FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, a US President in the early 20th century.

CATO is an organization that pushes for small-government, market-oriented policy. They’d be, economically, on the right side of the US political spectrum, whereas typically, an American using the term “liberal” would be talking about a social liberal, somone who would be, economically, on the left side of the US political spectrum, would favor a larger government.

EDIT: Also, to add to the fun, the US uses “political colors” that are something like the opposite of what is the common convention in Europe.

In the US, historically, there was no association between color and political position. However, in the, I believe 2000 election, a convention became adopted, started off some arbitrary choice by a TV station, where the Democrats (the more-left of the Big Two parties) were the “blue” party, and the Republicans (the more-right of the Big Two Parties) were the “red” party.

However, in Europe, the convention is for blue to be associated with center-right parties, and red to be associated with left parties.

EDIT2: Yes, 2000 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time and The Washington Post used the opposite scheme.[15][16][17]

In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic’s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, illustrated.[18][original research?]

You’ll tend to notice that in recent years, Democratic presididential candidates will wear a blue tie, Republicans red. Might also be true below that level; I haven’t looked. And, of course, Trump’s MAGA hat branding is red.

Valve willing to sell at a loss

I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.

Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?

Two reasons.

1. They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.

2. They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.

If you’re not from the US, unqualified “liberal” in the US started to refer to “social liberal” back around FDR.

This has been a source of irritation to some; CATO, which I’d call moderate right-libertarian, complains that they should get the title and self-describes as “classic liberal”. Meanwhile, in, say, Germany, an unqualified “liberal” tends to refer to the latter, so you get confusion when people accustomed to the two uses meet.

An unqualified “libertarian” in the US usually refers to right-libertarianism, whereas in some places, it would historically have referred to left-libertariansm; that can also be a source of confusion.

Some parties in Europe on the left side of the spectrum self-describe as “socialist” when they don’t really advocate for socialist policies any more, but rather for things like a larger welfare state. I’d call them “social democratic”; this branding is a legacy of older forms of those parties, when they did advocate for socialist policy.

The fact that small USB battery banks are typically rated in milliamp-hours and large ones are typically rated in watt-hours is just absurd.

i just had to battle a blister pack for like five minutes for ONE tiny pill

I keep a very tiny folding knife (a Spyderco Bug, though I’m sure that there are more-economical and equally functional keychain knives) on my keychain. I take it off if I’m going to fly somewhere. If one has something like that handy, one always has something with them to cut into a blister pack.

There’s some company that has done some CGI videos making fun of the Boston Dynamics use of a hockey stick for separation, do videos that have humans pretending to be Boston Dynamics people abusing a CGI robot.

kagis

Corridor Digital, as “Bosstown Dynamics”:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="bosstown+dynamics"

e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

If you mean a post, you can only chose one image to be the target of your post, but you can embed more in the text of your post.

If you mean a comment, I’m not sure the source of confusion. You can embed multiple images. The Lemmy Web UI should work, as well as all the clients I’ve used.

You just need to have the text:

![](url-to-image)

…in your comment text.

Most Lemmy home instances will be runnimg a pict-rs instance, and let you upload an image to it with a button near the comment text field and also add the above text to display that image in your comment in one go.

If you’re trying and it’s failing, there can be a maximum byte size placed on the pict-rs upload by your home instance, and it’s possible that maybe your first image is below it and your second is not. There are also some image formats that wouldn’t be recognized, if you’re using something exotic for your second image — that could also cause the upload to fail.

It’d be kind of nice to have something, animal or human, that could speak Minoan, as it’d maybe let us finally decode Linear A.

Flashlights produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone.

Flashlights can definitely put out a lot more light (and store more power) than a cell phone light, but for a lot of close-up stuff, the cell phone is fine.

I’m skeptical that flashlights will go away, as @[email protected] is proposing. But I do think that smartphones are a partial replacement.

In urban areas, I don’t need a bright flashlight much, because there’s fixed lighting all over, but in more rural areas, if you’re outside at night and walking around, you do tend to need a flashlight.

