You Should Know

The former Prime Minister of Australia said politicians are frightened of him:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2021/feb/19/australian-politicians-frightened-murdoch-media-beast-kevin-rudd-video

JD Vance recently flew across the United States to meet him in his mansion:

https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-montana-visits-rupert-lachlan-murdoch-d4f040113968ea5d702061cac6129ee4

When you are creating your resume, you don't need to put every random job you've ever had. What companies do is they look at your jobs on the resume, and at most call the employer and ask them if you worked for them and how you did at the job.

There is no way for a non government employee to know if you worked other jobs. Keep off any jobs that you worked at for less than 2 years and use every skill you learned as a skill for your resume.

Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.

I see a huge amount of confusion around terminology in discussions about Artificial Intelligence, so here’s my quick attempt to clear some of it up.

Artificial Intelligence is the broadest possible category. It includes everything from the chess opponent on the Atari to hypothetical superintelligent systems piloting spaceships in sci-fi. Both are forms of artificial intelligence - but drastically different.

That chess engine is an example of narrow AI: it may even be superhuman at chess, but it can’t do anything else. In contrast, the sci-fi systems like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, or GERTY are imagined as generally intelligent - that is, capable of performing a wide range of cognitive tasks across domains. This is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

One common misconception I keep running into is the claim that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are “not AI” or “not intelligent.” That’s simply false. The issue here is mostly about mismatched expectations. LLMs are not generally intelligent - but they are a form of narrow AI. They’re trained to do one thing very well: generate natural-sounding text based on patterns in language. And they do that with remarkable fluency.

What they’re not designed to do is give factual answers. That it often seems like they do is a side effect - a reflection of how much factual information was present in their training data. But fundamentally, they’re not knowledge databases - they’re statistical pattern machines trained to continue a given prompt with plausible text.

Death Generator is an easy generator for changing the text displayed on old game screens.

You should know this because there aren't enough Death Generator memes on Lemmy ;)

Opnxng hosts a number of public services focused on privacy by using opensource front ends for popular websites, including:

• Medium
• Threads
• Github
• IMDB
• Stackoverflow
• Tumblr
• Quora
• Fandom

It also hosts tools like:

• Stirling PDF
• IT Tools
• Etherpad
• Privatebin
• Send

and a few lemmy frontends like mlmym, Photon, and Voyager.

Edit: added a detail that they are not hosting the websites I listed, but rather open source and privacy respecting front ends for these websites.

TL;DR: Studies show they do the same things as and have the same effects as Medical Doctors.

Simple machines run on instant pulses. We run on chemical reactions that linger.

Think about your phone or computer—they operate on clean electrical signals that turn on and off instantly. Flip a switch, and the current flows. Turn it off, and it stops. No lingering effects, no chemical residue.

But we're not simple machines. We're incredibly complex bio-electrical systems that use calcium and magnesium channels to generate the electricity that moves our muscles and fires our neurons. The difference? Our electrical signals are created by chemical reactions—and chemical reactions take time to fully resolve.

Here's what happens when you get triggered, angry, or face danger:

Your body floods with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These chemicals don't just flip a switch—they create a cascading biochemical response. Your heart races, muscles tense, and your entire system prepares for action. Even after the immediate threat passes, these chemicals are still circulating through your bloodstream.

This is why you can't just "turn off" strong emotions the way you'd power down a device. The chemical reaction that created your emotional response is still happening in your body, slowly working its way back to homeostasis.

The civilized response often makes it worse. You feel angry or triggered, but you hold it in because it's the socially appropriate thing to do. You don't want to disturb others or escalate the situation. But here's the problem: those stress chemicals are still there, demanding completion of the biological cycle they started.

Your nervous system created that chemical cocktail to get you to safety or help you respond to a threat. But when you suppress the natural response, you're essentially leaving the engine running. The biochemical process needs to complete itself—those chemicals need to be metabolized and cleared from your system.

This is why you need to "finish the cycle." Go for a walk. Do some intense exercise. Have a good cry. Punch a pillow. Your body needs to burn through those lingering chemicals and return to its natural state of balance.

