warrior

more fucking petitions because this clown car country cannot stop with the bigotry for 30 seconds

uk people it takes 5 seconds and you checking your email to verify

everyone else: rebloge please

As of Sunday 12th May, this petition is at 1,897 signatures.

“At 10,000 signatures...

At 10,000 signatures, government will respond to this petition

At 100,000 signatures...

At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament”

My Warden Adara Surana with Carver Hawke - commission by @aveny-art who exactly nailed what I wanted and who I highly recommend :D

He’s ready to make something dead but she’s a smidgeon more cautious.

SUBMISSIONS for the Disability in Fantasy short story anthology are OPEN! 💖

We want your fantasy fiction🫵

Anthology Theme: Traditional Fantasy. Think fairy tale, folk tale, myth, legend, or fable. Imagine what kind of story might be passed down from generation to generation, whose origins have been lost to time.

Word limit: 4000 words.

Click here to see submissions guidelines, info on the theme, eligibility, payment, donations, and more.

Please share to spread the word!

I found this book on my bookshelf and...

i can’t believe this is real

not the source for the screen cap but here's a WSJ article (sans paywall)

Per previous tags--

In this model of Tesla, apparently—get this—according to the Tesla manual, you do it on a touchscreen.

Did a human being just die because of swiping the wrong way?

...And then, when you're in the water and the car's power systems (which operate the doors, because of course they do) have all gone down, how do you get out?

You partially disassemble the door and pull out one specific wire. The image via Warren Terra at Bluesky.)

...I don't know about the rest of you, but I am never getting into one of these alleged vehicles. Ever.

...you know, we've been saying that these things are deathtraps, but holy SHIT

I feel compelled to point out that the diagram above is for the back door. I still don't know where to find the wire to open the front doors.

This is why anyone who actually works in tech (being a tech ceo does not count as working) is wary at best about making things "smarter". The failure mode for a computerized mechanism should be functioning as a non-computerized mechanism, but very often the failure mode for a fully-smart device is undefined behaviour that the manufacturer doesn't intend for you to ever see. And that means there's no recourse in situations like this.

For any non tech folk, the concept discussed above is called fail-open vs fail-closed protocol and it’s an immensely important and well established consideration in tech. This applies to everything from firewalls to smart devices to anything else that has a computerized system(and some things that don’t but that’s a different topic).

The question is, “if the computer/network part of this fails, how much of this do I want to work, or break?”

There are some things where fail closed is important. Security devices/systems for example! If your security system fails, there is logic that dictates that it should fail closed because it would be better for people to lose access than to leave it open. Some security parameters advertise a fail close only model for this reason. Others like firewalls let you choose how your device fails.

Another example would be like. A system that is in highly specific motion, like a centrifuge. If the computer breaks or loses sync with the software running it, I want the whole thing to stop moving. This may seem obvious that it would happen but it’s not, and you can guarantee that manufacturers take it into account when making the hardware and software.

Then there are some things, many in fact, that you want to fail open. Anything where the ability to use it is more important than the “smarts” behind it. Including. For Dog’s sake. A CAR DOOR. Like if a computerized system blacks out, I do NOT want human beings trapped in the vehicle. The fact that they’ve removed the handle on a fucking car door is insane to start, if they’re going to do it, it should be fail open, not just for water but for ANY malfunction. If you get trapped in a car, you’re dead in MOST scenarios where a computer might fail. Heat? Oh idk what might cause that maybe FIRE. Dead battery? Hmmmm I wonder if you might be IN A SURVIVAL SITUATION IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. Water? Duh.

This is an inexcusable failing on the engineering team because F/O vs F/C is something that has been discussed for decades, and I cannot imagine what scenario they put themselves in where a fail closed model is the right call here. Go hire better people.

Anyway all of this to say, when buying smart devices, it’s a good idea to go d out how they work in terms of F/O F/C. Does your thermostat have a default it reverts to? Do the smart vents you bought for it close or open if they lose power, or do they stay where they were? Does your automated faucet (yes they have these, yes they’re super fucking cool, they regulate the temperature and volume of the water I WILL geek out) allow water through it when it’s glitching out?

And as always, if you’re buying smart devices, it’s a good idea to set up a segregated IoT SSID for them so they aren’t coming in contact with your informational devices.

This has been a couple of PSA’s!

I hope we all make it

So apparently some people new to Tumblr think a repost and a reblog are the same thing, so when they see creators asking for people to not repost, they're thinking the creators are saying to not reblog 😭

Y'all, a repost is when you copy/download the work and create a new post using the work making it seem as if it's yours. A reblog is you using a site provided feature to share the creator's post directly from the creator so that it's still credited to them and they still get all of the traction/notes from the work.

Please, reblog fics/art/etc. that you enjoy! Reblogging is not reposting! Creatives need support too, and reblogging is a way to do that!

This comes directly from Twitter/X and BlueSky, and it makes me very angry.

Twitter invented the Re-[whatever] technology that came to underpin Tumblr - it's why a lot of people at first though Tumblr WAS an extension of Twitter and that eventually Twitter would just buy Tumblr as more successful cousins often do in the tech world. That obviously never happened. But what you had first we a retweet over there, and then a reblog over here.

It's important to remember that this is not a universal social media technology, and most attempts to do something similar (like 'sharing' a post to your wall on Facebook) are clunky and really not the same. On most of the Internet, outside of Twitter and Tumblr, you have to steal content to have it on your blog - to 'repost' it.

But when Elon fuckface decided that Twitter would be called 'X' and all mention of 'tweets' would be purged from the system, the pour UI-text writers were left with a quandry about what to call the technology Twitter had invented. You couldn't retweet things anymore, and I guess they decided that 'reblogging' was Tumblr's thing (for all I know it's copyrighted - I hope not, but I'm too tired to check). So they settled on calling it a 'repost'.

At the same time, Elon's mate Jack is spinning up his new Twitter clone, Bluesky, which he wants everyone to join. So it has to have the 'retweet' facility, but it can't be called 'retweet', and presumably they went through the same UI-text grumblings. Like 'X', 'Bluesky' isn't a thing you do, so you can't re-Bluesky, and it doesn't lend itself to anything metaphorically similar, the way you can retoot on Mastodon. So they align and call this a 'repost' too.

Honestly, I also don't think it's a coincidence this blurs the lines of long-establish Internet usage in distinguishing a 'repost' (theft, copying a post without permission or credit and claiming it as your own work) and a 'reblog' or 'retweet' (sharing the actual original post to your feed or blog, with your name beside it, uneditable or claimable by anyone else).

I also think it's a sign of what happens when executives name things. There was clearly no thought process about the implications of calling a social media platform 'X' or 'Bluesky' along the lines of 'This will make our decades-old, well-established, technology-defining UI-terms nonsense' or, the name of the platform should in some way align with the platform's function and it would really help us create a coherent brand if it were easy to verb. You know, the kinds of thoughts that happen if you ask a writer to name something, and not a white man with more ego and money than sense.

as always l The Oatmeal l ⬇txt-edited

Kind of obsessed with this picrew where I can make Hawke kiss Anders! It’s so good!

omg it's so cute!

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

Me to my draft: You are a oneshot.

The draft: Wrong. I am the pilot chapter of a multichapter fic that you do not have the bandwidth to take on, but will haunt your every waking thought anyway.

guess who finally made it to inquisition