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China's Xi accused the US of trying to trick him into invading Taiwan, but said he won't take the bait
  • First link: Members of A Company, so you're looking at 100 people maximum and likely less. Not exactly a large fighting force.

    Second link: There's nothing "quiet" about it. It's been blaring on Western News non-stop for about 6 years now. The US has been completely open about weapons sales and training schedules.

    Third link: We gave President Tsai Ing-Wen a medal. Okay, and?

  • 15 Russian air defense systems have been hit in occupied Crimea in the last two months.
  • I'm pretty sure that's the point of these attacks. Ukraine is reducing the coverage and effectiveness of Russia Air Defenses in preparation for flying F-16s.

  • Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 massacre
  • The law was written by gun controllers some 90 years ago.

  • House Republicans launch investigation into news rating group NewsGuard
  • So literally no 1A violations can possibly exist, and nothing is being censored.

    You need to check closer. The DoD has a contract with them; which means that NG has a financial interest in doing what the DoD tells them. An arm of the Federal Government interfering in private media, and yes that includes fact checking, absolutely has the possibility of creating 1A violations.

  • Largest US oil trade group to sue to block Biden's EV push
  • This echoes generic fear mongering of regulation from the conservative side.

    No it acknowledges that changes that can be made from one administration to the next.

    What are some bad things the EPA has done in your mind?

    This took nearly 30 years.

    Saying the government shouldn’t have the power to regulate emissions that are destroying the biosphere is absurd.

    I haven't said that nor would I but $GovernmentAgency isn't a synonym for "The Government". What's being discussed are the limits of an Agency attached to the Executive Branch relative to the power of the Legislative Branch.

    What does “but will it always” do good things even mean?

    This, this right here is what it means.

    The Trump Administration Rolled Back More Than 100 Environmental Rules.

    That's what can happen when an Agency of the Executive "does things" on its own authority.

    If the EPA ever start doing truly asinine things, then we elect leaders to change the laws dictating their mandate.

    How's that been working out for the last 20 years?

  • Boeing and Airbus may have used 'counterfeit' titanium in planes, FAA says
  • This one got at least Airbus and Spirit as well and it's quite possible that it's related to the CFM / AOG Technics debacle out of the UK last year.

    https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/engine-maker-cfm-says-up-96-planes-affected-by-fake-parts-probe-2023-09-20/

  • Boeing and Airbus may have used 'counterfeit' titanium in planes, FAA says
  • It's not that the titanium metal is fake, it's probably real. By "fake" what they mean is that the part made with the titanium isn't what the documentation for it claims. It may have been made by a different company than what the documentation says or it may not have been tested in the way that the documentation says.

    Every last piece, down to the tiniest screw, in a commercial airplane has a paper trail and for these parts someone is saying that the paper trail has been falsified. That's the "fake" part.

  • Linux users survey!
  • it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

    Wow, that's a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

    I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I'm currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.

  • Why the gradual death of the console exclusive makes business sense
  • When I opened the page in FireFox I was prompted to manage cookies. I clicked on that and then clicked the "site vendor" tab.

  • Proton 9.0-2 brings better controller support in launchers, more playable games, lots of bug fixes
  • I got the latest version to work on Linux Mint but don’t ask me how because I can’t tell you.

  • Microsoft accidentally lists the benefits of not using a Microsoft account on Windows 11
  • What would you even do with a PC that never has internet access?

    The idea that computers should always be online is less than 20 years old. Even in the early 2000s it wasn't uncommon for most employees in a company to NOT have Internet access. Companies, and people, bought or wrote software and then ran it to accomplish the task. No internet needed.

    I'd argue that many employees in regular non-technical positions STILL don't require Internet access to do their job unless they have to sign into some kind of cloud portal

  • Supreme Court rejects bid to restrict access to abortion pill
  • The NRLB case didn't erode anything. The decision followed precedent and kept things status quo.

