comments

• Need a poiuy keyboard.

  on ah, so that's why touch typing is important in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 53m ago

• soon

  Mother distraught at 9 year old son buys $432,000 on Playstation Store with credit card taken from purse.

  on Sony patent could let players tap a credit card on their PlayStation controller to buy games in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1h ago

• Likely for ToU rates, I could imagine looking out for weather updates, if there’s a likely power outage I could see it heating the water another 5 or 10 degrees so it’ll last longer/provide “more” hot water?

  le sigh. I’d like to have a home with systems that do things like…synchronize to a clock more accurate and reliable than one I can feasibly own myself, that others such as the utility companies are using. I’d like to be able to get weather alerts and have the refrigerator automatically get a degree colder the water heater get five or ten degrees hotter, run the HVAC a bit, charge batteries, etc.

  What I don’t want are a thousand little ARM computers each one a member of three different botnets trying to scrape my home network, sending audio, video, FLIR and radar telemetry straight to Kim Jong Fuck’s third testicle from the left, while also DDOSing Amnesty International and waiting for the cpu.detonate() command to come down so it’s time to buy another fucking desk lamp.

  on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22h ago

• Here’s the popular story as I’ve heard it:

  The North American video game industry crash of 1983 was Nintendo’s chance to enter the North American market in earnest. A tidal wave of low quality, sometimes non-functional third party shovelware for consoles like the Atari 2600 had basically killed public faith in the industry, and folks were ready to write off video games as a passing fad. Inserting yourself into a dying industry like that takes some care, so Nintendo did some market research and found that Americans:

  • wanted to hear nothing about video games, but were excited for AV equipment and high tech toys. CD players and VCRs were increasingly popular, and electronic toys like the Speak 'N Spell and Teddy Ruxpin were rapidly gaining popularity.

  • Didn’t really play games as a family, games were kind of considered toys for the youth, with very few Americans over the age of 45 claiming to enjoy playing video games.

  • liked large things. American homes are fairly large by global standards, and especially in the still mostly analog world of the 1980s bigger usually meant better. A VHS cassette held more tape, and thus played longer, than the smaller Betamax cassette.

  • Expressed frustration in finding good quality games through all the nonsense. Some games wouldn’t even run, and in the 1980s, how could you tell?

  Responding to this input, they changed the name of the console. Gone was “Family Computer” or “Famicom”, in with Nintendo Entertainment System. The form factor was drastically changed, removing the conventional top loading edge connector slot in favor of that front loading then push down mechanism designed to emulate a VHS deck. The cartridge shell was made at least 4 times larger than a Famicom cartridge, though the circuit board inside was often identical in size and shape to a Famicom cart; most NES cartridges were mostly empty in size, but that size was required by the loading mechanism. Mostly as a marketing stunt, they offered a bundle early on with a robot toy called ROB that could interact with a few specially designed games. It was a gimmick, but a successful one.

  And finally, DRM. To address the shovelware problem, Hiroshi Yamauchi, President of Nintendo, would personally approve every game published for the system. The console had a hardware lockout chip that would look for a corresponding key chip in the console; if none was found, it would reset the console, meaning unapproved software couldn’t run. That, along with enforcing IP laws on the cartridge’s physical design, was designed to make Nintendo the only publisher for the system; any third party developers would have to contract with Nintendo to manufacture the cartridges. Nintendo communicated this to customers via the Nintendo Seal Of Quality, a (trademarked) badge on the packaging to reassure customers that the game had gone through a vetting process. They stopped short of guaranteeing the game was fun to play, but that it functioned correctly, wouldn’t crash or damage the console, and contained relatively wholesome content. Custer’s Revenge would never wear a Nintendo Seal Of Quality.

  on Small but mighty! Remembering the GameCube, Nintendo’s purple box of delights in c/games@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• That weird relationship with physical media started off as a key element of their business model, back in the NES era. They just…never let go.

  on Small but mighty! Remembering the GameCube, Nintendo’s purple box of delights in c/games@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• I legitimately don’t know how to administer a Windows system anymore.

  on dating tips in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 4d ago

• The N64 did okay. Sticking with cartridges meant a game had to fit in a tiny fraction of the space available on the Saturn and Playstation’s CDs, meaning that cross-platform games were difficult if not impossible to port, or they left out full motion cut scenes or something. The N64 had first and second party titles from Nintendo and Rare, and inferior ports. That and being THE most Japanese company out there chasing off business partners left and right, TO INCLUDE SONY THEMSELVES AND THUS LEADING OT THE CREATION OF THE PLAYSTATION IN THE FIRST PLACE, meant the N64 finished the fifth generation console race in the middle of the pack.

