dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago (edited 21 hours ago)

It would be elementary to make bump stocks illegal, because bump stocks are not firearms. Making bump stocks illegal wouldn’t cross the Second Amendment.

Correct. The issue was that the ATF tried to do an end-run around the legal process. Somebody in there did not watch that Schoolhouse Rock song about how bills become law… All that has to happen (federally, anyway) is that Congress must pass a law prohibiting them and the president has to sign it. But that’s not what happened. The ATF – under Trump’s direction, mind you – tried unilaterally to redefine an item that is not a firearm as a regulated firearm. What is and is not a firearm (and what is and is not a “machine gun” also) is already codified into law.

You can argue for or against unelected agencies having the ability to create new regulations with the force of law behind them without involving the usual system of checks-and-balances, but specifically in the case of the ATF they have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not able to use such a privilege in good faith. They would be (and are) exceedingly likely to use it as a cudgel to play these “legal yesterday, felony today” types of games with people so give themselves excuses to kick in doors and shoot people’s dogs.

Various state laws already prohibit bump stocks. My state is one of them.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

Are we going to tackle the dumbass pistol brace fiasco next?

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

mechanically activating a trigger rapidly with a motor activated with a single button press would be legal.

I believe it is. So are crank triggers, which clamp on to your trigger guard and click the trigger for you 2/3/4 times per revolution.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

The problem now is that in the modern global age we have plenty of enemies who have massive standing armies. China and Russia leap to mind. That sort of thing may have worked when America was physically isolated from outside forces by a several months long boat ride. Not the case anymore.

Abolishing everybody’s massive standing armies would be a pretty good idea, but I don’t foresee that happening any time soon.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

Yes. Already exists, too:

www.tacticalinc.com/catalog/product/id-1247

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

I ain’t bringing logic into it, I’m just pointing out how the law has been interpreted.

Attaching things to guns that enable fully automatic fire as it is defined by the law, i.e. more than one shot per activation of the trigger, do count, though. This includes things such as full auto sear or those fucking “Glock switches” that are so popular these days.

With a crank trigger you have to keep cranking it to keep firing, like an old wild west Gatling gun. You can’t just hold it down and the gun dumps the magazine on its own. A bump stock aids the user in rapidly pressing the trigger over and over again. You can bump fire a rifle even without a bump stock if you are sufficiently practiced or skilled.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

Diaper Don, the “Take away their guns and worry about the due process later” guy? That Donald Trump, right?

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

The comment was in this context:

thehill.com/…/376097-trump-take-the-guns-first-go…

dual_sport_dork , 16 hours ago

He probably could, but he can’t buy a gun to put on it so what he’s got is a funny shaped ineffective club.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

America.

Retailers are allowed to disclaim the merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose of the items they sell and most do. The customer is free to refuse, of course, via the simple expedient of going away and buying it somewhere else.

This is partially a blame-shifting exercise to reduce costs, yes, but it’s also a shield against the ceaseless horde of dipshits we have in this country who will willfully misuse a product and then immediately try to sue the retailer they bought it from when it doesn’t work or they hurt themselves with it via their own stupidity. It is much easier from a legal perspective to make a blanket “we don’t imply this product is applicable for any purpose” statement vs. having to explicitly predict whatever cockamamie thing someone might try it on and have to say “no, moron, that chainsaw is not suitable for cutting bricks,” etc.

Read all that fine print on the back of your receipt some day. You will be enlightened and, most likely, also infuriated.

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

The nomenclature I always hear is, “Experiencing a higher than expected call volume,” and since no one can prove how low their expectations actually are there is no crack in which to insert the prybar of legal complaint.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

For the classic 1950’s atomic war scenario, probably more for flying glass and so forth.

Obviously it’s not going to save you from a direct hit. You need to get in a fridge to be protected from that sort of thing…

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

Do it. Do it and use them to troll the fuck out of all the MAGA-hat snowflakes who aren’t up on their news.