  • T-Mobile users thought they had a lifetime price lock—guess what happened next
  • Today's $1,200 handset can be had 24 months from now for 1/4th of that. To forestall the "I broke my phone and need something NOW!" argument I'd point out that phones like the Samsung Galaxy A15 exist, are COMPLETELY usable, and cost less than $200 brand new.

    Anyone forking out $1,000+ for a new phone either has some very specific needs or is stuck in a FOMO trap.

  • US lawmakers pass Tibet policy bill that questions China’s claims over region
  • Imagine if that was the headline…

    Well that headline would be pretty damn accurate!

    all the way to the entire country

    China is no different. In fact there are NO countries in the world immune to the "you displaced a previous civilization" argument. They've all done it.

  • Largest US oil trade group to sue to block Biden's EV push
  • No, the basis is that the EPA has exceeded its regulatory authority by coming very close to ending ICE vehicles with its new rule. While I agree with what the EPA is doing with it's new tailpipe emissions rule I also wonder at the advisability of letting politically appointed technocrats make such sweeping changes.

    It will be a good thing THIS time but will it always?

  • YouTube looks to be testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers
  • A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.

    I don't think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.

    Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it's a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they're not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren't true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.

    With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.

    A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.

    It wouldn't be trivial but it's not really new territory either. It's just assembling existing tech in a new way.

  • Rare white bison sighted in Yellowstone evokes Native American prophecy
  • Another was born last year in Wyoming

    This one probably was too since it was photographed in Lamar Valley.

  • Why the gradual death of the console exclusive makes business sense
  • I'd like to read the article but holy hell there's over 700 companies in their tracking cookie policy!

    Luckily there's an archive of it: https://archive.ph/Yrcda

  • Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
  • Libertarian here. According to you I don't want to help the poor so can you please explain to me why I'm spending hours every month doing volunteer work that has positive impacts for the disadvantaged?

    It’s long been said Libertarians are just Republicans that want to smoke weed and distance themselves from the outwardly racist rhetoric.

    Some are but not all. The people who repeat that line really don't like to be confronted with the reality that there's a lot more to a libertarian than weed. As an example the party platform started pushing LGBTQ rights clear back in the late '70s, long before anyone else was.

    There certainly are selfish bastard libertarians but undesirables exist in every party and I maintain that we shouldn't define a group by its worst members.

  • Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
  • Why would I, a right wing libertarian, lend my time to developing a piece of software that I am unable to make a profit from?

    You are making a reductionist argument that the only thing that motivates a libertarian is profit. It is certainly a motivator but it's certainly not the only one. Libertarian's have a long history of association with FOSS, for example my own stretches back to the mid-90s. I have no desire to make money from it but I have a strong desire to stay out of the clutches of BigTech as much as possible and so I contribute to FOSS as I can.

    Something like bitcoin is the kind of tech project of that mould that i think attracts the right wing libertarian.

    A lot of libertarians push on cryptocurrency not because of a profit motive but because of the freedom and privacy aspects. To use myself as an example I don't hold crypto as an investment but rather as a way of holding a currency that isn't subject to the US Federal Reserve system.

    Are there some libertarians who fit your descriptions? Absolutely there are, and they are generally referred to as Anarcho-Capitalists, An-Caps for short, but just like every Democrat isn't a Progressive not every libertarian is an An-Cap.

  • New York Proposes Crackdown On Major Gun Company (It's Glock)

    New York may become the first state to bar gun companies from selling pistols that can easily be converted into machine guns.

    9
    Is Proton a good choice for what I want to do?

    I read the sidebar and didn't see anything about asking questions so apologies in advance if this post breaks a rule.

    I'm in the U.S. and wanting to knowif Proton Family is a good choice for my use case.

    Two decades ago I got tired of changing email addresses whenever my ISP changed so I registered my surname as a .net vanity domain and started running my own email server at home. When Google started offering Google for Organizations for free if you had less than 10 users I folded up my personal email server and shifted everything over. We use it for e-mail and basic family calendaring.

