Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 143 Posts
  • 4.75K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle
    1. Lamplighter

    Lamplighters were responsible for lighting and extinguishing gas street lamps in towns and cities before electric lighting became standard. They typically carried ladders and torches to perform their duties. The job was crucial for maintaining public safety during the evenings. However, with the introduction of electric streetlights, the need for manual lamp maintenance disappeared, leading to the decline of this occupation. Lamplighters are now part of history, representing a bygone era of urban infrastructure.

    The lamplighters themselves were machine operators that replaced earlier professions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy

    A link-boy (or link boy or linkboy) was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before the introduction of gas lighting in the early to mid 19th century.


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washerwoman

    A washerwoman or laundress was a person, usually a woman, employed to wash laundry by hand, before the widespread use of washing machines and commercial laundries. The profession existed in many cultures, spanning from antiquity to the early modern period. While the profession has historically been gendered, often associated with women, in some contexts, men also performed laundry labor. It was typically low-paid, physically arduous, and associated with lower social status.

    The occupation began to decline with the rise of commercial laundries. The spread of domestic washing machines and self-service laundries further reduced the need for the independent washerwomen profession. By the late twentieth century, the profession had largely disappeared in industrialized countries.




  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station_attendant

    A filling station attendant or gas station attendant (also known as a gas jockey in the US and Canada[1][2]) is a worker at a full-service filling station who performs services other than accepting payment. Tasks usually include pumping fuel, cleaning windshields, and checking vehicle oil levels. Prior to the introduction of self-starting vehicle engines, attendants would also start vehicle engines by manually turning the crankshaft with a hand crank.

    In the United States, gas jockeys were often tipped for their services,[3] but this is now rare as full-service stations are uncommon except in New Jersey, 16 “urban” counties in Oregon, 4 cities in Massachusetts, and the town of Huntington, New York, where there are laws or restrictions against letting customers pump their own gasoline.



  • This is what I imagine that they’re concerned about:

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

    You’ve got a left-economic vote with socially-conservative positions, especially anti-immigrant, that’s pretty substantial.

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

    The Red Wall Caucus is a British political caucus and pressure group of backbench Labour MPs who represent red wall seats in the House of Commons. Led by Bassetlaw MP Jo White, the caucus was formed in November 2024 and has 43 members as of May 2025.

    The Red Wall Caucus mainly focuses on opposing immigration, with the group arguing that immigration is opposed by the British people. It believes that opposing immigration is necessary to prevent the loss of red wall Labour voters to the anti-immigration right-wing populist party Reform UK, which has gained support in the region as a protest to high immigration numbers under previous Conservative governments. The group also focuses on issues which it sees as affecting Labour’s traditional working class voter base in particular, such as the cost-of-living crisis, anti-social behaviour and crime, access to GPs and welfare benefits.

    Personally, I think that immigration is usually a pretty strong positive for a country, but if you can’t sell your policies to voters, you don’t get to hold power. British political parties, including Labour, are going to have to figure out some way to handle anti-immigrant sentiment among the electorate.

    EDIT: I’d add that I also think that the recent anti-pornography stuff is obnoxious too, but I imagine that the same sort of thing is driving that. They’re probably going to have to have some kind of game to win more-socially-conservative voters over, or they’re going to have a difficult time of it.

    EDIT2: Another option: they could go beat up on transexuals instead of immigrants to try to get those presently-planning-to-go-for-Reform votes. Probably not a very appealing option for a lot of people here either.

    https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/05/08/reform-uk-lgbtq-policies-local-election/

    Reform UK’s LGBTQ+ policies

    Reform UK’s manifesto – titled ‘Our Contract With You’ – takes aim at “‘woke’ ideology”, specifically “transgender indoctrination”.

    In the opening statement, from party leader Nigel Farage, it says: “Divisive, ‘woke’ ideology has captured our public institutions. Transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children.”

    In its education section, it vows to “ban transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools” in their first 100 days in government.

    “No gender questioning, social transitioning or pronoun swapping. Inform parents of under 16s about their children’s life decisions. Schools must have single sex facilities,” it reads.

    Later, it vows to “mandate single sex spaces”, saying: “Public toilets and changing areas must provide single sex facilities.”

    It also says it will “review the online safety bill”, adding: “Social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology and divisive Critical Race theory should have no role in regulating free speech.”

    In February 2026, Suella Braverman said that, if voted into power, “on day one, we will get rid of the equalities department, we will scrap the equalities minister … and we will repeal the Equality Act”.



