I mean.

Whirlpool also has a reputation for not radically changing the design of internal components. I called a repair shop over a washer or tumble dryer that was like 15 or 20 years old. They said at that age, if it’s not Whirlpool they won’t even show up because when the parts change every year then spare parts quickly become unavailable (of course before people start needing the spare parts). They said Whirlpool is an exception because the same parts will be used for a decade or more, which then justifies the business of making spare parts for a prolonged time (I imagine as well the aftermarket likely thrives too).

Grain of salt though because I heard Whirlpool doesn’t always put their label on their own products and Whirlpools also end up getting labeled as Sears Kenmore. If Whirlpool rebadges something else as Whirlpool, how could the design have consistency w/other Whirlpool machines? Anyway, it was just an example and possibly flawed based on one repair shop’s opinion.

The problem -- no metrics

This is all just tribal knowledge propagated ad hoc by word of mouth. The masses don’t generally know this shit and probably most of them don’t care. I think Whirlpool and Thinkpad were not even diligent enough to advertise it. Maybe they did not even know in advance they would have design consistency over the years. Perhaps if they advertise: ”uses the same motor as previous 6 models”, they would fear that it would chase away foolish consumers who would regard that as ”old”, unevolved, or non-innovative. Those same stupid consumers who are brainwashed to chase “latest and greatest” are why we face so much unrepairable garbage on the market.

Since no one tracks design stability/consistency over time (not even Consumer Reports or similar orgs), there is no incentive for manufacturers to try to satisfy the unknown & unmeasured demand that no one is looking at.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474519

Not sure if a local gov could get away with this. Is it sensible to ask the local gov take formal actions to declare copyright as unenforcable on things like service manuals and wiring diagrams, which product makers protect almost like trade secrets? It’s not likely enforced anyway, but a formal step would be needed before leaked service manuals could be distributed by public libraries.

In the EU, manufacturers must share repair docs with third-party /insured/ repair professionals (not consumers) for some specific products like washing machines.

Using a stick

Would it be sensible for a local law to require those professionals who have privileged access to repair docs to share whatever they obtain in the course of their work with a public library?

using a carrot

Would it be sensible for a policy to compensate professionals who have privileged access to repair docs for sharing whatever they obtain in the course of their work with a public library? It could be abused. E.g. an appliance repair shop could submit multiple wiring diagrams for the same product as separate submissions if they are (e.g.) paid $/€ 50 per submission.

If the carrot and stick are both used, repair pros could get 50 for the first submitted doc for each model, but then have a mandate to supply any additional docs they receive for that model without further compensation. Maybe that’s too detailed for a petition.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21033639

The background is here. In short, an SSD with the “Apacer” brand froze itself into read-only mode, presumably due to reaching a point of poor reliability.

The data on the drive is useless. It was part way through installing linux when it happened. I would like to reverse that switch to make one last write operation (to write a live linux distro), which thereafter can be read-only.

I have heard some speculation that the manufacturer uses password to impose read-only mode. If true, then the password would be in the drive’s firmware. Does anyone know what Apacer uses for this password?

We can’t always find BifL products for everything. So it’s at least interesting to steer clear of the utter garbage known to be the opposite of BifL. I just created this community for that purpose:

!unsustainable_products@slrpnk.net

I know it’s unacceptibly high, whatever the figure is. I would like to have a credible accurate CO₂ cost of a Google reCAPTCHA for comparison purposes and also to add weight to my complaint when condemning a CAPTCHA pusher for their anti-human tech.

update:

A study has just emerged showing that traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2.

