bob

if you like this account then you'll love my actual blog: https://hella.cheap

[bourtange]

republicans: homeless people should be ground into sausage and fed to schoolchildren

democrats: persons experiencing houselessness should be ground into sausage and fed to schoolchildren

[txttletale]

this post posits a utopian world where either of these parties would support feeding schoolchildren, making it a masterclass in "hopepunk"

[paratoxoplasmosis]

[2022dirt]

Things worn down by people.

[paratoxoplasmosis]

[pissvortex]

Thank you for posting your tweets, I do not enjoy going there.

It’s really not a good or productive website to use at all but it’s my biggest foothold into relevancy because I know sometimes JD Vance sees my tweets telling him that his mom traded him for some pocket lint and a perc 20

[pissvortex]

Nobody is having fun on that website. One of the nazis who posted my address had a group of even more insane nazis post his birth certificate a couple of days later. It’s like the Abyss Watchers on there, just stupid chuds executing each other over and over out of some ritualized algorithm-induced compulsion. But for some reason the Vice President gets mad and starts twitter arguments with people in his replies. And one time the Iranians shot a ballistic missile at a target in Israel because a guy with an anime profile picture told them to. A japanese guy used the auto translate to call me names for calling the new japanese PM “female hitler” and the japanese government made me take my post down because I just responded with an image of the thing they used to kill Shinzo Abe. Cyberstalking and harassment is openly encouraged by the moderators. It’s the world’s public forum in the most despicable and honest sense of the term.

[pissvortex]

This is what I’m talking about man why is Hunter Biden name searching on twitter and replying to “Pissvortex”

[palinasin]

[paratoxoplasmosis]

scrapple isn't any more disgusting than sausage, come on

[bungerc0re]

deeply deeply deeply funny post to me. nobody look up how much electricity and computing power it takes to run twitch

[paratoxoplasmosis]

it really doesn't take much at all. when I worked there the core datacenter was like half a dozen racks (so like on order 100kW) and one or two U per PoP (so like another on order 10kW). I have been to the twitch colo, I have seen the servers, they were across from wikipedia and wikipedia needed more floor space

if you don't have an intuition for what a kW is, a standard solar panel is 0.5kW, so multiply by two and imagine that many solar panels

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

[paratoxoplasmosis]

transmission and deluge are also good options

[transgenderer]

There should be a napoleon in every generation. Like the dalai lama. French revolutionary monks searching the countryside with a group of artillerymen which each candidate child must attempt to command

[paratoxoplasmosis]

if you want a napoleon you need to have a french revolution first

[jabberding0]

how it's done

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[headspace-hotel]

had to read a sourcebook of primary sources about the thirty years war called "experiencing the thirty years war" like 5 years ago in one of my history courses and it still haunts me.

Either the introduction to that reading or another reading we had argued that the widespread devastation and collective trauma of the thirty years' war was analogous to one of the World Wars. In many parts of (what would later become) Germany 60 to 80 percent of the civilian population died. Wars, famines and plagues have a way of working in synergy.

[70sscifiart]

A set of interior illustrations by Robert Tinney, for BYTE magazine's August 1989 issue, accompanying a series about neural networks.

More info in my art blog newsletter post: Robert Tinney: BYTE Magazine and Beyond

[iiconostasis]

[escuerzoresucitado]

Peony (牡丹) is a classic Chinese cigarette label, famously known for being one of Mao Zedong's preferred choices.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Today at work a couple of apprentices were rotating rows of solar panels and unwittingly turned one row directly into a couple of metal posts that had been driven into the ground, shattering two panels.

And on the one hand I feel really bad for them, because they were clearly really upset and they kept apologizing even though it wasn't really their fault. (Who the fuck puts metal posts underneath a rotating solar panel?!)

On the other hand, I kind of can't stop laughing. They were so distraught! God, what must have gone through their minds when they heard the first crunch. This is SUCH a classic apprentice scenario, everyone in the trades has been there. Congrats on your rite of passage kiddos, you're gonna be telling this story to your apprentices one day

[captainjonnitkessler]

POV: You're about to have a really unfortunate conversation with your foreman

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

[mammalianmammals]

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services