Understanding this difference between simple electrical systems and our complex biochemical machinery helps explain why emotional regulation is so challenging. We're not dealing with on/off switches—we're working with sophisticated chemical processes that follow their own timeline.

The takeaway? Honor your biology. When you feel strong emotions, remember that there are real chemical reactions happening in your body that need time and space to resolve. Give yourself permission to complete the cycle, even if it means stepping away to process what you're feeling.

Your body is an incredible bio-electrical machine, but it operates on chemistry, not just electricity. And chemistry takes time.

What strategies do you use to help your body process strong emotions? How do you complete the biochemical cycle when you can't express what you're feeling in the moment?

So if you do the Docker setup, obeying the instructions and substituting everything that needs to get substituted, but don't proofread the files in detail and so miss that line 40 of docker-compose.yml doesn't have the variable {{domain}} like in every other location you need to write your domain, but instead just says LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=lemmy.ml and so you fail to change it away from lemmy.ml... then, everything will work, until you type in your admin password for the first time, at which point your browser will send a request to lemmy.ml which includes your admin username, your email address, and the admin password you're trying to set. And, also, of course your IP address wherever you are sitting and setting up the server.

I have no reason at all to think the Lemmy devs have set their server up to log this information when it comes in. nginx will throw it away by default, of course, but it would be easy for them to have it save it instead, if they wanted to. And my guess is most people won't use a different admin password once they figure out why creating their admin user isn't working and fix it.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml I think you should fix the docker-compose.yml file not to do this.

Edit: Just to increase the information-to-rudeness ratio of my post. The docs are at:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

And they recommend using wget to download:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/main/assets/docker-compose.yml

Which is pulled from:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/tree/main/assets

Which is what has the wrong line 40 in it.

Edit: They fixed it. Good stuff.

The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network let's you send and receive mobile alerts about nearby ICE activity whenever, and wherever it occurs.

No downloadable app required. StopICE works with technology already built into your phone. Send and receive mobile alerts via text message, or at stopice.net from any mobile device with a tap of a button.

Puerto Rico has far more rescue animals than can be adopted by the local population, and being an island it's much harder to transport them to other rescues with more space or even who already have an adopter lined up for the animal. It's not feasible for volunteers to regularly transport them.

If you are visiting PR, you can sign up to escort a cat or small dog on your return flight. A volunteer meets you at the departure airport with the animal in a carrier, and another meets you at arrival to pick them up. It's a very easy process since PR is a US territory. The rescue pays for any costs associated with bringing the animal as a carry on, and you get an adorable travel buddy.

This is a little guy named Halo that I escorted a few years ago 🥲 I still think about him and am so happy I got to help him to his new life.

A 2023 study at MIT made this discovery, which could be a boon for storing electricity.

The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household.

3.5 cubic meters of material ought to be enough to make quite a comfy house

There is a tradeoff between the storage capacity of the material and its structural strength, they found. By adding more carbon black, the resulting supercapacitor can store more energy, but the concrete is slightly weaker, and this could be useful for applications where the concrete is not playing a structural role or where the full strength-potential of concrete is not required.

They talk about making roads with the material, but I suspect electrical posts (utility poles) could also be made of this, which would certainly last much longer than roads and be cheaper to maintain and fix

YSK: How to document that you are a US citizen

https://www.usa.gov/prove-us-citizenship

The most common way to show that you are a US citizen is to show a passport. However, only about 50% of US citizens have a passport.

An alternative to a passport is a Certificate of Citizenship.

Certificates of Citizenship and Naturalization show proof that someone is a U.S. citizen. The website https://www.usa.gov/prove-us-citizenship shows how you can get or replace these documents.

Prove your citizenship: born in the U.S. with no birth certificate. If you were born in the U.S. and have no birth certificate, learn how to get documentation to prove you are a U.S. citizen.

Prove your citizenship: born outside the U.S. to a U.S. citizen parent. Prove your U.S. citizenship without a birth certificate if you were born outside the U.S. to a U.S. citizen.

