There’s not really a single robin hood canon, some versions of him are quite violent, others he avoids killing. All depends on who was telling the story and when.

Just kind of spitballing

For starters, you design a robot whose design is to take, for example, 100 steps forward, then take 100 steps back. Then you could:

Have it take a scoop of soil before it turns back, you now have a sample to test

Put some kind of chemical test strips (litmus paper, water quality, etc.) on it and send it towards a puddle of water you want to test. It splashed into the water and comes back, now you can see what the results on those test strips say

Not all electronics are so sensitive to radiation, and to some extent they can be shielded. Building a whole digital robot that’s hardened against radiation would be difficult and expensive. Sticking a couple radiation hardened sensors on an otherwise dumb pneumatic robot that doesn’t need to be hardened would be much cheaper.

Send the robot in with analog measuring tools- thermometers, barometers, film cameras (radiation can expose film, so picture quality may not be great, but it’s better than nothing, and just seeing how exposed the film is could be used to get a rough idea of the radiation level) etc.

Say there’s a big rock, and you need to know what’s behind it. Nowhere in the safety zone has a good viewing angle, and it’s either unsafe to fly over the area or there’s too much tree cover so you can do aerial photography. So you stick a mirror on the robot and send it out somewhere behind the rock off to the side o bit. Now you can look at the mirror through some binoculars or a telephoto lens and see what’s behind the rock in the reflection.

These are just a couple off the top of my head ideas as a layperson, I’m sure that a scientist or engineer actually doing this kind of work whose entire job is to think about this could come up with plenty of other good ways to use this sort of thing.

Electronics definitely make things easier, but we’ve had people doing science for millennia before we figured out how to do anything particularly useful with electricity.

Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

(Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

Lol, I’ll keep that in mind, internet stranger. I do have a lot of techy friends who I’ll probably offer it up to first, and I haven’t quite ruled out running Linux myself either to keep as my main PC or to use as a media server or something, but I’ll keep you in mind if I’m looking to get rid of it in a few months.

If it does come to that, pay for shipping (or pick it up if you happen to be local) and it’s yours. Feel free to hit me up to ask about it come november-ish if I don’t reach out first. No guarantees it will be available, but I’d rather it go to someone who’s going to use it than be waste

My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.

I believe they’re owned by Diageo, which is a UK company, and I don’t think that Diageo has an American subsidiary like Suntory does, but otherwise pretty much everything I said applies.

This really is a situation where you have to do a little research and make your own value judgement on these things. I’m honestly not too sure where I land on it, I want to support Canada in this but I also want to give as little money to the US government as possible, and they’re somewhat at odds so I need to make the call which is more important for me with every item I might buy that has to cross the border.

Black market just makes it even harder to figure out where your money’s going.

Are the people smuggling liquor across the border only smuggling liquor, or are they involved in other crimes that you’re supporting from buying from them?

When is the liquor being diverted from legitimate channels into the black market? Has it already crossed the border and the tariffs been paid? Kind of defeats the purpose then, doesn’t it? Is it happening before it crosses the border and possibly fucking over the Canadians you’re trying to support?

Unless you’re traveling to Canada and buying it legitimately to smuggle back you’re probably not accomplishing what you hope to.

Or I suppose you could start moonshining.

I think this recommendation is a good segue into how important it is to think about where your money is going.

First of all, it seems obvious to buy Canadian whisky to support Canada. However we’re slapping big tariffs on them. That means that when you buy them that’s giving that tariff money to the US government, which I think we want to avoid.

Further, we’re in a very global economy. Damn-near every brand you’ve ever heard of is owned by the subsidiary of a subsidiary or some other company.

Canadian club is now owned by Suntory Global Spirits (Formerly Beam-Suntory, as in Jim Beam, they actually consider it to be a part of the Jim Beam brand portfolio) an American company, that is itself a subsidiary of Suntory, a Japanese company.

So an American company is getting a good slice of the profits from Canadian club.

And of course Suntory owns a lot of American brands (like Jim Beam since I already mentioned them) and they might well decide to take some of that Canadian Club money they take in and use it to prop up one of their Kentucky Bourbon brands which ends up funneling money towards whatever crazy right wing nut jobs there stand to profit from that.

So yes, Canadian Club is in fact made in Canada, presumably by Canadian employees, and contributing to the Canadian economy, paying Canadian taxes, etc. but a lot of it is also going to other places, and not necessarily places you want it to go, so it would be wise to weigh that into your decision-making here.

