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Joined 8 days ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2025

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  • In the olden times, it was a big point of pride of American politics that a lot of people didn’t want to kill the leaders. It was sort of assumed that in feudal style European politics, of course the common people kind of wanted to kill you, because you were threatening their safety and taking their stuff. In America, the way we did things was to earn the respect of the people you governed. The people actually wanted this person to be in charge. Why would I shoot that guy? That’s who we picked, we like him.

    Of course there are some caveats (slavery large among them). The reality never matched up to the ideal. But we’re going back to where even the approximation of consent of the governed that we used to have, isn’t assumed anymore. Fuckin bullshit


  • You seem to be assuming that the volume is immediately replaced by the external atmosphere, which I doubt is valid

    No, I was assuming your volume decreases. I don’t actually know that to be the case, but my assumption is that there isn’t “extra” space inside a person, and so if you lose material from a part of your body that isn’t encased in anything rigid your volume decreases slightly.

    So maybe I did have my terminology wrong. When a hot air balloon deflates, it falls. The density went up, but that’s not what’s directly relevant. The weight went down, I guess, but the “number on the scale”, weight minus buoyant force, went way way up, because it lost some lower-density volume that was making the whole thing float. The weight (in a strict physics sense) went down, sure. But the number on the scale (which I was incorrectly calling “weight”) went up. Same thing for a farting person.



  • Fart gas is warmer than the surrounding atmosphere, therefore less dense. Your digestive system is under very slight compression (10-20 mmHg gauge pressure according to the internet), which I would guess does not equate to enough pressure to be more significant than the temperature gradient. Fart gas is also less dense than air at a given pressure by a pretty significant margin (1.06 g/L compared with 1.20 g/L).

    When you fart, you’re releasing gas that is less dense than the atmosphere, which means you get slightly heavier. Think of yourself as a hot air balloon with a very tiny chamber, and when you release a 90 milliliter fart, you lose a little buoyancy and sink a little. You get heavier when you fart.

    I haven’t done the math, but I looked around on the internet at some numbers, and that’s what I think. I also ignored this because it is clearly AI slop, which is a little upsetting.



  • Beastie Boys had one of the first and biggest of the anti-Iraq-War songs, I can’t think offhand of one that was more “mainstream” at the time and still explicit and specific about it.

    Well I’ll be sleeping on your speeches 'til I start to snore
    Cause I won’t carry guns for an oil war
    As-Salamu alaikum, wa alaikum as-salam
    Peace to the Middle East peace to Islam

    And so on. It might not have been the best (IMO that is “Empire” by Dar Williams, with haunting sadness, historical scope, and irony), but it was big.



  • I feel like this is kind of the amateur-hour stuff. It’s certainly dangerous, but in comparison to a lot of state-actor activities (or even committed-amateur activities), this kind of supply-chain attack is pretty blatant and easy to spot. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy to spot – I just mean would be trivial to volunteer and contribute some minimal fixes and enhancements to some open source project, and then at one point smuggle in a zero-day that will basically never be detected unless someone detects the intrusion itself and then works backwards from there with a ton of time to spend on it.

    If you’ve ever looked at the obfuscated C contest it should be obvious that this kind of thing can be made completely invisible if you know what you’re doing. Some of the interactions and language features that lead to problems are basically impossible for a casual viewer to see, even if they’re paying attention, and the attack surface is massive and the amount of attention that goes into checking it for weird subtle vulnerabilities is minuscule.