  They continued to shoot themselves in the foot with the tiny discs for the Gamecube which meant a GC was STILL difficult to port games to because it STILL held less data than the competition, and couldn’t be used as a DVD player making it harder to sell to Dad than the Playstation 2. Due to the PS2’s low price tag ($100 less than a Dreamcast; the launch announcement at the very first E3 is a story unto itself), DVD video playback capability and backwards compatibility with PS1 software meant it outsold blowjobs for a couple years in a row.

  on Small but mighty! Remembering the GameCube, Nintendo’s purple box of delights in c/games@lemmy.world · 4d ago

• That doesn’t surprise me.

  on Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 6d ago

• Constantly. Show me the lie.

  on Dating Apps Are Dying in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026

• So Sony isn’t fucked then.

  on Wiki Documents at Least 44 Instances in Which Sony Says You Own Your Games in c/games@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.

  Nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.

  on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• So said bacteria was already present in the environment, but conditions are now favorable for its rapid growth.

  on US datacenters face further backlash over wastewater pollution in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• To be fair to Nintendo, they painted themselves into a corner.

  The first game was supposed to capture the feeling Myamoto had when exploring the woods near his home as a kid, so it has an excuse plot about collecting magical plot tokens on a quest to rescue a princess from a monster. It did well enough to get a very dissimilar sequel, because Nintendo also hates sequels. Myamoto always wants to do something new, he always resists making more of a good thing.

  The third game, A Link to the Past, returned to the top-down dungeon crawl, but there was room on the cartridge now for some NPC dialog, so they wrote some backstory. And they got a little carried away becuase they wrote a creation myth, a deep backstory of the kingdom, a villain, and the design document of the rest of the series. The fourth game, Link’s Awakening on Gameboy, is canonically a dream. It all happened in Link’s head.

  The fifth game, Ocarina of Time, is a prequel, they made a game out of A Link to the Past’s fluff text. Fans went fucking nuts for it. The sixth game, Majora’s Mask, is a game made on a strict one-year deadline, it has themes of constantly ticking clocks and impending doom. Write what you know, boys.

  The Oracle games are side stories that don’t effect the overall story, Wind Waker is the way it is because Myamoto went on a vacation to the beach and liked it, see also Mario Sunshine. Minish Cap is a distant prequel that takes place before OoT, and then Twilight Princess came out, made almost entirely to address the backlash against the cartoony art style of Wind Waker and to a lesser extent Minish Cap.

  Nintendo sold the Wii on its motion control gimmick. Twilight Princess was a launch title for the game, but TP was designed for the Gamecube and they just mapped wiimote swipes to button presses. They took the rest of that long console generation to develop Skyward Sword with actual motion controls, and it was yet another distant prequel even predating Minish Cap.

  It’s the 2010s by now. Youtube exists, and fans are starting to make video essays about the sprawling, self-contradictory series and trying to form it into a cohesive whole. Detecting a merchandising opportunity, Nintendo releases Hyrule Historia, a nearly 300 page hardcover book that among other things contained the officially sanctioned timeline of events: The timeline splits into three separate parallel realities at Ocarina of Time, meaning some of the biggest entries in the series to date: A Link to the Past, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, had nothing to do with each other.

  One 3DS sequel to ALttP later that largely takes place in yet another alternate reality, and they come out with Breath of the Wild, which is deliberately nowhere on the timeline and contains details established in all three split realities, followed by Tears of the Kingdom which retcons even Ocarina of Time out of existence.

  TL;DR: The story of the Legend of Zelda series is best summed up by its main character, Link, when he said “Hep! Hap! HEEEEEYAH!”

  on Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Trailer in c/games@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• Each game can stand on its own. Nintendo is well aware that its audience will always include children playing their first Zelda game on their first console.

  If any of the games refer back to a previous one, it will almost always be Ocarina of Time. OoT depicts the origin story of the series’ main villain, so the boss fight at the end of that game marks the “Year Zero” for the series kind of the way the Battle of Yavin does in the Star Wars fandom.

  Because Ocarina of Time involves time travel, it actually forks the timeline into three paths: Link is defeated, Link defeats Ganon and the timeline continues from there, Link travels back in time to prevent Ganon from rising to power in the first place. Later a fourth branch was established: Prequels, set before the events of OoT.