I also don’t know how much more change there will be. Like, people already have smartphones pretty much everywhere. I think that most of the replacement that will happen has probably already happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQz4VBablAM

Waymo’s starting to roll out self-driving robotaxis onto the freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area; news coverage from today.

My expectation is that there will be a lot more autonomous cars out there in the future.

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc

tries running yt-dlp on the page URL to grab the URL of the actual video file involved

Try:

https://video.euronews.com/mp4/SHD/29/22/96/00/SHD_PYR_2922960_20251113112832.mp4

I mean, yeah, but that’s wartime policy. Like, most countries are willing to take more risks and accept more costs if they consider is necessary to fight a war.

But as far as I know, doing this demo successfully isn’t something that Russia needs for any kind of war purposes.

Frankly, if the thing is that untested, I’m not sure that I’d want to have the developers or the audience that close to it without shielding. And it should have a remote E-stop switch (though maybe it did here, and that’s why it froze up).

You know those Boston Dynamics videos? Unless the stuff is pretty mature, they’ve got those protective walls or are interacting with the robots with hockey sticks.

Ex:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYwekersccY

EDIT: Actually, looking at the Russian video again, I think that the AIdol people don’t have a remote E-stop button and were instead fumbling around with one built onto its back there, since that’s when it stopped moving.

Not to mention that Steam does have competition as an app store, stuff like GOG. I mean, it’s a little bit obnoxious to use both at once, but really not that much of a hassle.

It’s built like an extra beefy gaming laptop.

Much better cooling, which is a limiting factor for the laptop form factor.

I think that the question of whether an industry would benefit is a hard one. It depends on your perspective and what benefits one is gonna aim for.

I think that if I had to choose one category, I’d do CAD.

So, this covers a wide range of different industries and roles. 3D and 2D mechanical engineering. Chip and circuit board design. Designing 3D objects for 3D printers.

There is open-source CAD software out there, of varying degrees of sophistication and for different purposes. But in general, I kind of expected to stumble into a huge wealth of world-beating software. I mean, it’s a field with a lot of technically-oriented people who don’t mostly compete on the software as their core competency. I could see a lot of people wanting to scratch itches, and the situation to be kinda like it is for mathematics software, with strong open-source entrants. But that isn’t the case. There’s very much usable stuff, depending upon what you want to do. But the big boys in the field are proprietary.

There’s FreeCAD. I use openscad to do code-oriented design of objects for 3d printers. I wouldn’t call Blender a CAD package, more a modeler, though it’s adjacent to the field and there is some CAD-related add-on stuff. There’s QCAD. I don’t know how practical BRL-CAD is today, but it’s out there.

[email protected] is the most-active that I subscribe to.

General solution for finding communities: use https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search the whole Threadiverse. They index all the communities out there, on all instances, so they can even find communities that your home instance doesn’t yet know about.

EDIT: I’d also add that to my non-musician/sound engineer eyes, [email protected] does have subscribers providing technically-sound answers when people post. But it doesn’t have a lot of people posting. @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] are clearly trying to stimulate more conversations by posting periodically, but if more folks interested in music posted there, that’d probably benefit the existing subscribers too.

I have a Bluetooth Ultimate (keep in mind that 8BitDo makes a wide range of “Ultimate” controllers with extremely-confusingly-similar names, which don’t have the same hardware and have a wide range of prices, so be very careful when buying to ensure that you’re getting what you want; for example, when I bought mine, the “Bluetooth Ultimate” had Hall effect thumbsticks and the “Ultimate” did not. The “Bluetooth Ultimate” didn’t have a Xbox-style face button layout available, just a Nintendo one; you could remap this in software, of course, but the gamepad itself couldn’t do the mapping. Then there’s an “Ultimate C”, and it sounds like also an “Ultimate 2”).

I’m fine with its ergonomics.

But, then…I’m also fine with the ergonomics of a bunch of other gamepads that I have.