Email

The convenience¹ of email inspires a huge bias in favor of email (and likely confirmation bias to a large extent). But if you can detach from the tyranny of convenience and look at email critically, it does not look like such an obvious best choice ecologically. Consider these inconvenient facts:

• Advertising → people needlessly buy more stuff as a result of ads that are fed by email content
• Google sells machine learning to fossil fuel corporations (see also YT videov3n8txX3144)
• Google finances climate deniers
• Apple, Amazon, Google & Microsoft have teamed up to block Right-To-Repair laws.
• Google’s Android phones (and other smart devices) are only updated for a few yrs
• Google got caught excluding climate effects except CO₂ from Google Flights search results
• Google accepted money from Bayer Monsanto to bury unfavorable news (and Bayer-Monsanto is environmentally harmful)
• War is bad for the environment and Google supports Russia’s war (but says they are scaling back)

Google’s support for fossil fuels is probably the most notable problem. Microsoft is even worse than Google (see item 11). Even if you are the rare netizen who uses an ethical email provider, probably over 95% of your email traffic is with a gmail or outlook user. Nearly all corporations and gov agencies are using Microsoft for email service but it’s masked by their vanity addresses. Of course PGP is not an option for ~95+% of your email traffic, so MS and Google profit from your traffic in both directions because it all feeds their advertising networks. From there, the ads fuel consumerism, leading to more purchases of shit that takes a toll on the environment.

So how good is email for the environment when you take all factors into account?

I restricted the dirt above to ecocide as this is a climate forum, but once you also account for non-environmental factors like privacy abuses, MS and Google are a clear non-starter.

¹ I use “convenience” more loosely than justified because email is very inconvenient for some of us, like people who run their own mail servers in order to not needlessly feed extra 3rd parties. The anti-spammers have really ruined the convenience and availability of email by going to extremes that impose colatteral damage on legit email. So it’s not really fair to call email convenient any longer.

Fax

A fax can be sent without printing. Your letter just needs to be formatted for US letter or A4 and in a raster graphic. More often than not, the receiving side is a service that attaches the letter to an email and sends it to the recipient, who likely uses Microsoft.

The pros:

• You can withhold your email address from the letter, thus preventing an email reply (which would then feed the MS ad network and lead to more purchases).
• MS must work harder to snoop and OCR the raster image. But do they? Idk. If they do, it would expend more energy. But if they don’t, the msg avoids feeding the ad network.

The cons:

• The electronic payload is more bulky, thus uses more energy per msg.

Paper letters

Paper must be used, but the paper industry has trended toward sustainabilty and some regions have a mandate on recycling paper (yes, it is illegal to toss recyclable paper in with other waste in wise parts of the world). Unprinting has made progress, which would enable you to erase toner from a page to reuse it.

When a recipient in my city uses Google or Microsoft for email and they have no fax number, I print my correspondence on paper and cycle to their mailbox. It’s a way of saying fuck you to the giant surveillance advertisers. And because all kinds of tech rights and ethics are being pissed on by Google and MS in addition to their environmental abuses, this approach is the clear winner for me.

It’s not exactly obvious which choice is the least harmful for the environment without research that really dissects it and looks at the nuts and bolts of it. But I conjecture that if enough people were to switch back to fax and paper letters and cause inconvenience for Microsoft & Google recipients, it would drive them to choose more ethical email providers in order to esacape the burden of scanning paper and then the cost of paying the postal service to carry their reply. This ultimately favors a more sustainable path even if it’s taking a step backwards in order to take more steps forwards.

The raw figures

• email (excl. indirect impacts): 0.3—50g CO₂/msg, depending on msg size
• paper (non-recycled, excl. ink): 4.29—4.74g CO₂/sheet
• envelope: 24g according to a source I don’t trust. That figure does not specify whether it refers to a windowed envelope. I have recently started saving and reusing inbound windowed envelopes by separating the side seam. LaTeX’s KOMAscript pkg has presets for standard envelopes and also gives a way to enter geometry so the address aligns with a nonstandard window.

The email figure is raw energy consumption assuming the email provider is ethical. It does not account for Google and MS’s involvement in the fossil fuel business, the extra consumption of unnecessary goods due to ads, and all the other factors mentioned. If you send a pure text email and the response comes from an org that attaches an image to every response (cosmetic stationary), it’s comparable to the footprint of a sheet of paper + envelope (still without accounting for the Google/MS factor).

It would be interesting to do for Google and Microsoft what the “Banking on Climate Chaos” paper did for banks, which was to rightfully factor all their harmful activity into their footprint.