Oh, and be sure to post their inevitable unhinged responses everywhere for yuks as well.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

It will be after the inevitable lawsuit happens about 0.0002 seconds after they fully roll this out.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

I have nothing of value to add other than I used to have those exact same plates. I bought them at K-Mart.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

traffic stop

Never break more than one law at a time…

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.

So, just don’t include this dumbshit “feature” in your product which no one appears to actually want anyway? Seems pretty simple to me.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

I use MS Paint for similar purposes all the time.

It can be launched from the run prompt (Win + R and just slam in “mspaint” and hit enter), loads instantly, and is perfect for cropping a selection out of a screenshot and then using the chunky unprofessional doodle tools to draw a bunch of circles and arrows to illustrate with maximum snideness the position of whatever paragraph or interface element is clearly right there in the user’s screen, but rather than use their eyeballs and comprehend with their brain they decided the best course of action was to bleat at me about it in a passive-aggressive email instead.

Two can play at that game. If I’m feeling particularly vindictive, I will intentionally not use the text tool but rather draw out my various “Look, dumbass, it’s right here” labels with my mouse. The more they’ve irritated me the more eye-searing colors I’ll use.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Because I’ve been doing it that way since Windows 95. Don’t mess with my workflow, man.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Something like this is why every single Microsoft program or OS still has all the old options, shortcuts, control panel page, and MMC snap-in buried in it somewhere.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

But! You see, the accounting department of this Fortune 500 company is run by Gladys. Gladys wears 1000 denier stockings, a turtleneck sweater, and keeps her pointed glasses on a chain around her neck. Gladys never smiles. Gladys has been doing this job since 1992 so she knows it better than you, buster.

And Gladys has a spreadsheet she uses to calculate the entire company’s payroll of several million dollars per month, and she originally made it in Excel 4.0 using XLM macros, and it relies on undocumented bugs from that version which now must be faithfully reproduced going forward forevermore. Otherwise Gladys will have a thermonuclear tantrum, the payroll will be late, and Microsoft will get sued.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

The Ranger/B2000, S-10, and first Tacoma were really the sweet spot for compact pickup trucks but you won’t get them back, because all of them got killed by CAFE.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

?

Every automatic transmission car sold since the 1970’s and probably earlier has had a transmission cooler, right there alongside or in front of the radiator.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Not me. I’m content to be the minority. My truck is from ‘99 and newer vehicles annoy the shit out of me.

I don’t want gadgets and I don’t want to need a stepladder to get in it, either. 8’ bed, single cab, crank windows.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Wow. The remaining 7,950,999,999 people on this planet now have something to be thankful for, because none of them are as wrong as you.

You clearly did not actually understand what your mechanic told you.

A transmission cooler is exactly what it sounds like. It is built exactly like a radiator and works the same way. It is mounted in front of or next to the radiator for the engine. On a lot of newer cars it is actually part of the main radiator. Transmission fluid flows through it and excess heat is dumped into the air. On many vehicles it’s also served by the radiator fan, i.e. for situations where the vehicle is not getting airflow because it’s not moving.

The torque converter is part of your automatic transmission literally operates by moving the transmission fluid. There is no separation between the transmission fluid used in the torque converter and the rest of the transmission where the hydraulic valves use it to actuate the clutch bands, etc. to shift gears. The same bath of transmission fluid is circulated through the torque converter, the rest of the transmission, and the transmission cooler.

This is not a truck thing. Even my dinkum Saturn SL I had when I was a teenager that was so pathetic it was literally made of plastic and did not crack 100 horsepower had a transmission cooler – as designed from the factory. The vast majority of passenger vehicles made in the last half century or more with automatic transmissions have transmission coolers built in. It has nothing to do with towing, either.