And I’m not trying to badmouth Suntory in particular, in the scheme of terrible megacorps I don’t think they’re the worst by a longshot (not that they’re necessarily at all good either) that’s just where I found a jumping off point. I enjoy a lot of their brands, and at least the handful of them that I make some effort to follow still seem to at least be paying lip service to some half decent ideas about things like DEI and sustainability, where some other companies have totally bent the knee to Krasnov.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I just spent a little time researching a few different Canadian whisky brands to see if any of the names I recognize are actually wholly Canadian-owned. It doesn’t look like it, it’s all huge multinational corporations based in other countries when you dig into them. The only thing I could personally come up with is Glen Breton, which is a Canadian single malt, not a Rye, so it fits the bill as a whisky made in Canada, but it’s a totally different style than what most people think of as a “Canadian Whisky.” I’m certain there are some smaller craft distillers that are fully owned by Canadians, but I couldn’t come up with any big brands that fit the bill. Do what you will with that information. I’m not trying to suggest that anyone should or should not buy Canadian whisky, just that if they want to be mindful about which companies and countries are getting their money, it’s a complicated web.

I think there’s a few factors at play here

Yes, depression is a big one

There’s also a lack of places to go and things to do for young people. Some parents are weird about their kids going anywhere these days, and no one really wants to bring their boyfriend/girlfriend over to hang out with their parents.

And even if you don’t have obnoxious helicopter parents, where do you go? Malls are dying, restaurants and movies are expensive, and if you go hang out in a park some Karen will call the police on you.

Neighborhoods aren’t walkable, public transit is broken, and cars are unaffordable so even if you find somewhere to go on a date, how do you get there?

And at least in heterosexual dating, we’ve also had a bit of a cultural shift that might throw things off. A lot of things that used to be accepted we now rightly understand are problematic, I think a lot of men and boys are hesitant to make the first move now because we don’t want to be seen as creeps, but at the same time I think most girls still kind of expect the guys to make the first move, and while a lot of us are a bit more enlightened and could be cool with that (my wife of 5 years made the first move, she’d probably still be waiting if she left it to me) there’s still plenty of guys with toxic fragile masculinity out there who could react poorly to a girl making the first move and I don’t blame girls for not wanting to take on that risk (for the record, I also choose the bear)

So the dynamics have shifted a bit, and I don’t think we’ve really figured out how things are supposed to work yet, and honestly things probably need to shift a whole hell of a lot more before things can normalize there and people can just feel comfortable asking other people out on dates without worrying about it being weird.

And in a similar vein, it’s also I think become a lot more normal to just have platonic friends of the opposite gender. Personally some of my best friends are women who have no desire to date or fuck.

And people are also a lot more willing to have some sort of casual sex, friends with benefits, hookup culture, etc.

So there’s probably a lot of physical and emotional needs that are now being met outside of the context of a romantic relationship when in the past that was pretty much the only way to meet them.

My mom’s side of the family is polish, back in the 80s they visited some relatives there so my mom could be the godmother to one of their daughters.

Shit was rough there then, the family they stayed with had an actual outhouse. No one could ever say that my family is rich, but American money went a long way there back then, basically anything they wanted could be had for what was practically pocket change but the local polish people could barely afford any of it. One of them managed to visit the US back then, and literally cried when he went into an American supermarket and saw the variety and amount of food that just anyone could buy without needing to save up their ration cards (and not a big or fancy one, I’m pretty sure the one they went to is now a normal sized CVS)

So some really rough times are still in living memory for a lot of poles.

And they’ve really come a long way since then, my mom’s goddaughter is now traveling the world doing something in the hospitality industry, last I heard I think she was in Thailand (the relative who visited back in the 80s was amazed to see black people.)

So I don’t think most poles are in any hurry to end up under Russians thumb again.

You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)

When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.

We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.

I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.

You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.

I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)

Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.

And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes

Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.

For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.

Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.

Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.

The idea of pain doesn’t really factor into my issue with needles, I’m not worried about it hurting, I’m just skeeved out by the needle itself.

If it were an option I’d gladly take needle-less vaccines and blood draws that hurt 10× worse (which still wouldn’t be that bad, needles really don’t hurt much)

Hell, if they hurt more I’d probably have less of an issue with them. I’d rather have an actual reason to dislike them instead of just a random case of the heebie-jeebies for no particular reason.

Without knowing the content of the training or the actual intent of the people who decided to pull it, it’s pretty hard to say whether it was malicious compliance, or just plain-old compliance.

However, it got at least one republican’s feathers ruffled (the one who called it malicious is a Republican)

So if they knew it would get that kind of reaction and did it specifically to do so, that would be “malicious”

I could certainly imagine someone in the airforce deciding “You know, Alabama has pretty much nothing to be proud of except for the Tuskegee Airmen. I bet if word gets out that we’re stopping this training, some Alabama politician will make a stink over it, and make us roll it back. Then when they get on our case about other ‘DEI’ training, we can point to this as an example and say ‘well we tried to stop that one and you got butthurt about it, and these are more of the same kind of thing, so either make up your fucking minds or get off our fucking backs and let us do our god damned jobs’”

Again though, without knowing their actual intention it could just be plain ol’ compliance or even just incompetence that led to this.