    Last month when going through bills my wife and I were once again frustrated by coordination required to sign into various accounts. "Hey what's the password for $CreditCard?" or "What's the MFA you just got for $BankAccount?" or "What's the password for Disney"?"

    That got me started looking for a family password manager so we could easily share and keep this stuff up to date.

    At the same time we realized that were paying for YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, two YouTube Music, and an Amazon Music subscription. Whoops.

    Well, no problem. We'll just "family share" the YTTV and YTP subscriptions so everyone has everything and we save some money.

    Nope. G-Suite doesn't allow family sharing. So we're all going to have to create seperate @gmail.com addresses to make this work. Oh, and I'll have to shift the YTTV subscription from my vanity domain to a regular @gmail as well. Which breaks the entire idea behind the vanity domain in the first place.

    While I researching a Family Password Manager of course I found Proton Pass. While I was looking at the pricing for it I realized that they also have a "Family" setup for email which looks interesting.

    So now I'm considering porting my vanity domain and all it's email out of G-Suite and over to Proton Family. At nearly $300 a year it's not exactly inexpensive, since I'd basically be paying it until I die, and it will be a fair bit of work to switch everything over so I don't want to do it unless it's going to work.

    So would Proton Family be a good choice? Are there any significant technical challenges to migrating a custom domain and email out of G-Suite and into Proton?

    Edit: This post was rambly and unclear. The TL;DR is that I’m increasingly annoyed with G-Suite and since I’m looking at Proton Pass anyway I'm wondering about Proton Suite (which includes Email, Calendar, and Pass).

    13
    Automation Question - What am I missing?

    Always surprises me when I go to do something in HA and realize that I can't figure out how.

    This time its lights, specifically making sure that they don't get left on.

    Until now I've simply been creating an automation for each light switch so that if it changes state from Off to On and when it's 30 minutes after sunrise it's starts a 15 minute wait and then changes the state of the switch to off.

    This approach mostly works but it's less than ideal.

    First I'm having to create an automation for each device. How do I do it by Area, or list / group of devices, instead?

    Second if a device is turned on too early there's no state change for the automation to catch and it never fires. I could fix this by creating another automation that checks for it but then I'll have even more of them to manage.

    Third this doesn't work very well if you want different things to happen on the weekends as opposed to during the weekday. For instance on a Saturday I may WANT that closet light to stay on longer because I'm putting away clothes.

    It'd be really nice if I could program HA like this 'On a weekday if you see any device on this list turn on 30 minutes after Sunrise I want you to turn whichever one(s) it was off again 15 minutes later.'.

    I'm must be missing something here because surely HA can do this, right?

    9
    Have a ratGDO v2.5i and no case for it?

    Shortly after the ratGDO v2.5 was released I ordered one and a couple of days later I ordered a case from Etsy to go with it.

    Two days later the Etsy seller messages me asking if have the v2.5 or v2.5i because the cases are different. WTF? There's already a new version?! I tell the seller to make it the v2.5i because that's probably what I'll get.

    So last week I received a very nice red case from the Etsy Seller HighTower3D out of the North Carolina. Seriously, this thing is nice. The build quality is high, it has magnets in the bottom for mounting, comes with allen screws (and the allen wrench you need) and a couple of little zip ties.

    So this week my ratGDO shows up and...it's v2.52i! A quick check of the website shows that there's now a v2.53 and that makes four revisions in the last month!

    You can't make this stuff up so all I can do is laugh...and give away the v2.5i case that I spent $26 on and doesn't fit the ratGDO version I ended up with.

    I have no use for this case so I'm giving it away to someone who can; make sure you have a v2.5i though because this call will NOT fit any other version.

    If you are in the United States and can use this case then leave a reply below. 😊

    7
    Correct way to control Sidewalk Heating Mats

    I ordered some sidewalk heating mats from HeatTrak and I want to automate them with HA so that they come on when it makes sense to do so based on the data from my Tempest Weather Station.

