discord is shit, poorly designed software, with all the most obnoxious poor security decisions (like requiring phone calls), with poor political decisions on top as well as spying. probably one of the worst pieces of software to ever exist. all it has is momentum. it's like pop music where a million people make bands and one wins the fame lottery.
it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.
they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.
instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading
it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)
You can map the availability of pornography to a rise in risky sex practices like choking. This isn't a problem inherent to pornography itself—rather, it's a factor of inadequate sex ed combined with the commonplace irresponsible presentation of certain sex acts in porn. Still, it'd be misleading to present porn as an entirely neutral depiction of sex. Mainstream pornography demonstrably does spread some harmful ideas. This is also true of Hollywood cinema, though; all media works this way, to a greater or lesser extent.
lets just skip straight to the logical conclusion, buddy. no amount of "web" or "discord" regulation stops porn consumption. the statistic of "minors viewing porn" wouldn't be affected even slightly, even if all of the regulation in question here were passed to the fullest extent. this is because people can just download and run whatever software they want, and communicate with any party they want. what you want is for people to not have control over their computers/communications made from them. people talk about a middle ground, but there is none, because you will always just notice that the "minors viewing porn" statistic is not affected by your latest law, until you have absolute control over civilian communications. this is completely against what anyone in the open source community let alone democracy, stand for.
My complaint was exactly that with modern devices, the owner does not have absolute control over communication on the device, and that's a problem. I think anyone in the open source community or people that believe in democracy would agree that e.g. the owner of a phone or computer should absolutely have the ability to intercept, record, manipulate, and filter all communication that device is doing.
regulation fixes nothing and just makes everything worse in the big picture
> no recording in public
this is the only one that sounds like good common sense but isn't even regulation it's just law any sort of legal system would enforce.
all these "safety" things means ai offerings are all useless like google after 2003 when anything you query like "list of fad diet" is transformed into instead of an answer to that "problematic" question, an answer to "NVM LOL HERE IS A LIST OF HEALTHY DIETS"
> can't train on copyright material
that's so dumb. this world has no interesting copyright content coming out for 2 decades, it's literally all sellouts. losing to AI (which will happen regardless of whether the training material contains any copyright content) is exactly what they deserve. don't forget that these are also people who sue random civilians for "damages" that only exit in their head. sellout culture no longer even applies to musicians and book authors, it's also the majority of software too, with people just creating software for part of their resume, or some crowdsource shit, or a blog. any software anyone makes in a corporation is just to host an ad or be a dev tool for people who just host an ad
If you think copyright in general is dumb, then the U.S. should drop it together. Keeping copyright for humans but allowing "copyright laundering" by using A.I. is dumber IMO.
Password policies are a joke since you use 5 websites and they will have 5 policies.
1. Bank etc will not allow special characters, because that's a "hacking attempt". So Firefox's password generator, for example, won't work. The user works around this by typing in suckmyDICK123!! and his password still never gets hacked because there usually isn't enough bruteforce throughput even with 1000 proxies or you'll just get your account locked forever once someone attempts to log into it 5 times and those 1000 IPs only get between 0.5-3 tries each with today's snakeoil appliances on the network. There's also the fact that most people already know that "bots will try your passwords at superhuman rate" by now. Then there's also the fact that not even one of these password policies stops users from choosing bad passwords. This is simply a case of "responsible" people trying and wasting tons of times to solve reality. These people who claim to know better than you have not even thought this out and have definitely not thought about much at all.
2. For everything that isn't your one or two sensitive things, like the bank, you want to use the same password. For example the 80 games you played for one minute that obnoxiously require making an account (for the bullshit non-game aspects of the game such as in game trading items). Most have custom GUIs too and you can't paste into them. You could use a password manager for these but why bother. You just use the same pass for all of them.
Wow SMS 2FA forced bullshit that suddenly got astroturfed right on the day of the Snoweden revelations is actually indeed bullshit. When will they have opt out of this or is this just the end of the web? 20 years ago I did not need or want anything more than a password (obviously cryptographic key auth would be better but not if it's brought to you by X.509). And of course all the HNers who eat this shit up and defend it like little dogs are suddenly on the other side. Email verification is fucking dumb too, and of course now every email forces phone SMS shit.
they also aren't very hot and wont work in northern cities, but people will install them there anyway. "boiler" - is that jargon for multiple kinds of heating units or actually just boilers?
Heat pumps work down to -25C. Cold climates get colder than that. Sure most cold climates are typically above that, but it only takes one night every 10 years to hit those temperatures and a heat pump alone does not work. You need a backup. Of cousre once we have a backup we can ask if it is cost effect - heat pumps get less efficient as temperatures go down - when you need the most heat, so it may be most cost effective to install a heat pump that doesn't even work to that cold (perhaps it does but is under sized?) and just use backup heat when it is cold.
One night where the outside temperature gets below -25C is not a serious problem. If you had the heat pump keeping your house at a comfortable temperature the day before, you aren't going to die of hypothermia or have pipes freeze overnight. You'll just wake up to a house that's chilly inside and takes most of the day to get back up to where you want it.
Sustained cold spells are where you need an alternative heat source.
I presume you’re talking about air source heat pumps here. Some will go down that far, but it’s not common. If installed in a location where winters will routinely see temperatures below -10/15 degrees C, it’s going to be far more efficient to do a ground source heat pump, ideally with a deep bore hole where you can get a heat source that is continually 10-20 degrees C
As CP says, you design your system for the conditions 99% of the time, because designing for that last 1% leads to a terrible cost benefit calculation. Same reason you don’t daily drive an armored personnel carrier with a 300-gallon gas tank.
Boilers in the UK are usually mounted on the inside of an exterior wall to provide for venting exhaust gases outside. They may provide hot water on-demand without a tank (combi boiler) or fill a hot water cylinder on a schedule (system boiler) depending on type. Heating is typically provided by the boiler pumping hot water through a circuit of wall-mounted radiators regulated by TRVs (Thermostatic Radiator Valves).
Boilers are definitely much more common in the UK than US. I believe New England is one of the few areas of the US that has a relatively high percentage of homes with hydronic+boiler heating setups. In most other parts of the U.S., many people probably have no idea what a boiler even is.
> Health advocates praised the Environmental Protection Agency
which ones? which ones didn't? just 2 days ago i heard PFAS is still in the rumor stage.
> Water providers are entering a new era with significant additional health standards that the EPA says will make tap water safer
i thought you already said it's safe?
i have plenty of health issues caused by just about everything, everything has 10 billion perfumes for no reason, and new kinds of experimental plastics in every single possible thing you can buy, that smell terrible and unsurprisingly make you feel awful, just walking in a city and coming in fills my face with irritants and can ruin my day. this is a small difference in comparison. i doubt the PFAS thing is any more than a typical fad and way for gov to make money as usual. nobody actually cares about this stuff, they just pretend.
you don't expect it to work that way, you discover it. once you discovered it, sometimes you have two files that start with e and you press e to get to the one you want, but it got you to the one before it, so you press e again to go to the next one, which is faster than reaching for the down arrow. being able to select files with finesse is important in windows.
windows 9x was probably the last time any user interface tried to be this efficient, now it's just click the arrow and it will make sure to slide the next photo in very slowly in case you forgot that you're waiting for the next photo to appear
another thing i just remembered like this is how the start menu will fade in in windows XP, and submenus. but after you open one submenu and then decide to open another beside it, it admits that the animation is just a gimmick and doesnt do it again.
it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.
they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.
instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)