  At least one game is a fever dream, at least two games take place in other, faraway kingdoms, at least one game can be interpreted as a fever dream or a faraway kingdom, and then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seem to be a reboot of the series because ToTK retells OoT’s story and retells it wrong.

  on Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Trailer in c/games@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026

• Okay so. A primer on the Zelda franchise:

  Nintendo dislikes video games with stories, and they nakedly hate video game franchises with overall lore. Nintendo wants to make video games that are mechanically fun, “it’s fun to jump on the thing.” “It’s fun to swing a sword ad the thing.” “It’s fun to throw a ball at the thing.” Look no farther than their primary flagship franchise, the Mario series, for games with an excuse plot and highly polished primary gameplay loops. You can tell they truly, madly, deeply resent their secondary flagship franchise, the Zelda series, for being a more narrative driven adventure saga that attracts gamers who like deep overall lore.

  Ocarina of Time is the most important game in the Zelda series’ deep overall lore.

  on Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Trailer in c/games@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• I’m gonna say no it wasn’t expected. I’d expect toxic chemicals, heavy metals etc. I would expect a data center to discharge water that is unsafe and damaging, they are after all being run by Captain Planet villains…but bacteria? I wouldn’t have called that one.

  on US datacenters face further backlash over wastewater pollution in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• Arch has good documentation. Read it and you’ll be ok.

  on You don't actually have to be 1337 to use arch(install)btw in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• What if I talked about the five times a trans person attacked a woman?

  “Attacked?” So we’re talking assault and/or battery, which is a jailable offense? I take it these five were convicted of felonies and spent some time in prison? Does prison prevent assault? If no, why do we do it at all?

  on Sweden confirms 458 Britons deported or forcibly removed since Brexit in c/europe@feddit.org · 8 Sep 2026

• I have a copy of The Hunt For Red October that was taped in December off of HBO, and it’s got this ad before it for…you know those children’s games, it’s a plastic enclosure, you fill it with water, there are like little plastic rings or balls, and you like push a button to squirt water around the enclosure to move the rings around, it’s like if you explained the concept of Pinball to someone, and the only language you share in common is Klingon? I have a late 80’s early 90’s ad for that.

  on TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026

• I’m curious on your opinion of the execution of Ronald Clark O’Bryan in 1984.

  There’s this myth that strangers are going to taint Halloween candy with poison or razor blades or drugs, so you have to check the packaging to make sure it’s factory sealed or better yet only go to our Trunk Or Treat event open only to members of Our Church. Our Church: “Fear and hate everyone who isn’t a member!^TM^”

  Yeah let me tell you something about Our Church: The United States is the third largest nation by landmass and population and 250 years old, and out of all those people in all that space in all that time, the number of children harmed by tainted Halloween candy is ONE: Timothy O’Bryan, 1974, age 8. The son of Ronald Clark O’Bryan, a deacon of the Second Baptist Church.

  Approaching Halloween of 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan opened several Pixy Stix (if you’re not familiar, these are straw-like tubes full of a sweet and tart powder. Small ones are crimped paper tubes, larger ones are plastic tubes heat crimped at one end and folded over and stapled at the other), poured out the candy, mixed it with potassium cyanide, poured the poisoned mixture back in the tubes and re-stapled them. His intended victim: His own son, Timothy. His motive: Life insurance fraud.

  He handed out several of the tubes, to his own daughter and several other neighborhood children. After trick or treating, his son asked to eat some of his candy, and Ronald urged him to eat the Pixy Stix. He needed help with the staple, and then complained of the bitter taste. Ronald offered him Kool-Aid to help with the taste. His son complained of stomach pain and ran to the bathroom where he began convulsing and vomiting, before dying in Ronald’s arms.

  He raised the alarm, “My child just ate a Pixy Stix and died! Check your child’s Halloween candy for Pixy Stix!” All of the other tainted tubes were recovered, one directly from the hands of a boy who had tried to eat the candy, couldn’t open the staple and fell asleep still holding it.

  It was found after a short investigation that Ronald O’Bryan had visited a local chemical store to purchase potassium cyanide shortly before Halloween.

  Ronald Clark O’Bryan was executed via lethal injection in 1984.