  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world...........
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    3 days ago

    checks

    https://lemmyverse.net/communities has a list.

    It’s on the lemmy.porn instance, !forcedincest@lemmy.porn. Presumably that instance is, well, for porn.

    If you don’t want to see it, you can block that community and you won’t see any more from it. If you don’t want to see anything from that instance, you can block that instance. If you don’t want to see NSFW content in general, you can block that.

    As to “why” in the broader sense, it’s because the Threadiverse is a global system. It spans many countries and different groups of people. It’s like asking why something is “allowed” on the Web — everything is allowed as long as the local country is okay with it.



  • Magewell Pro Capture card

    I’ve been kind of shifting towards use of USB devices over internal cards.

    All of the USB devices that I have still can be connected to computers. Ditto for DE-9 serial ports, though I might need a USB adapter.

    But I’ve seen ISA->PCI/AGP->PCIe obsolete a lot of old hardware that I’ve had sitting around, and that’s just on the PC. That includes my video capture hardware.



  • I doubt that this is political theater. The judge — who is a neutral party here, and introduced the question — is asking a pretty straightforward question, testing the argument that the lawyer is making. “If your argument that Trump can rebuilt the wing of the White House holds, it seems that it’d entail X (where X is something that it seems like we wouldn’t want). Is that true?”

    If you read court transcripts, this isn’t an uncommon thing for a judge to do.



  • “use a strong password” whats that gonna do if the database gets pwned, sandra?

    Strong passwords aren’t intended to simply protect against brute-forcing a password via trying to authenticate repeatedly, but also to help protect against brute-force attempts to obtain passwords from a compromised password database using a dictionary attack, the scenario you’re describing.

    Typically — if an authentication system is storing its password database competently — the password shouldn’t be stored in plain text. Instead, the password will be salted (to avoid rainbow table attacks) and then hashed via a cryptographic hash. The password database entry will look something like a tuple of (username, salt, salted hashed password). If the password is a strong one, it will be computationally-hard to obtain the plaintext password, even if someone has the salt and the salted, hashed password.


  • In March 2019, Bevin said in an interview that he deliberately exposed all nine of his children to chickenpox so they would “catch the disease and become immune.”[287]

    What year was that?

    I mean, when I was a kid, there was no chickenpox vaccine available. I didn’t even realize that we’d finally developed one until a few years ago.

    I don’t think that my parents intentionally went out of their way to expose me, though I did catch it, but intentional exposure certainly wasn’t some sort of wacko practice at the time. You were likely to catch it sooner or later, and it could be much more severe if you had it late in life — you wanted immunity earlier rather than later. Chickenpox was just kinda part of life.

    searches

    Looks like it was rolling out in the US in the mid-1990s.

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

    Pox parties, also known as flu parties, are social activities in which children are deliberately exposed to infectious diseases such as chickenpox. Such parties originated to “get it over with” before vaccines were available for a particular illness or because childhood infection might be less severe than infection during adulthood, according to proponents.[1][2] For example, measles[3] is more dangerous to adults than to children over five years old.[1][4][5] Deliberately exposing people to diseases has since been discouraged by public health officials in favor of vaccination, which has caused a decline in the practice of pox parties,[6] although flu parties saw a resurgence in the early 2010s.[7]

    In the United States, chickenpox parties were popularized before the introduction of the varicella vaccine in 1995.[9][19][20] Children were also sometimes intentionally exposed to other common childhood illnesses, such as mumps and measles.[21] Before vaccines for these infections became available, parents regarded these diseases as almost inevitable.[21]

    1000009376





  • I think that the /r/place-style collaborative pixel art thing is neat.

    https://placedata.reddit.com/data/final_2023_place.png

    To be fair, that is explicitly not infinite canvas — it has finite dimensions — but there have been derived programs with infinite bounds that work the same way to do pixel art.

    It sounds like the software you’re using is intended for some kind of idea organization team stuff, though. For that, it doesn’t sound like it’s a great paradigm to me, but I also don’t spent a lot of time using software of that sort.

    I’ve used visual programming languages. These use flowcharts to represent data flow, are often used for signal processing stuff. Same kind of idea. My general feeling is that that doesn’t really scale up to large problems — you wind up wasting way too much time trying to navigate around the thing. It’s a quick and intuitive way to view very small things, though it still isn’t my preferred approach; I’d rather use text.