Your torque converter absolutely can be locked under acceleration and in fact, nearly all vehicles equipped with a locking torque converter do so as part of their normal shifting pattern when moving up through their gears. This is observable from the driver’s seat if you know what’s happening. The locking and unlocking of the torque converter feels like an “extra gear” in between the gears. Some Japanese cars from the 80’s have a “TC Locked” light on a dash that illuminates when the converter is locked and you can watch this happen in real time. The usual pattern is 1st gear, shift to 2nd gear, lock converter, unlock converter and shift to 3rd, lock converter, unlock converter and shift to 4th, etc. A traditional automatic transmission only has 4 gear ratios, but it will feel like it has seven. Guess why.

Think about it real hard for a minute. A locked torque converter is the same, mechanically, as a fully engaged clutch. If you could not lock the torque converter during acceleration, by the same logic you would not be able to fully release the clutch pedal during acceleration on a manual transmission car, either. It is glaringly obvious that this is not the case.

I am not a “random lemming.” I have four decades of actual real world mechanical experience and have disassembled and rebuilt more transmissions, engines, and vehicles in general than you have probably sat in throughout your entire life.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Tell us you didn’t read what I just wrote without telling us you didn’t read it.

The engine will only stall under load if it is at so low of an RPM that it is generating insufficient torque to overcome the inertia. Which if you are moving and in the correct gear for your speed is never.

Which is why your transmission has more than one gear.

Remember back 30 seconds ago when I told you to think? Actually try it this time. Or maybe plug some of your bullshit into Google first before continuing to make a fool of yourself in front of everybody.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Which is why automatics have torque converters and manuals have clutches. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle or something!

Millions and millions of vehicles are driving on the world’s roads right now, happily tooling along under the sound mechanical and physical principles known as “reality,” completely heedless of your apparent inability to understand it.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

And? Come on, you’re almost there. Just two more neurons to put together:

That’s why the transmission cooler is there.

Wrap up: Your original claim that Americans “can’t” tow due to predominantly driving automatic transmission cars, in addition to being an uncreative and tired thinly veiled attempt at insulting Americans, is not only wrong but also prima facie absurd.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

And is the cooler in cars big enough to have noticeable towing capacity

Yes, it is. Do you realize that manufacturers publish a maximum towing capacity as part of their specifications for every vehicle? This is publicly available information, right there on the internet. It’s not a secret. The required surface area for the cooler is designed right in by the manufacturer for the transmission to work for the vehicle’s application. This not a case of something “extra” being added. It’s just how cars with automatic transmissions are built to begin with.

The published towing capacity for most vehicles that are available in both automatic and stick are exactly the same. Would you care to guess why that is? You could have figured it out for yourself if you would bother to actually do some extremely minimal internet research instead of continuing to shoot your mouth off on whatever this ill-informed little crusade of yours is.

Your initial claim is false. End of discussion. Just stop. You’re making a fool of yourself.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

What, so now you’re trying to split hairs over the regulatory differences between the US and Europe to attempt to distract from the fact that you still haven’t addressed making the following demonstrably false statements?

• Your notion that automatic transmissions “need” active cooling that they “don’t” have when in fact they do, and
• Your claim that torque converters “can’t” be locked during acceleration when they provably regularly are, and
• Your claim that your engine “will stall” if the transmission can’t “slip” even while the vehicle is already in motion. (Hint: Get your car rolling, don’t touch the clutch, and take your foot off the accelerator pedal. Did it stall instantly? Did it stall when you got back on the accelerator, either? Of course it didn’t, because inertia is a process that exists.)
• Bonus points for blathering about “trying to slip the lock of the converter,” which also makes no sense because that’s not how torque converter lockups work nor attempt to work, nor has anyone proposed they work that way.

For the benefit of anyone else reading this, the difference in rated tow capacities between US spec and Euro spec vehicles is, as you have almost correctly observed, down to regulations and the trailer designs and not the tow vehicles themselves. There is no difference between the cars or their transmissions mechanically (nor the laws of physics – anywhere on the planet, I guarantee it). European regulations have two critical differences between the US, to wit:

1. Vehicles towing trailers are typically limited to ~60 MPH or the equivalent, whereas in the US they are not (at least outside of some specific state laws).
2. Tongue weight requirements are significantly lower, because nobody owns a body-on-frame truck which is necessary to support a high tongue weight.