In Firefox and its derivatives, you can add the non-AI version of DuckDuckGo as a search engine by going into Settings > Search > Search Shortcuts > Add and then giving it a name of your choice with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s being put in the "URL with %s in place of search term" part. You have to remove the 25 part from the URL though, that seems to be a Lemmy quirk with posting a link.

I don't know when they made this available, but I'm learning about this now and it's super useful if you hate LLMs and also use a browser that clears cookies on close (such as Mullvad or LibreWolf).

Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don't have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI's crap. Those are great ideas. But, don't drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

You can even add a search like this to your browser's inbuilt search engines, with a string like this:

• https://searx.oloke.xyz/search?q=filetype%3Apdf+ %s &language=all (or pick another SearXNG instance here)
• https://duckduckgo.com/?q=filetype%3Apdf+ %s &ia=web

The %s is the placeholder string used by both Firefox, Chromium, and many of their derivatives like LibreWolf, ZenBrowser, and Vivaldi. You'll need to remove the spaces around it in the two URLs above (as Lemmy changed all my URLs without spaces to something different).

This is a general warning to most people, always focus on the accuracy rather than the advocacy part.

Don't read or share an article just because it aligns with your world view.

News organizations in general are the "middle man" between you and events happening in the world.

Don't let the middle man shape your view on reality, focus on accuracy and hopefully you will get a balanced world view.

I had the feeling I couldn't poop for some reason for two days, I also had some sickness from being exposed to too much AC (the doctor said), the doctor gave me medicine against the other stuff which works wonderfully. But my stomach hurt a lot so I ordered a 1 liter bottle of prune juice because I heard it helps against constipation.

Once it arrived I drank the whole bottle at once just to be sure, because I heard it's a natural mild laxative and my stomach hurt so much.

And it worked very well, after 2 hours I was running to the toilet and getting rid of whatever was stuck in there. It worked very well, my stomach stopped hurting after one more hour, wonderful!

But I didn't need to drink the whole bottle, I'm stuck on the toilet the whole afternoon now because as soon as I get out, 2 minutes later I need to run back in, so it's just easier to stay on it.

I think like a cup or two might have been enough.

With the recent event the US just pulled, it is a good idea to freshen up or learn what a Proxy War is and is not.

This makes it much easier to set your screen's brightness to a comfortable level at each time of the day, and to save energy.

(For Windows, see the very bottom of this post.)

On Linux, if you currently have no keyboard shortcuts for that available, a good way to create them is via ddcutil. Once you have ddcutil installed, have your displays' properties printed in the command line by typing ddcutil detect.

This should show you a list of parameters for each of the displays you have connected. For a display of your choice, try these commands:

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 - 5 # reduces brightness by 5 %
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 + 5 # increases brightness by 5 %

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 12 - 10 # reduces contrast by 10 %
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 12 + 10 # increases contrast by 10 %

ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 0 # sets brightness to minimum
ddcutil -n <Serial number> setvcp 10 100 # sets brightness to maximum

If these commands all work, you can create in your desktop environment's settings (e.g. KDE) custom keyboard shortcuts that execute these commands. Personally, with my two displays and with dedicated "Brightness up" and "Brightness down" keys (macros) on my keyboard, I am using combinations with the modifiers Alt to address the secondary instead of the primary display, Shift, to adjust contrast instead of brightness, and Control to set an absolute value (0% or 100%) instead of going by increments.

Further notes:

Instead of addressing your displays via their serial number, you can also address your display via most other parameters shown in ddcutil detect by using another option than -n, e.g. via bus number or manufacturer name, but I've found that bus number is not persistent over the years, and manufacturer name ("Mfg id") may contain spaces which may lead to problems.

A full list of all other possible vcp commands (the numbers after setvcp) can be obtained through ddcutil vcpinfo.

If you're using a laptop, brightness adjustments for its internal screen are of course almost always a no-brainer.

On Windows 10 and perhaps 11 as well, you can apparently do the following:

Step 1: Press the Win + A to open the Action Center.

Step 2: Press Shift + Tab to select the brightness slider.

Step 3: Use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the screen brightness.