I think it depends on how you use those different sites

I transitioned from Reddit to Lemmy pretty seamlessly like you did. Around the time it became clear they weren’t backing down on the API thing and other bullshit, I looked up some reddit alternatives, chose Lemmy, and kept right on doing what I was doing on Reddit.

On the other hand, I’m having a bit of a hard time ditching Facebook.

The difference is I know the people I’m friends with on Facebook, I have actual relationships with them, I’m there to interact with those specific people. Leaving Facebook without finding a decent alternative and getting those people to switch with me (which probably means they’d also have to convince their other friends to switch too) means losing contact with those people.

On Reddit and now Lemmy, I’m basically here to read articles and have conversations with strangers about those articles. I don’t really form lasting relationships here, I don’t recognize usernames outside of maybe 2 or 3 big names. If they weren’t full of the worst kinds of idiots, trolls, bots, and scammers I could pretty much get what I’m looking for from the comment section on a news site.

Some people do build those kinds of relationships here though, they come to Reddit or Lemmy, at least in part, to interact with specific users and communities that they have some sort of connection to, and when you have connections like that, it gets pretty hard to leave that platform. Unless all of your friends leave at the same time and go to the same platform, you need to either lose some friends, split your time between the two platforms (neither of which may be as good as what you had because not everyone is there) or you have to find some other way of staying in touch and keeping the friendship going (which is often much easier said than done)

I’m not at all ashamed to say I don’t like needles. I’m not an overall squeamish person, blood doesn’t bother, I’ve gotten all kinds of nasty cuts and scrapes and I just clean them up, throw some bandages on, and continue about my day. But something about needles specifically really skeeves me out. If the process was to stab me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine in there I wouldn’t mind it nearly as much.

It’s probably part of why I’m not great about going to the doctors for a regular physical and such, in the back of my mind I think that they’re gonna find some new excuse to stick me with a needle, and I’m even worse about getting blood work done (also there’s a part of me that feels really strongly that they should just be doing it as part of the physical. Surely this dude who went to medical school can handle a quick blood draw, so why should I have to go carve more time out of my life to go sit in another waiting room at LabCorp or wherever?)

That said, I can still suck it up and get my flu and COVID shots every year. Definitely helps that my work (county department of public safety) has someone come in to do it at my workplace so I can’t psych myself out of scheduling an appointment, I’m gonna be there anyway so i might as well get it done.

Yeah, fuck me for having an opinion on something I frequently find myself needing to use.

No, in an ideal world, a truck shouldnt be anyone’s primary transportation. Privately owned passenger vehicles in general should be a rarity and most people’s needs should be served by public transportation.

However, sometimes you need a truck, they do exist to serve the purpose of moving large or bulky things that you can’t with other vehicles, they’re not just for idiots to waste gas driving getting groceries or for idiots to go play in the mud. And people tend to develop opinions on the tools they use. I have a favorite hammer, I have opinions on computer operating systems, a preferred style of cabinet hinges, and opinions and preferences on countless other things.

And it happens that I like trucks. I don’t own a truck, it’s not a practical vehicle for my everyday needs, but I borrow them frequently from friends and family and rent them on occasion. And the maverick is my preferred truck for when I need one.

I don’t think it’s so much that western social media “won’t allow” leftist content, you can certainly post it and share it, but the algorithms aren’t going to do anything to help it gain traction.

Pretty much all of my Facebook friends skew liberal, leftist, even pretty hardcore socialist and communist. They share their memes and post about politics, and I like and interact with that stuff in positive ways. The few political pages I follow myself are pretty much all left leaning causes- environmentalism, pages devoted to voting out Republican candidates in my local elections, LGBTQ rights, atheism, etc. and I actively block, unfollow, and when appropriate report (though of course the reports never seem to go anywhere) any sort of of homo/trans-phobic, racist, bullshit and any misinformation I come across.

I’m just about the furthest right of anyone on my Facebook, and I’m still pretty far left. I have a few hobbies and interests and such that tend to skew right-wing, like hunting, fishing, guns, etc. but I don’t really interact with any pages relating to any of that on Facebook, don’t post about those things, etc. and the way I approach and interact with those sorts of activities is very different than the way most conservatives do.

If you looked at my ads and recommendations though, you’d think I was some kind of truly insane redneck. Gun stuff, weird Christian tradwife quiver-full homesteader shit, very thinly veiled racism, homophobia, etc, muscle cars and big trucks (I think muscle cars are stupid, I do like trucks but not the big lifted monster trucks that it’s always showing me, I think a stock maverick is pretty damn close to perfect)

The only left wing stuff I see is stuff my friends are sharing themselves, and mostly it’s stuff they’ve posted themselves and not shared from anywhere else on Facebook. Their stuff’s mostly not getting taken down, but it’s not getting promoted to any wider audience by the algorithm.