1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of “discuss” rarely comply with this rule.

Very nicely done haha! I for one love the Wiktionary, and referenced it today to confirm that “to auction off” is the generally-accepted phrase, as opposed to “to auction away”.

On a serious note, going through a puddle is genuinely a valid way of avoiding trail erosion. The alternative of walking around a puddle means walking on the unimproved edges of a wet trail, which erodes that soil and makes the puddle wider. Continuing through the middle of the trail – puddle be darned – means the puddle might get a little deeper, but when it dries out, the soil will fill the hole again, by gravity.

Trails are not heaven-sent but are built and rebuilt every year by park managers so that the public can still enjoy a slice of nature, while balancing the needs of wildlife for undisturbed parkland. People that go trail walking after rain will know to bring deep boots, precisely so they don’t contribute to the erosion problem. Trail bikers also come prepared to wade through puddles, although they already tend to enjoy the mud anyway

As they say, there’s no such thing as bad weather but only bad clothes. Go forth into the puddles.

(Edit: to be clear, stomping on a puddle doesn’t do much to drain it. Some water will fly out, and that amount will drain away usually. But please, do not carve out a ditch to drain a puddle. Nature will evaporate it in time, or the park management needs to fix the trail drains)

In California, a U turn is considered a left turn that keeps going. As a result, a U turn is legal anywhere that a left turn is legal, except when signs are posted otherwise. So in a left-turn pocket/lane, it is both reasonable and expected that people will make left turns, some of which will continue into a full 180 degree turn. People who do U turns are doing what is allowed, and they have every right to do so. If this seems like a problem, then talk to your transportation department to restrict U turns.

I’m not aware of any aspect of a U turn procedure that would be any different than than a standard 90 degree turn: use turn signals, look for oncoming traffic, look for pedestrians, turn slowly as required by the radius, roll out of the turn with careful acceleration.

As the other commenters have noted, what sort of adversary are you trying to protect against? There is no such thing as “security for its own sake” but rather security measures like E2EE are to protect against specific types of attacks. Do you believe a ticketing system is vulnerable to attacks that E2EE would mitigate?

As an aside, please do not consider PGP to be a pinnacle of signing or encryption. I’ve opined in another project before about why Late 20th Century PGP isn’t that good in the 21st Century.

But even with a modern replacement for PGP, how would E2EE even work for a multi-user ticketing system? If everyone on the support side has the same key, then key management becomes (as usual) the most crucial part of the operation, and remains an unsolved problem at scale. This is no different than physical key management, when every member of the custodial team needs to have the “super key” that opens every door of a university campus.

American English speaker here. While I would understand what “to auction away” means, I’m not aware of anyone here in California that would say it like that. Usually, I would say “to auction off”, which follows in a long series of other “X off” verbs, like “to bake off” or “to shake off”, all of which usually involve some sort of adversary or competition.

Note that we do use the verb “to give away” but that would mean a gift without compensation, which is definitely not an auction.

This distinction is both illogical and ahistorical. Python is a scripting language that has a compiler. Indeed, any scripting language can be translated into a compilable language and then compiled, a process called transpiling.

There’s also Java, which definitely compiles down to bytecode, but for a machine which physically doesn’t exist. The Java Virtual Machine is an emulator that runs on supported hardware, in order to execute Java programs. Since the Java compiler does not produce, say, x86 assembly, your definition would assert that Java is not a compiled language, despite obviously having a compiler.

As an exercise for everyone else, also have a look at Lisp, a very-clear programing language with a compiler, but some specially-built machines were constructed that optimized for Lisp programs, with hardware support to do checks that would take longer on other architectures.

Civil forfeiture and DEA is a separate problem unto itself, and you’ve always hit on the key points: DEA operates within the country, whereas customs is at port of entries. DEA’s corruption and geographic reach mean they have caused far more problems than any customs agent, in pursuit of a 1990s zeal that “drugs are bad” and expanding that into a parallel law enforcement system, despite already having a federal law enforcement department: the FBI. Civil forfeiture should be abolished as unconstitutional, violating due process, equal protection, and property law.

So yes, once you’re in the country, there is a risk to carry around large sums of cash. But that’s hardly connected to the customs declaration requirement, and certainly cannot be connected to the declaration requirement on the way out.

When entering or exiting the USA, the rule is that cash or financial instruments need to be declared above $10,000, but you can bring as much as you want. So bringing a literal suit case of Swiss francs worth $5 million USD is perfectly fine, provided you tell the customs agent.

While I can’t really advise going to the USA right now, it’s not like they will confiscate cash above $10,000. The particular phrase used in most places is “freedom of capital”, meaning that money can flow into or out of the country without significant impediment. The entire USA financial sector relies upon freedom of capital, whether that’s electronically or – if need be – with bundles of cash.

Declaring cash helps prevent money laundering, since people intending to secretly move money would not want to declare to customs. The threshold is intentionally set so that normal people going on holiday with cash or travelers checks (yes, I’m aware it’s 2026) won’t be burdened by the rule.

I very much don’t care for AI, but yeah, I posted it because an unexpected Rickroll – whether from AI or not – is still as funny as ever.

That said, I’m also aware that Mike Masnick is a recognizable name, of “Protocols, not Platforms” fame, also the person who coined the Streisand Effect, and probably most relevant, is a BlueSky board member (therefore not as interested in ActivityPub), those may be part of the downvotes too. Nevertheless, we take the rough with the smooth.

Citation needed

Code has never been able to be copyrighted. You cant copyright a for loop. I cant create a car class that has properties like make, model, year and copywrite it. Thats never been a thing. Thats why projects are copyrighted. An entire piece of work.