    According to HeatTrack my mats will have a combined resistive load of 5A which is well within the spec of the Zooz ZEN05 or ZEN14, both rated for 15A resistive loads, but when I asked them about it they did not recommend using either of them with heated mats. They couldn't, or wouldn't, explain why and it doesn't make sense to me why this wouldn't work.

    My next thought was to simply swap the outlet to something smart but this is an outdoor outlet so it needs to be GFCI and there's essentially no Z-Wave GFCI outlets made.

    Do I really need to use something like an Enbrighten Z-Wave Plus 40-Amp contactor for this or am I missing something here?

    6
    How do I add a cool down to an automation?

    I have an automation that turns my driveway lights on when motion is detected. It normally works fairly well but it was windy last night and that caused the automation to trip endlessly as my trees and bushes were whipping around. Lights would come on, shut off 10 minutes later, then turn right back on again. It basically did this all night until I disabled the automation.

    I'll do some fine tuning of the motion sensors which will help and I'm considering adding a condition to the automation where it won't trip if the wind speed is above a certain level but how can I add some kind of cool down timer to the automation to prevent it from endlessly engaging?

    11
    I need some help choosing how to setup lights and camera for my driveway.

    First the layout. My garage is setup similar to this one, although mine is attached, has three light fixtures, and my driveway is 4 cars wide.

    The wife wants me to replace the three basic on / off fixtures that we have (they're getting rusty) and keep them all matching. If I'm going to do this I want to add a camera to the setup.

    Functionally I'd like the lights to have or work like they have dual bright capability where they come on full bright at sunset then after a couple of hours they dim down unless they detect motion. If they detect motion then they come back to full bright for a period of time then dim back down again. They do this for a set period of hours, say 4, then they turn off completely unless they detect motion.

    My current lights are already automated for on / off (but not dimming or motion) through the use of HA and a z-wave switch.

    Where I'm getting stuck is that I can see at least three ways to do this but none of them are perfect.

    1. Replace my dumb carriage fixtures with new dumb fixtures then change the switch to a dimming version plus add a motion sensor and camera out front. Then setup HA for the functionality I want. The upside of doing it this way is that it's very easy to get matching fixtures. The downside is that the motion sensor and camera will not be well integrated visually.

    2. Replace my dumb fixtures with ones that have dual bright built in. It's easy to do, and I could even keep the HA Automation I have setup now, but again the camera setup is not going to integrate well visually. I'm also concerned that three motion sensors controlling three lights will cause trouble for the camera (or each other) because they will react to different things and turn themselves on and off independently.

    3. Replace my dumb fixtures with smarter ones. In the center position I'd use one that has an integrated motion sensor and camera. This Reolink seems like it would work pretty well. However RL doesn't make any fixtures that match it, which means my center fixture would look different than the other two.

    I may just have to deal with mismatched fixtures but does anyone have any suggestions? Am I missing an option?

    9
    Why shouldn't I use Reolink Cameras?

    The next step in my HA journey is adding cameras; indoor, outdoor, and doorbell so I've been exploring my options. I had originally intended to do a Frigate setup, I even have a Coral module and PC to do it with, but then I discovered Reolink.

    Without having any experience with them they look nearly ideal. They seem to have tight integration with HA 2023.3 or later and their pricing and functionality look good.

    They seem like a no brainer but I've noticed that they're often NOT the first recommendation in the HA Community. Why is that and why shouldn't I use them?

    18
    Where in the file system does the UDMP-SE store it's ipsec tunnel configuration?

    UDMP is running UniFi OS 3.1.16 and I need a specific VPN configuration that StrongSwan supports but isn't possible to do in the GUI. Three years ago the files I need were located in /run/strongswan/ipsec.d/tunnels/ but they are no longer there. Does anyone know where they live now -or- how to edit a VPN config outside of the GUI?

    0
    Buelldozer Buelldozer @lemmy.today
    Posts 9
    Comments 1.1K