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It’s so much worse than that. From the article;

“Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet,” he told former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in October. “What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”

Basically, it’s not the “homeless” part of “homeless people” he thinks is a lie.

Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.

IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.

Oh, I was using Keepass2Android as a password vault, but was a little frustrated with it because occasionally it’ll forget to synchronize with the file before adding an entry and leave a “conflicted copy” I have to deal with manually. If KeepassDX will also do TOTPs that sounds perfect.

Do you have a replacement you would recommend?

I think there are a bunch of things at play here. The whole pricing structure of this generation is kind of problematic; the 3 is a little too expensive for the mass market, and the 3S is supposed to be an answer for that, but the discount below the 3 isn’t large enough to make it seem like a good deal given the visual and comfort downgrades involved. Meanwhile family budgets are pretty tight, and folks are feeling really uncertain about the future, so big-ticket items that are purely for escapism seem like something you can postpone.

There’s also some crossover with folks who do have the money, but may be saving it for a Switch 2 next year, or one of the Steam devices (Steam Deck 2, Deckard, Steam OS consoles) if any of those ever actually turn up. (Not holding my breath on them, but hey, Brad has been saying…) I think there’s also some degree of fatigue over the cadence of device replacements in so many categories these days (phone, console, handheld, headset…) that may be inclining people to wait and see a bit more. Some folks are probably also saving for a computer replacement, thanks to Microsoft’s strict requirements for Windows 11 and next year’s End Of Support for Windows 10.

TL;DR: I would expect most niche luxury goods to have decreased sales this holiday season over last year’s.

I definitely considered FFmpeg (I mean, it does everything, and pretty much as fast as possible), but the sense I had was that people were mostly posting about tools that were reasonably accessible to novice users, with nice-ish interfaces. FFmpeg is pretty daunting to newcomers.

OpenSCAD (CAD, but with a programming language-style interface) is kind of in a similar category. It’s pretty powerful, and for someone who thinks like a programmer it can be relatively easy to learn, but if you don’t already understand 3d transformations on a pretty intuitive level, the program doesn’t have a lot of features to ease you into that.

Adding on:

Inkscape - vector graphics program

Meshrom - photogrammetry

Handbrake - video transcoding

MakeMKV - rips DVDs and Blu Ray into video files

7zip - file compression and decompression

Droid48 - Truly excellent HP48 emulator for android

LibreOffice - free word processor & office suite (not without some recent drama though, I guess)

I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty, but hey, more for additional commenters to name.

Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too

The “idiot” part comes in where I encountered this problem, and didn’t even stop to consider whether this might be specific to this model, or even try something as basic as turn the model on the print bed, which wouldn’t have fixed the slicing, but would have told me my assumption about how the “bridging angle” setting worked was wrong. Instead, I leapt straight from “huh, this model sliced in a weird way” to “this basic slicer feature is designed in a bizarrely poor way and I’m the first one to ever notice,” and posted about it on social media.

So I appreciate the sentiment, and I’ll leave the post up as it I agree it’s a mildly interesting and counterintuitive result, but I still maintain I acted kinda dumb. :)

A bit of a weird one because it never actually came out, but I was really excited about the news that Michel Gondry was set to direct a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel The Master of Space and Time. I really like both Gondry and Rucker, and their sensibilities would have worked really well together. The story is kind of a sci-fi three wishes fable. It’s not my favorite of his–that’s gotta be White Light–but it’s really light-hearted and fun. And Gondry is terrific at getting bizarre, dream-like ideas onto film. I’m still bummed out that they cancelled that.

For something that actually did come out but then got cancelled, I enjoyed Disney’s adaptation of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Then they threw that one down the memory hole for tax reasons, so there’s no way to watch it anymore short of piracy. I feel like that shouldn’t be allowed. Seems like they should add least have to provide the Library of Congress with a copy. It’s weird that our cultural history can just be yanked away like that now.

This depended on the phone. The HTC One M8, for instance, had a surprisingly good built-in DAC.

That wasn’t the issue for me–my bridging angle was set to zero (the default). The issue was that the anchors for these bridges ran into one another, which made the slicer treat them all as one single unified bridge, and choose one angle for the lines across them all, rather than treating them as separate bridges (which is how I was thinking of them, because they crossed different gaps). I put the text below the images on this link before I understood what had gone wrong, but the images are still useful for illustrating the error: https://imgur.com/a/VjUTVaq

I was being an idiot. It does bridge correctly, it just got confused because the bridges were close enough together that it thought it had to make them one single bridge. Thanks!

I was being an idiot. It does bridge correctly, it just got confused because the bridges were close enough together that it thought it had to make them one single bridge. Thanks!

Oh, you’re totally right! I knew I was a little braindead today. Thanks so much! It absolutely already does the thing I’m asking for, it just got confused because the edges of the bridges were close enough that their anchors overlapped.

Bridging working normally: https://imgur.com/a/U7yqZU3

Thanks!

I’m using PrusaSlicer, and in PrusaSlicer there is a specific setting for this, which is called “bridging angle.” But my point is that bridges are already specifically identified by the slicer as a specific category of print area needing specific settings, and in this case it should be possible for the slicer to choose an optimal bridging angle on a bridge-by-bridge basis, rather than requiring the user to choose a single global angle. You’re right that it would be less catastrophic for the bridging to be 45 degrees off than to be 90 degrees off, but it’s not obvious why this should be a global setting at all, rather than tailored to the needs of the local geometry of the bridge. It could even be something fairly simple, like just drawing lines parallel to the perimeters of the bridge, similar to what “concentric infill” does. I haven’t really looked in to what the best way to implement this feature would be, I’m still at the point of trying to work out how to even describe the issue.

Basically this: https://imgur.com/a/VjUTVaq

The blue sections have no support material below them and are printing as bridges, but in the default behavior, PrusaSlicer just uses the single, global “bridging angle” setting to decide which way to print layers on top of these sections. The perimeters on these sections are printed correctly to make the shortest path across the gap, but the rest of the lines making up those bridge layers are printed to match the “bridging angle,” which here means that two of the bridges are printed so they are supported only by those two perimeter bridges themselves.

Please ignore the details of the print itself, as I’m a little braindead today and this is a print that won’t actually fold together correctly as designed. But the issue of bridges orienting poorly is more general than this particular design.

Because they didn’t turn on federation until last year, and at that point it was still limited to fewer than ten users per alternate server, and you had to manually request federation through a Discord server from an actual human. This year they’ve automated the federation process, but you still have to start with a tiny server, and they claim they’re going to raise the user limit gradually as new servers remain federated with the main server.

But yeah, the upshot is bsky.social has 13 million users, and there are no other servers with notable numbers of users. That’s a pretty notable difference from ActivityPub.

Sure, I mean, anything you need a spacecraft to do but that you can accomplish without adding extra equipment, you should probably do it that way, because it means less mass to accelerate and less equipment to test and certify and so forth. It’s definitely not hard to imagine getting this functionality without adding equipment. The question is whether the ability to do this in the rare scenarios that call for it offset the drawbacks of having a system in which the protections against such failures can be disabled. Which means you then have to include a bunch of interlocks and crap to ensure it’s as unlikely as possible that the ship can get into that mode without someone being very sure they want that. I think OP is probably right that on, say, a cargo ship, it’s pretty unlikely that “also, the engine can explode!” would be seen as a feature rather than a wholly alarming bug.