I’m on sh.itjust.works. Which is actually run like a democracy, funnily enough.

According to a post made in our Main Community, sh.itjust.works is the fifth largest Lemmy instance by total posts, after lemmy.world, hexbear.net, www.hexbear.net, and lemmygrad.ml. So figuring Hexbear got duplicated, and anyway hexbear and lemmygrad are commonly defederated with because tankies, that puts sh.itjust.works at #2 on this side of the Silicon Curtain.

It shows lemmy.world at 390k total posts, with sh.itjust.works at 65k. Sh.itjust.works has very, very few of THE communities people use. !Games[email protected] is the biggest one by subscriber count.

So sh.itjust.works is a popular place to access other instances from, and I think others like lemm.ee and lemmy.ca are in the same boat.

“Join this instance, they’re not as radical left as lemmy.whatever” misses the point. Who cares which door of the building you walked in through when everyone congregates in the same room anyway?

My watch history would peg me as NOT a Republican. Youtube’s short feed will serve me

• excerpt from youtuber’s longer video
• tiktok repost from like, the truck astrology guy or “rate yer hack, here we go” guy, etc
• Artificial voice reading something scraped from Reddit with Sewer Jump or Minecraft playing in the background
• Chris Boden
• Clip from The West Wing
• Clip from Top Gear or Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm
• “And that’s why the Bible tells us that Jesus wants you to hate filthy fucking liberals.”

“Do not recommend channel.” “The downvote button doesn’t even seem to be a button anymore but I clicked it anyway.” “Report video for misinformation and/or supporting terrorism.” But the algorithm keeps churning it up.

One night when I was 18, like a couple months before I turned 19, I was having a fitful nightmare. And mind you, I didn’t have nightmares yet because I hadn’t gone to aircraft mechanic school by that point. I woke up extremely nauseous and with terrible abdominal pain. I staggered into the bathroom and puked my guts out. This wasn’t something I ate or some stomach flu, this was different. I couldn’t stand up for the pain in my midsection. I convinced my mother to drive me to the hospital, where they gave me Maalox.

For 18 months this went on, every now and again once or twice a month just BOOM, always at night, no apparent reason. We ruled out food allergies, I was prescribed everything from muscle relaxants to migraine medications. This interfered with my aviation medical certificate, I was grounded for ten months.

I was at University, away from my home town, and it happened again. One of my roommates drove me to a different hospital. The doc at the ER was a young chick with a nose ring, like I’m barely 20 by this time and she didn’t feel much older than me, she hadn’t been out of med school long. She had the bright idea to put me in a CT scanner while my tummy was actually hurting.

About 45 minutes later I was being whisked into an operating room to have my appendix removed, and the early morning thunderpukes never returned.

I had appendicitis for 18 months.

But if you shot yourself in the dick, now you’re bleeding out.

Now do you mean the actual original, or do you mean Wolfenstein 3D?

I have a couple restaurant apps on my phone. These are for takeout or delivery type places like Domino’s Pizza or Sheetz. In that context, it’s a genuine upgrade. Like, i can either drive to Sheetz, type my order into the kiosk there, and wait the whole time they’re preparing it, OR I can place the order from home on my phone, and they’ll prepare it as I’m driving there.

At a sit-down restuarant, what are you trying to do? Trying to use that instead of the waitstaff for ordering or paying…some customers are going to and some aren’t. There’s a procedure people understand about eating at a restaurant, and now you’re throwing a wrench in it for…what? The ability to update the menu without printing a whole bunch of them, somewhere to write down the specials so the waitstaff doesn’t have to remember them, or “because technology?”

And at something with counter service like a deli? Fuck off.

You know all that medical gaslighting and not having their problems taken seriously women complain about?

Men don’t experience that as much because we just don’t go to the doctor in the first place.

I still prefer the email analogy with explaining how it works. The WoW analogy is for the people who say “That’s too complicated for the unwashed masses to understand.” People have been signing up for World of Warcraft going on three decades now, I think they’ll figure out lemmy.world vs sh.itjust.works.

I never played WoW or anything like that, but aren’t there several WoW servers and you have to decide which one to be on when you start the game? People managed that.

That British guy, Jack “That guy who fought World War 2 with a claymore and bagpipes” Churchill, was also an early pioneer of surfing.

There’s a LOT of e. coli up your ass.

Put more delicately, you are a great big multicellular eukaryote, each of your cells has (or had, in the case of red blood cells) an inner chamber called the nucleus, and you’re full of mitochondria and other organelles. Your body is covered and filled with other organisms, many of them simple, tiny little single cell prokaryotes which make a living helping their gigantic, complicated host function. Like all the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest food. Their cells outnumber yours by a wide margin.

So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:

Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.

Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.

Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.

Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.

The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.

This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.

There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.

This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.

We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.

The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.

Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.

Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”

AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.

It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.

As an American, I’ll take the Mojave over the Outback any day.

I was picturing Phalanx CWIS. doesn’t take much mampower to run one of those.

1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

Paint me a picture of what you think that looks like. Here’s my painting: Everybody marches on their capitals, everyone gets gunned down with 30mm cannonfire, the Americans are gunned down holding pistols and rifles everyone else is gunned down holding pitchforks and torches.

On an episode of Castle, the daughter character was introducing the mother character to the internet, and the mother character says “I’ve now got a page on MyFace.”

You want to test that “Fediverse Freedom” say “every billionaire in the world, their wives, parents and children shall be torn apart with random farming machinery and/or prostituted to death whichever is funnier” and see what happens.

Is hotornot.com still live?

How does the web interface collect the transmissions?

The person or organization hosting the website has an antenna somewhere attached to a Software Defined Radio, or SDR. I honestly don’t know how these work at the silicon level, but radio antenna feed line goes in one side, some JFM happens, and USB and/or PCIe computer data comes out the other end. Instead of tuning into such and such frequency with such and such modulation, it sends the raw RF data to the computer to let it process it digitally, with algorithms and GFLOPS and RAM and shit.

Which means, you get to tell it “process the data as if you’re a single-sideband radio listening on 14.070MHz Upper Sideband” and you can listen into amateur radio slow scan television. It’s basically like you get to remote control someone else’s radio receiver.

Are all the transmissions made digitally accessible with the interface?

No. See the above “A person has an antenna somewhere.” You can hear what that antenna hears. This will be limited to line of sight for VHF and up, and even HF will be limited by propagation conditions and the nature of the antenna. The hardware they’ve hooked to their computer may also have its own limitations. Also, their antenna is imperfect because there is no such thing. This is the world’s shittiest Wi-Fi antenna (only partially because it fell over).

Why (other than cost) would I want to use a web interface rather than a traditional receiver?

Not all radio transmissions can be heard from everywhere. I can’t hear anything above 12 meters out of eastern Europe from here, not in the worst solar cycle since humans learned the sun has cycles. I can hear it loud and clear from some Frenchman who put his SDR online.