  

  on Sweden confirms 458 Britons deported or forcibly removed since Brexit in c/europe@feddit.org · 7 Sep 2026

• Elsewhere as in the companies and idividuals not employed by Apple that actually invented the things Apple sold? Correct.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026

• No, I’m pretty sure they licensed it, and so did Dell. Go look at Dell’s MP3 players, damn near identical interface.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026

• Those are impressive, and unique. They have an aesthetic to them that reminds me of the Amiga? out of an IBM CGA card? Trust the demo scene to pull that off.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• The CGA card used that technique anyway. The IBM CGA card had a 9-pin RGBI digital output and an RCA analog NTSC output. There was a 16 color text mode, rarely used. Color graphics were usually done via the 4 color mode, which chose between four awful pallettes: light and dark variants of white black magenta and cyan, or yellow black red-orange and yellow. So they appeared kinda terrible on an RGBI monitor, but by dithering the colors together and using the analog output, you’d get other colors.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• I’ve kinda known that most of my life because my elementary school had a lab of IIes, most of which had color monitors, a couple of them had monochrome monitors. So there were a couple of them that were inexplicably “just green.” Most of the rest of that I learned from The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube.

  That Wozniak guy’s a good electrical engineer. Clever dude.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• That was a limitation of the monitor you were using, not the computer. All models of Apple II to include the Plus, e and c had color graphics. But it was common practice to pair them with monochrome monitors, first because they’re cheaper than color monitors, but also…the way the Apple II achieved a 16 color palette was through NTSC artifacting. It only ever tried to send something like six colors over the cable, but when you put two dissimilar colors next to each other, they get smeared together somewhere in the analog domain and they come out some other color. It allowed them to achieve 16 colors, but it had a drawback: Text that was supposed to appear black and white would have green and purple fringes, which made it blurry and hard to read. So if you were using the machine for business or something you might choose a monochrome monitor to get sharper, easier to read text. Apple’s first party monochrome monitors were indeed green.

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.

  The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.

  The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.

  The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.

  Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”

  on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• You built the world’s most resource intensive asshole, you deserve to have your lips sewn around it.

  on Microsoft executive vice president bemoans employees sending him "AI slop," saying "This is a doom loop." in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• I outright hate it. For all of Tantacrul’s plugging on about design, he really dropped the ball, split his pants bending over for it.

  Yeah the older logo may have looked dated, but I think what I would have done is get rid of the yellow glow behind the waveform and flattened a blue headset with a red wave between, not whatever liberal arts major bullshit this is.

  on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4 Sep 2026

• “Tyranny of the majority” is a MAGA euphemism for “we’re not the majority.”

  on Germans pitch EU plan to circumvent national vetoes | Euractiv in c/europe@feddit.org · 1 Sep 2026

• I’ve played with GPS from several different directions. There are a lot of GPS receivers on the hobby electronics market that will offer that level of precision, but not accurately. The aviation wide area augmentation system significantly increases accuracy to the point it can be used for precision instrument approaches.

  on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026

• You think there are hundreds of thousands of GPS satellites in orbit?

  on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026

• OR just make the line glow teal.

  on Game design in c/gaming@lemmy.world · 30 Aug 2026

• Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn’t that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn’t your ISP collecting that bill though.

  In the early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to have an ISP that wasn’t your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don’t remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising “more local numbers?”

  Well into the 90’s, you’d have use for a modem even if you didn’t have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You’d dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.

  Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It’s the 1990’s, nobody’s got a Venmo account, hell you can’t rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don’t ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer’s modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download…almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.

  on The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now in c/technology@lemmy.world · 30 Aug 2026

• The GUI app stores are much better than any helper script I could write.

  on Rule in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• Radar doesn’t work underwater. Sonar does, though most subs want to be stealthier than constantly shouting downwards.

  on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026

• apt-search and dnf-search both exist. I have used both. I prefer a GUI for that because they’ll provide things like screenshots, no CLI tool does, neither to TUI tools like Aptitude.

  on Rule in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• Oh great, Russia is going to attack NATO territory.

  on Trump says Russia is 'not going to attack' NATO territory in c/europe@feddit.org · 28 Aug 2026

• I do both. If I know exactly what I want to install, I’ll install it from the terminal because it’s often more direct. If I go “I need an app that does thing, what’s available?”

  on Rule in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• So the joke is, you’ve got something you want to install, be it a Python module, Java library, steam game, desktop application, whatever. You want it installed, figuring out which package manager has it and remembering the exact command syntax starts getting to be a pain, so just use this script to try installing it from a variety of sources.

  You would evoke it by running ./install.sh package and it will replace all instances of $1 with the string “package” at runtime. The ampersand at the end of each line will run that line as a separate background process rather than in the foreground process, so effectively this will attempt to install “package” or whatever you put in as an argument from a half dozen sources simultaneously in parallel.

