• 0 Posts
  • 281 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • DMs are exactly what you expect, like private email. Every service has some form of this.

    Reddit chat is real time, designed for shorter messages and real-time communication.

    The other difference is that everybody uses Reddit DMs and nobody uses Reddit chat. I have my chat turned off as do most others that I talk to.

    So this is yet again another example of Reddit management not reading the room and forcing the use of a system people generally don’t want.


  • Sad but true. And they are taking some good stuff with them.

    Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason. Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.

    I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.


  • Yes it can.

    The fob has no idea what it has access to, in most systems it just has a serial number. When you tap it on the reader, the reader scans its serial number. The system has a list of which key numbers are allowed to open which doors at which times, if your key matches it opens the door. These almost always have some kind of log of which key opened which door when. Whether the building management knows how to access that is anyone’s guess.

    If he loves in a building with fobs there’s probably cameras also.

    So if he’s worried about after the fact investigation into his movements, he should live somewhere else.






  • Actually with nitrogen it’s not tricky at all.
    Gas chambers use toxic cyanide gas which is extremely painful to breathe in. After the execution the corpse has to be decontaminated so it does not poison mortuary workers. This is not a good system.

    The air you are breathing right now is about 80% nitrogen (and 20% oxygen). Nitrogen is all around us. You breathe it with every breath. It is harmless and non-toxic.
    Execution by nitrogen does not kill the prisoner because they are breathing nitrogen. It kills the prisoner because breathing 100% nitrogen means they are not breathing any oxygen. Our bodies need a constant flow of oxygen to survive. Remove that, even by simply displacing all the oxygen with a harmless substitute, and the person dies.

    Thus if done correctly, all you really need is a breathing mask. You can have other people right next to the prisoner during the execution and they will suffer no ill effect as long as the room is generally ventilated.


  • For somebody that actually wants to be dead, nitrogen is the most painless method I am aware of. The key is breathe 100% nitrogen little or no recycled breath or atmosphere air, and have this continue for several minutes. There is no choking sensation or pain. You just get light-headed and pass out and eventually die of hypoxia.

    Look at this video. This guy is training to be a fighter pilot. They put you in a high altitude chamber to create hypoxic effects so you know what to recognize when you’re in the air. Fighter pilots breathe pure oxygen delivered through a series of regulators, gang load your regulator means manually select maximum flow rate on all regulators. So the point of this training is to recognize when you get hypoxic so you can crank up your oxygen.
    Point is though, that guy isn’t suffering. He’s having a blast. He will keep holding up the wrong card and calling it four of spades all day. But that is what happens when the brain is starved of oxygen. If they reduce the oxygen level even farther in that chamber he would pass out, high enough and he would eventually die from it. Breathing 100% nitrogen at sea level does the exact same thing.

    One assisted suicide group built a sort of death pod around this concept. I’m sure you can find it on Google. But the basic concept is it’s an enclosure and when you push a button on the inside, a liquid nitrogen tank in the base starts delivering gaseous nitrogen to the pod in enough quantity to push away any CO2 you exhale. They put a ton of research into it, like it has safety interlocks and override switches and I think it can even play music.

    For whatever it’s worth, I hope you never have reason to make use of this information. I believe all life is precious.
    But I also think that for somebody with a degenerative disease who’s quality of life is going downhill who absolutely 100% is not going to get better, I think the option of choosing to die with dignity rather than suffer for a few more years in an expensive hospital in constant pain is something that should be available. I think that’s a very personal decision and there’s nobody on the fucking planet who has any right to make it for anyone other than themself.


  • There’s two things going on here.
    As a pilot, I’m familiar with hypoxia and how it works. I or pretty much any other pilot could very quickly write a completely bulletproof execution protocol that would guarantee a 100% painless death every time. It would involve a non-rebreathing 100% nitrogen mask so every lungful taken is 100% fresh nitrogen. In this mode, you just get drowsy and euphoric and pass out with no physical pain.

    If they ask me to write it, I don’t care if they offer a million dollars I wouldn’t do it. I think the death penalty is barbaric and the way we have applied it is even worse, given how there are numerous instances of people executed despite evidence they were innocent being blocked by court procedure and prosecutors. I’m not saying there aren’t people the world is better off without, there absolutely are. But if we are going to kill people, we need to be absolutely 100% totally fucking sure beyond any doubt regardless of procedure. So I will not support the death penalty.

    And that brings us to the two issues.
    First is that very few people who actually understand how to do it have any interest in writing good execution protocol. Thus a lot of the protocols are written by people without understanding of human physiology. And quite frankly, I would rather that be the case, if only so it is easier to challenge capital punishment.

    Second, is that I think some of the people who write these protocols actually want to cause suffering. I say I’m a pilot so I have understanding of hypoxia, but none of my knowledge is unique or difficult to obtain. A quick Google for ‘painless death nitrogen’ would tell you everything you need to know.
    So when I hear that the condemned is breathing his own CO2 from a bag, I conclude that either whoever wrote the protocol doesn’t have Google, or they are intentionally writing a protocol that will look good on paper but cause suffering in reality. Or the protocol is being implemented in such a way to cause suffering, for example if the nitrogen flow is not enough. An executioner could easily prolong suffering by simply using less nitrogen, causing the prisoner to breathe CO2 and thus feel panic reaction.

    But I think that further illustrates why the death penalty is a bad idea. The fact that the entire stack from prison guard up to Governor isn’t 100% focused on a humane death sense to me we need to clean our own house before we start burning others.




  • Exactly. I would extend that and the article’s premise to say, tech isn’t innately good or bad, it is just a tool that can be applied in good or bad ways. For example at his cafe, a QR code ordering system could have been optional for those who prefer it, and could be easily implemented without collecting any personal data. And that could actually be a positive thing for those who want to reorder without getting up or who have social anxiety. But by forcing all customers into this confusing and privacy invading system, the tech becomes a bad thing.

    The villain of that story is not tech. The villains are the online ordering company that decided to make a data grab, and the cafe owner who decided to buy tech so he wouldn’t have to pay servers.



  • For the last year or two AI has been the buzzword of the day. Anyone not investing in AI is considered dinosauric. Just like cloud was 5 to 10 years ago.

    Only the cycle has happened a little more quickly this time. AI was supposed to produce immediate revolution, and we are seeing the immediate results are… Just okay.

    Google spends billions building an AI that takes 10x more power per query than a standard search, only so it can tell people to superglue their pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when they are depressed.

    Copilot 365 costs about as much as an E3 license, so turning it on basically doubles your monthly spend with Microsoft. I don’t see it doubling anybody’s productivity.

    AI is like cloud. There are some places where it makes sense, where it can be helpful, where it can save time or help do difficult jobs. That is not everywhere doing everything for everybody, and I think perhaps some of the world is starting to realize that.


  • I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

    Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!