This is because it is dangerous to tow a low tongue weight trailer at high speed. America has no such speed or tongue weight restriction, and we also have interstates with 85 MPH speed limits. Thus our target tongue weight is roughly 15% of the total load, largely in order to keep the trailer under control at speed and prevent it from snaking all over the place and rolling itself and the vehicle. All other things being equal this ultimately winds up in the tongue weight being the limiting factor for most unibody vehicles. If your tongue weight is limited at e.g. 200 pounds, which it is for my bog standard Subaru Crosstrek, solving for the estimated tow capacity assuming 15% of it is 200 lbs would be roughly 1333 lbs. What’s the US spec rated tow capacity of a Crosstrek? Oh wow, it’s 1500 pounds. Imagine that. (For both the manual and automatic/CVT versions, by the way.)

FYI, we also have trailer brakes over here, and many states require them to be used on loads exceeding 3000 pounds. Below that, the trucks most people use have adequate mass and braking capacity to handle towing trailer loads in and of themselves. It turns out, the actual reason Americans tow with trucks is because Americans tow with trucks, and our towing regulations and trailers are designed around the expectation of towing with trucks. It’s a just a cultural thing. No need to try to make it complicated nor make up fictitious bullshit about automatic transmissions.

But none of this has anything to do with your original assertions re: automatic vs. manual transmissions. I’m not arguing any other points with you.

As a matter of fact, I’m not arguing any more points with you at all. You have no idea how cars work. Go away.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

And Sony originally had the intention of each symbol alluding to a particular action or concept:

• O is confirm or okay.
• X is cancel or go back.
• ☐ is map, menu, or option
• Δ is heading, recenter, or point of view

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

They are used precisely that way in most Japanese titles, but for some reason when Playstation games were localized outside of the Japanese market the baffling decision was made to swap the positions of the OK and cancel buttons. So we got X for OK and O for cancel, which totally makes sense…

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

IIRC this was originally a Squaresoft decision, and was originally done for ergonomic reasons. Then other publishers started following suit. Square switched from the Japanese style O for OK, X for cancel between Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 in the US. 7 has Japanese style controls, 8 by default has the American style layout. I have never actually seen a definitive explanation given, though.

FWIW, the original Playstation predated the XBox by six years (1995 vs. 2001). The X/O switch for non-Japanese Playstation games was well in effect long before the XBox ever landed on store shelves, so I’m pretty sure the reverse is actually true. The XBox button layout is designed to ape the Playstation’s ergonomically, but the letters are shuffled around so it is not the same as the Nintendo/SNES controller most likely for lawsuit avoidance purposes.

dual_sport_dork , 2 days ago

To be fair, I have seen the XBox theory floated repeatedly on the internet, never with any acknowledgement that the timeline doesn’t make sense…

Insofar as I can determine from my standpoint of being a video game collector who has no inside knowledge but was at least there at the time, Sony copied the SNES pad when they split from Nintendo after the original Play Station add-on debacle. As a matter of fact, the original original plan was to just use the SNES controller itself to begin with. The button conventions for the subsequent Playstation pad were obviously meant to be a direct copy-paste of the above and intended to be used in the same way as was currently the norm for Japanese console RPG’s on Nintendo’s machine: A was for OK and B was for cancel/back. The Playstation O button is where the SNES A button is, and the Playstation X button is where the SNES B button is. It all makes sense.

…Until it got switched. Only outside of Japan. For reasons that no one responsible has ever seen fit to document, at least publicly.

dual_sport_dork , 6 days ago

Or the landlord might just want to spite the tenant, or he might want to sell to a “new” buyer who turns out to be business partner/cohort/shell LLC/etc.

dual_sport_dork , 6 days ago

You forgot the part about where the individual in question goes to jail when caught. That part is important.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

They’re for sharpening razor blades. I mean, duh.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

Socialism! REEEEEEE!!! Why do you hate America???