  These include the old and new Python package managers, the old and new Red Hat package managers, debian/Ubuntu’s APT with and without sudo, cloning a git repo and building from source, and the icing on the cake is curling directly into bash.

  Don’t curl directly into bash. You’ll catch genital rabies.

  Remember that this is an XKCD comic, it’s a joke. The alt-text says “The failures usually don’t hurt anything and if it installs multiple versions it increases the chance one of them is right. (the ‘yes’ command and ‘2>/dev/null’ are recommended additions.)” “Yes” is a bash command that will spam ‘y’ in the terminal, the point of it is to answer yes to any questions an automated system asks, and 2>/dev/null will stop it from displaying errors. These add an even deeper level of Yolo-ing.

  on Rule in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• Elect me your president and I’ll bring back tarring and feathering.

  on Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash | TechCrunch in c/technology@lemmy.world · 25 Aug 2026

• What the fuck kind of compromise? “Let us technical loophole around your constitutional rights just a little bit?”

  How about we compromise and let that guy in Tennessee hang you just a little bit.

  on Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash | TechCrunch in c/technology@lemmy.world · 25 Aug 2026

• Silly Putty I think was an attempt to make plastic that failed and they went “well it’s kind of fun to play with, we’ll sell it as a toy?”

  wikis the pedia

  Rubber. It was an attempt to make synthetic rubber during WWII rationing. Found to be pretty useless but kind of a fun toy.

  on America's Largest Grid Operator to Data Centers: Bring Your Own Power or Get Turned Off First… in c/technology@lemmy.world · 23 Aug 2026

• Point of order, you’re thinking of play doh, not silly putty.

  on America's Largest Grid Operator to Data Centers: Bring Your Own Power or Get Turned Off First… in c/technology@lemmy.world · 23 Aug 2026

• Problem 1: They make the same DTMF tones that severe weather alerts do. That particular tone should mean “Immediate risk to YOUR life” such as a flash flood, severe thunderstorm or tornado. Using the same tone for amber alerts (or silver alerts, for missing old people) is just crying wolf. How many people are going to go “FOR FUCK’S SAKE I’M IN BED I’M NOT JOINING A MANHUNT” and mute such an alert without reading it, and then it’s gonna be about a tornado?

  Side problem: I learned something from Technology Connections a month or two ago that I’ve known since I was four. Almost all fire alarms sound a cadence of three short bursts. When I was in kindergarten, our school used the normal bells for the emergency alarm system, we were taught that groups of 3 short bursts on the bell was the fire alarm, but they taught it as if that’s how it works at this school and not universally. I bet the alert noises your phone makes, you know the government screeches? I bet those carry meaning they haven’t even tried to teach the public, in either the exact tone or beep sequence.

  Problem 2: It seems to assume that every adult in half a state is going to drop what they’re doing and fod walk the world looking for this kid (or geezer). Almost no one is, in large part because no one has been trained as to how. I guess the idea is you’re supposed to be out driving, get that alert, remember the details including the license plate number of the vehicle, and then call 911. Has that ever even once happened? Especially since:

  Problem 3: The message isn’t persistent or retrievable. It’s a push notification. If you dismiss it, possibly to get it to stop making noise so you can concentrate on reading it, it vanishes. There’s no message history to find it in, no real way to go “Hey wait a second, is that the car the amber alert was talking about?” 22 minutes later.

  It does kind of come off as a very political “I am assembling a task force to create a solution to these dastardly crimes” solution.

  on Do Amber Alerts for Missing Kids Actually Work? | The Walrus in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026

• Agriculture (especially in the american southwest) uses THE VAST MAJORITY of freshwater. Its not even close.

  Oh well the solution’s obvious. We’ll just stop growing food.

  on Voters Aren't Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers | As a backlash grows over data centers, more local officials are facing recall elections for their support of the comput… in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• Several of the administrators of a school system do bear job titles containing the word “officer” such as the finance officer, head of the finance department over purchasing, bookkeeping and payroll.

  on Omaha Public Schools requests SROs to not carry shock gloves, effective immediately. Omaha Public Schools is fighting back after parents and students spoke out against the use of shock gloves in scho… in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Pilot here: It’s interesting that you specify “airplanes” because that is specifically who those minimum altitude requirements apply to. The law (FAR 91.119) makes specific exceptions for helicopters.

  on Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• I remember when I thought this bullshit was merely reckless.

  on Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026 in c/technology@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026

• Oh great I’m a Ficsit pioneer.

  on How awesome or f*cked are you in c/gaming@lemmy.world · 20 Aug 2026