Every single complete sentence in this quote is factually wrong, under both USA copyright law and international copyright law.

Copyright accrues the moment that some work is rendered into a fixed format, such as a sheet of paper but also includes a computer text file. Writing a “for” loop as a homework assignment does create copyright. Ten students writing their homework all create their own copyright, even if the result is coincidentally identical. This isn’t even a point of serious doubt in the law: copyright is very much an exercise of provenance, not of bitwise comparisons.

From when a work is created, every transformation, edit, or addition must all occur within the parameters of some sort of license from the copyright owner, or else an infringement has occurred.

Two people may stand at the same position at the foot of Mt Whitney in California and set up their own camera, one after another, on the same tripod to take the same frame of the scenery. And under copyright law, each owns the copyright to their own photo. One may decide to sell their photo and copyright to an East Coast newspaper, while the other has theirs committed to canvas. The newspaper may not assert a copyright claim against the canvas owner, and the canvas owner cannot assert a claim against the newspaper.

At least in the USA, not really. The federal income tax main form, Form 1040, has all the big-picture totals like taxable income, deductions, credits, computed tax, payments and withholdings, and finally the amount owed to or from the government. Some fraudsters that want to steal someone’s tax refund will in-fact file a fraudulent Form 1040 with a massively-inflated number in the deductions box, which then causes a large tax refund check to be mailed to the fraudster, who then absconds. Fortunately, this is much harder now because of cross-checks by the IRS, before issuing a refund.

For actually claiming the largest and most common deductions, taxpayers would attach Schedule A behind their Form 1040, and would compute their itemized deductions, such as state taxes (which they federal government mostly doesn’t tax, to avoid doubly taxing that income) and home mortgage loan interest. These are much harder for the IRS to verify, because that would require more cross checks into each state’s system.

Form 1040 is two sides of a sheet of paper. Schedule A is one side of a sheet of paper. Lots of taxpayers can in-fact file their taxes with no more than 5 sheets of paper, total. The tax changes in 2017 saved only about one sheet. This is not a thick envelope by any means, but quite frankly, e-file is free for the federal return so individuals rarely mail their return. Businesses and trusts, however, do still mail.

Minor gripe: the tax return is the paperwork that is sent in to the tax office (thus “returned”). And the tax refund is the overage which the tax office sends back to the taxpayer.

A huge return is a large stack of papers. A huge refund is a large direct-deposit onto one’s bank account.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3138/

Please let such a thing never exist!

I think the market for each is quite a bit different. Prop guns, whether functioning or not, are often regulated in law as “replica firearms” because while they may (or not) be functional, the issue is that they are intentionally similar to the real thing. Hence, some jurisdictions have limits on who can sell replica firearms and who can buy them.

One rank below firearms and replica firearms, air/pellet guns and BB guns propel small balls or shuttlecocks (?) made of metal using compressed air or spring power. These could still be harmful to people, but aren’t usually fatal, which makes them effective for pest control or target practice, in lieu of live firearms. Accordingly, these are often regulated like how knives are: don’t just hand a pellet gun to a child without supervision, and don’t assault people. Otherwise, do as thou whilst.

Meanwhile, airsoft guns propels small plastic balls using springs, compressed air, or electro-pneumatic pressure. By sheer virtue of having less density, a plastic airsoft projectile carries less energy than a BB pellet, and certainly a lot less than a live-fire bullet. Also, whereas firearms can attain supersonic velocities, the speed of sound puts a firm cap on what a plastic, ball-shaped projectile can achieve, when not using chemical-based propulsion (ie gunpowder).

Only 8 US States regulate airsoft guns, and even those that do are not restricting them as heavily as firearms (except New Jersey?). The common requirement is that an airsoft gun should have an orange tip. That means a majority of Americans are potential customers for airsoft, and that means an environment will form that host matches, competitions, and so on. Big market means lots of producers, so lots of variety, high quality, and lower prices for all.

Whereas, what’s the market for replica firearms? Show business? Gun enthusiasts?

if properly reviewed and it works right, you can’t argue with results.

The key word is “if”.

This is rather the crux of the issue: most AI-generated code is not reviewed, let alone reviewed by humans, let alone reviewed by human experts within their expertise. Nor does AI-generated code have a good history of being well-tested to any particular formal standard of validation (eg ISO), against any defined criteria that isn’t itself AI-generated and unreviewed. There are outliers, no doubt, which strive to lift themselves above this low-bar, though the effort to do so often exceeds the effort to just have the experts hand-write the code instead and then formally validate it, at least as of early 2026.

Some AI could plausibly be tolerable within an already-functioning software engineering team. But “all code in Trail Mate is 100% generated by AI under human guidance” is an abdication too far.

!Meshcore@feddit.org

I too took a welding class at my nearby community college, and it’s an awesome skill to have. That said, my understanding is that spot-welding for battery cells is substantially easily than TIG, MIG, stick, or any of the other large-format welding processes. Yes, PPE is still highly advised, but spot welding seems like something which can be picked up through watching a video.

Not to simplify too much, but a spot welder has only a few controls: the location of the weld, the current in amps, and the weld time in fractions of seconds. Some hobbyist tools specifically for battery packs will automatically execute a weld for the precise amps and seconds, provided that you make contact with the electrodes. Others have a foot pedal to start the weld.

Please be considerate: how would anyone know that you meant your last post? Why not the last post on c/programming? If you’re asking a question, please try to make it easy for people to answer. A link is easy to add and avoids ambiguity.