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

Isn’t Ubuntu Debian based? Or is that no longer the case? I haven’t used it for about a decade.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

Your grandma would hate and complain about upgrading from Win10 to Win11 just the same, though. Everyone hates change itself. What the change is made to doesn’t really matter.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

The thing is, during the 95/98/ME/XP/Vista days Microsoft had less competition in the consumer computing space, smart phones weren’t really a thing, and a PC was “the” way to get online. Nowadays everyone and their dog has an iPhone or Android device instead, and ever dwindling numbers of people even bother to have a PC anymore. So in modern times, there is a nonzero possibility that on a consumer level at least, Microsoft might finally slide into irrelevance. That’s not to say they’ll go out of business anytime soon, but they might not be able to remain the Microsoft we’ve known so far for too many more years.

Nerds use Linux. A lot of people who want to buy an off the shelf computer that “just works” buys a Mac. And everyone else just uses their phone for everything.

Microsoft doesn’t actually do anything (except make the XBox, I guess) that non-corporate users give a shit about except “make computer machine go” and “stupid subscription ribbon bar program I need to use to open files work sends me.”

This is why M$ has been so gung-ho about their path to enshittification in recent years, I’m sure. This is a profitability thing. They see the writing on the wall that just selling operating system and office suite licenses to rubes is not going to remain a profitable business model much longer. Instead, they have to scrape and datamine and sell adds and push subscriptions and all the rest of it for alternative recurring revenue, because no member of the public will willingly pay for a Windows license anymore. I sure as hell won’t… If I need Windows, I’ll pirate it. And there’s no way they are shifting as many OEM licenses as they were in the early 2000’s. People aren’t buying computers like that anymore.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

Say it with me again now:

For fact-based applications, the amount of work required to develop and subsequently babysit the LLM to ensure it is always producing accurate output is exactly the same as doing the work yourself in the first place.

Always, always, always. This is a mathematical law. It doesn’t matter how much you whine or argue, or cite anecdotes about how you totally got ChatGPT or Copilot to generate you some working code that one time. The LLM does not actually have comprehension of its input or output. It doesn’t have comprehension, period. It cannot know when it is wrong. It can’t actually know anything.

Sure, very sophisticated LLM’s might get it right some of the time, or even a lot of the time in the cases of very specific topics with very good training data. But its accuracy cannot be guaranteed unless you fact-check 100% of its output.

Underpaid employees were asked to feed published articles from other news services into generative AI tools and spit out paraphrased versions. The team was soon using AI to churn out thousands of articles a day, most of which were never fact-checked by a person. Eventually, per the NYT, the website’s AI tools randomly started assigning employees’ names to AI-generated articles they never touched.

Yep, that right there. I could have called that before they even started. The shit really hits the fan when the computer is inevitably capable of spouting bullshit far faster than humans are able to review and debunk its output, and that’s only if anyone is actually watching and has their hand on the off switch. Of course, the end goal of these schemes is to be able to fire as much of the human staff as possible, so it ultimately winds up that there is nobody left to actually do the review. And whatever emaciated remains of management are left don’t actually understand how the machine works nor how its output is generated.

Yeah, I see no flaws in this plan… Carry the fuck on, idiots.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

This is almost certainly what we’re looking at here. It’s the Ford Pinto for the modern age. “So what if a few people get blown up/defamed? Paying for that will cost less than what we made, so we’re still in the black.” Yeah, that’s grand.

Further, generative “AI’s” and language models like these are fine when used for noncritical purposes where the veracity of the output is not a requirement. Dall-E is an excellent example, where all it’s doing is making varying levels of abstract art and provided nobody is stupid enough to take what it spits out for an actual photograph documenting evidence of something, it doesn’t matter. Or, “Write me a poem about crows.” Who cares if it might file crows in the wrong taxonomy as long as the poem sounds nice.

