there were thin (~2mm) sticker-type Bluetooth tags […] No battery, just a passive coil that could be found with Bluetooth signal and an app that shows how close it is.

Sounds kind of like UHF RFID, which are common in places like warehouses and can be done at a distance, but even higher frequency?

I imagine range was a huge issue. Unless you have an extremely powerful bluetooth tranceiver and a very high gain antenna (i.e. not a phone, a professional radio system), the inverse square law will mean you won’t have enough energy to activate the electronics in the tag after a fairly short distance. Would probably work for finding something in your house though.

Also to the liberals pearl clutching about “but we need democracy!” not realizing that’s what that quote means.

The proletariat is, pretty much by definition, the VAST majority of the people in a society, by far the largest group. The commoners like you and me, working in order to make a living.

Dictatorship can mean what you think it means in that context. Ruling a country by the will of some dictator.

If the proletariat is the dictator, it means ruling a country by the will of the vast majority of the people. That’s what democracy is. We can further discuss implementations of it and how well they work (hint: Western democracy works very poorly and is very undemocratic in practice, as you’ve definitely experienced), but the general concept described by “dictatorship of the proletariat” is democracy.

AKA communism?

Unlike C++ though, explosives usually degrade over time and become less dangerous.

OpenAI: “They stole our technology!”

Also OpenAI: “Uh, well, our technology is actually inferior to theirs, but they must have stole it and made massive sweeping improvements to it that we weren’t able to! How dare they!”

Jesus is definitely watching Cuba and Venezuela, countries that are more Christian than America ever was

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I’m on Fennec F-Droid which already had it for a while. From my initial experience, this is less ergonomic because I now have to stretch my thumb across the screen to get to some of the options, whereas the old menu kept all the options closer to the right side of the screen where I could more easily reach one handed without shifting my hand.

Wym? You mean you don’t like typing out unsigned long long a hundred times?

main =

This message was brought to you by the Haskell gang

let () =

This message was brought to you by the OCaml gang

This message was brought to you by the Python gang (only betas check __name__, assert your dominance and force every import to run your main routine /s)

As a cis man, I think very lowly of men-only groups. Usually (from my admittedly limited experience) if a group goes out of their way to identify as “men-only,” the people there tend to be the kind of men who are very misogynistic and generally insufferable to be around, even for other men. Any group genuinely focused on the hobby or culture they claim to identify with wouldn’t really care about your gender.

Women-only groups though, I tend to sympathize with and respect a lot more, and IMO they are the symptom of the West being a heavily male dominated society rather than an innate desire among women to be exclusionary. If the world didn’t revolve around men and had genuine gender equality, there probably wouldn’t be a need for many women only groups either, but that’s unfortunately not the world we live in.

I can’t really speak on trans/nonbinary exclusion though because I have no personal experience being on the business end of it. I try to only participate in groups where they don’t care about your gender to begin with.

They’re talking about your commute on the highway to some office park in the middle of nowhere.

The Elon aspect has already been covered by other commenters, so purely against Starlink’s technology as a primary method for internet, ignoring Musk:

It has an enormous carbon footprint. Launching stuff into space takes a ton of energy, and SpaceX rockets are entirely powered by fossil fuels. Most of the rocket body is just massive tanks of fossil fuels, and because they don’t fly very far from Earth, most of that ends up in the atmosphere. The internet already has a significant carbon footprint, and adding this layer when we absolutely don’t have to is stupid. We can build A LOT of terrestrial radio infrastructure for less environmental impact, covering pretty much all rural areas. Microwave dishes pointing to towers is superior for rural internet in pretty much every way, including latency which is Starlink’s main selling point over older satellite internet systems, and wired internet is still the best option in every benchmark possible so using Starlink in urban places where you can effectively supply wired internet is stupid.

But what about people who live in super remote areas where ground based infrastructure is unfeasible? Well, we’ve already had internet capable satellites for much longer, and Starlink is an inferior satellite technology in terms of efficiency compared to satellites that orbit much higher up. They fly so low that most of the time they’re doing nothing because they’re flying over the ocean or places no one is using the service. With geostationary satellites, each satellite can “see” a larger portion of the Earth, so not only do you need fewer satellites while still providing global coverage, each satellite is in use much more of the time even when they’re flying over unpopulated areas because they cover so much more area, so say, ships and wildlife researchers in the jungle can stay connected to a single satellite instead of needing a dense web of satellites flying by overhead to deliver continuous coverage.

Flying so low also causes them to experience much more atmospheric drag, meaning they have a much shorter life. So you need more launches in total to replace satellites and maintain global coverage, massively increasing the carbon footprint. You also further pollute the atmosphere with vaporized satellites (which contain some nasty heavy metals BTW) when they run out of propellant and fall back to Earth. So not only do you need fewer satellites with geostationary orbit, each satellite also has a longer life.

The antenna you’d need on the ground is also much simpler, just a dish instead of an expensive, fragile, and power hungry phased array. Pretty important for truly off grid people.

It’s also bad for national security (again, speaking on national security implications of the technology in general because as a Canadian I couldn’t care less about US national security) to rely on it as a primary way of getting Internet because, as we’ve just learned, other countries can just shoot down your satellites when they fly over their territory. Not helped by the fact that they’re so close to the ground. It would be a lot harder to attack infrastructure in a country’s own territory. And if you’re not the country operating it, you’re also at the mercy of that country because they can just deny you access.

(Edit: made a more formal comment closer to the root of the thread)

Why? Launching shit into space is hard as fuck and has an enormous carbon footprint. You can build A LOT of cellular infrastructure for the same cost and impact.

And building your internet infrastructure in your own territory instead of floating in space will make it a lot harder for China to shoot with their badass microwave canon.

And I’m just a common idiot, but I’d wager upgrading satellite infrastructure is going to be slightly more expensive than terrestrial infrastructure. There’s a reason we’re still using a lot of satellite infrastructure from the 1980s.

his Asperger’s

As an autistic person, don’t you FUCKING DARE defend his use of that fucking card for the horrible way he acts.

Same applies to all social networks and MS Windows, right

YES

What about cars?

/c/fuckcars

Just wondering how far this govt coercion hatred extends into everyday life.

A lot

Which is also fucking horrible. Yeah just further pollute the atmosphere with vaporized satellites why don’t you. Hope that Fortnite battle was worth it.

Just one of the reasons removable batteries need to come back. Imagine if you could just choose between the lighter lithium ion and the more durable lithium iron phosphate for your use case.

Usually they just say there are no civilians in Russia and Ukraine killing ANY Russian is completely justified. Not the other way around though.

Also parallels their thoughts on Israel vs Palestine. Israel can kill any Palestinian and be “self defense” but when it comes to Israelis suddenly they care about the civilian distinction.