My own take is that pretty much all controller ergonomics are fine. The only gamepad I’ve ever used that I’d call outright bad was the original rectangular NES gamepad from the 1980s. These have a hard, squared-off D-pad that will absolutely kill your thumb with enough use.

Probably dishonorable mention goes to a wired Logitech controller dating to the 1990s, and to a lesser extent, a later Logitech controller; these had a D-pad that rolled to the diagonal too easily.

All modern controllers that I’ve used are noticeably more-comfortable for extended use than gamepads from the '80s and '90s.

I’ve owned a wide range of Playstation, Xbox, third-party, etc controllers, not to mention joysticks and other game control devices, and I’ve always been generally pretty happy with the ergonomics. That doesn’t mean that they don’t differ, but it’s pretty doable to adapt to the differences. Symmetric Playstation-style thumbstick layout, asymmetric Xbox-layout. Some are heavier, but nothing enough to really bug me. Nintendo face button layout vs XBox face button layout can be remapped in software. I’ve been able to adapt to different trigger pull force levels. Clicky face buttons that are popular on some new controllers versus no-tactile-feedback buttons. Controller bodies of slightly different size and shape. A new, different controller might feel weird at first, but in general, I’ve found that the brain is pretty good at bridging the differences.

Some have more buttons, and in recent years I’ve had enough bad luck with stick drift that I’ve moved to Hall effect thumbsticks. Some don’t have rumble motors. Some have RGB lights. One could prefer a gamepad over another for various functionality reasons, but…I think that on ergonomics, vendors have pretty much done a good job.

I mean, you can run a Linux phone now:

[email protected]

Downside is that aren’t going to have a large software library optimized for touchscreen use. The hardware options are pretty disappointing compared to Android. Not all hardware functionality may be supported, if it’s on a repurposed Android phone. Android or iOS software is mostly designed to expect that it’s on a fast/WiFi connection some of the time and on a slow/limited mobile data link some of the time and be able to act accordingly; most GNU/Linux software is not. Battery life is often not fantastic.

I still haven’t been pushed over the edge, but I’m definitely keeping my eye on it. I’m just not willing to develop software for Android. I know that GNU/Linux phones will stay open. I am not at all sure that Android won’t wind up locked down by Google at some point, and over the years, it’s definitely shifted in the locked-down direction.

My current approach is to carry around a Linux laptop and try to shift my usage more towards using the Android phone as a tethering device for the laptop, to get Internet access everywhere. That’s not always reasonable — you need to sit down to use the laptop — but the only thing that the phone really has to be used for is dealing with text messages and calls. If you really wanted to do so, as long as the laptop was on, you could run SIP to get VoIP service off the Internet from a provider of that from the laptop over the phone’s data service, not even rely on the phone’s calling functionality. The laptop isn’t really set up to be able to idle at very low power the way a phone is, be able to wake up when a call comes in, though, so it’s not really appropriate for incoming calls.

If I need to access something one-handed without sitting down, I can fall back to using the phone.

And it does have some nice benefits, like having a real keyboard, a considerably more-powerful system, a much larger library of software, a better screen and speakers, a 3.5mm headphones jack (all those phone space constraints go away on a laptop!) and so forth. You can move the phone to somewhere where its radio has good reception and just have it relay to the laptop, which isn’t an option if you’re using the phone itself as the computing device.

You can, though I don’t, even run Android software on the laptop via Waydroid.

I don’t presently use it in this role, but there’s a software package, KDE Connect, that lets one interface a phone and a Linux desktop (well, laptop in this case), and do things like happily type away in text message conversations on the laptop, if one has the laptop up and running.

I’m thinking that that approach also makes it easier to shift my use to a GNU/Linux phone down the line, since mostly, all I absolutely need from a GNU/Linux phone then is to act as a tethering device, handle phone calls and texts. It’s sorta the baby-steps way to move off Android, get my dependence down to the point where moving is no big deal.