Facts and LLM’s don’t mix, though.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

To err is human. But to really fuck up, you need a computer.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

…Nnnnno, actually always.

The current models that are in use now (and the subject of the article) are not actual AI’s. There is no thinking going on in there. They are statistical language models that are literally incapable of producing anything that was not originally part of their training input data, reassembled and strung together different ways. These LLM models can’t actually generate new content, they can’t think up anything novel, and of course they can’t actually think at all. They are completely at the mercy of whatever garbage is fed into them and are by definition not capable of actually “understanding” their output because they are not capable of understanding at all. The nature of these processes being a statistical model also means that the output is to some extent always dependent on an internal dice roll as well, and the possibility of rolling snake eyes is always there no matter how clever or well tuned the algorithm is.

This is not to say humans are infallible, either, but at least we are conceptually capable of understanding when and more importantly how we got something wrong when called on it. We are also capable of researching sources and weighing the validity of different sources and/or claims, which an LLM is not – not without human intervention, anyway, which loops back to my original point about doing the work yourself in the first place. An LLM cannot determine if a published sequence of words is bogus. It can of course string together a new combination of words in a syntactically valid manner that can be read and will make sense, but the truth of the constructed text cannot actually be determined programmatically. So in any application where accuracy is necessary, it is downright required to thoroughly review 100% of the machine output to verify that it is factual and correct. For anyone capable of doing that without smoke coming out of their own ears, it is then trivial to take the next step and just reproduce what the machine did for you. Yes, you may as well have just done it yourself. The only real advantage the machine has is that it can type faster than you and it never needs more coffee.

The only way to cast off these limitations would be to develop an entirely new real AI model that is genuinely capable of understanding the meaning of both its input and output, and legitimately capable of drawing new conclusions from its own output also taking into account additional external data when presented with it. And being able to show its work, so to speak, to demonstrate how it arrived at its conclusions to back up their factual validity. This requires throwing away the current LLM models completely – they are a technological dead end. They’re neat, and capable of fooling some of the people some of the time, but on a mathematical level they’re never capable of achieving internally provable, consistent truth.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

I’m a developer and typing encompasses most of my day as well, but increasingly less of it is actually producing code. Ever more of it is in the form of emails, typically in the process of being forced to argue with idiots about what is and isn’t feasible/in the spec/physically possible, or explaining the same things repeatedly to the types of people who should not be entrusted with a mouse.

dual_sport_dork , 7 days ago

And untangling that clusterfuck can be damn near impossible.

The reaper may not present his bill immediately, but he will always present his bill eventually. This is a zero-sum thing: There is no net savings because the work required can be front loaded or back loaded, and you sitting there at the terminal in the present might not know. Yet.

There are three phases where time and effort are input, and wherein asses can be bitten either preemptively or after the fact:

1. Loading the algorithm with all the data. Where did all that data come from? In the case of LLM’s, it came from an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards. That is, us. The system is front loaded with all of this time and effort – stolen, in most cases. Also the time and effort spent by those developing the system and loading it with said data.
2. At execution time. This is the classic example, i.e. the algorithm spits out into your face something that is patently absurd. We all point and laugh, and a screen shot gets posted to Lemmy. “Look, Google says you should put glue on your pizza!” Etc.
3. Lurking horrors. You find out about the problem later. Much later. After the piece went to print, or the code went into production. “Time and effort were saved,” producing the article or writing the code. Yes, they appeared to be – then. Now it’s now. Significant expenditure must be made cleaning up the mess. Nobody actually understood the code but now it has to be debugged. And somebody has to pay the lawyers.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

All it did to you was cosmetic.

Windows 10’s “feature” updates consistently also re-enable the “fast startup” option on my machine when they install. Which, on my particular motherboard and SSD combination, causes Windows to take about 30 minutes to boot when left enabled for reasons I have never been able to comprehend. A regular cold boot only takes like 20 seconds, so… I definitely tend to notice when it does this behind my back yet again.