posts
web.archive.org (no paywall)
Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed.
This is a great explainer of a world wide shift in climate and regional weather patterns occurring right now that is expected to be especially intense... on already very high sea surface baseline conditions.
WHY YSK: I share this here because the pictures, graphics and explanations I think provide a great way to actually get a sense of what all these sciencey climate words mean. The scientific illustration work here is great and I think this is the best explanation I have found for El Nino, what it impacts, and why. I studied climatology at university so I am lucky but all of these terms and concepts can really be confusing and feel opaque if you haven't seen an explanation that visually and spatially integrates everything for you to actually see and then remember as a concept not just a set of jargon terms.
Well here you go, if you have ever wanted the best, approachable explanation of El Nino and La Nina here it is!

purposefully awkwardly cropped example of the graphics in the article, I didn't want to just copy paste these, but I wanted to entice people.
For example, did you know that what determines whether we are in an El Nino or not is literally defined spatially by a bunch of huge boxes? (then you integrate over time, the boxes have to spend a certain amount of time at certain values to qualify as the Pacific technically being in an El Nino... kind of like how recessions are defined I guess?)

The spatial extent is in one sense arbitrary, but what matters is a consistent measurement of relevant places across the ocean, and that is why El Nino is defined this way... to make it easier for everyone to measure the same thing!
Terms of Service; Didn't Read (ToS;DR) is a project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: it summarizes the terms of service almost no one reads.
ToS;DR aims to foster a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse terms of service and privacy policies. The goal is to generate a rating for the terms or policies from Class A to Class E, similar to a grade on a school assignment.
Various Terms of Service are reviewed by ToS;DR contributors and divided into small points that can be discussed and compared. Ultimately, a score between 1 and 10 is assigned to each individual point. Source: https://edit.tosdr.org/about
Imgur blocks access to most VPN IP addresses so any posts using the host will result in many users being unable to see the content. Sometimes only remote viewing is affected but is also often blocked when trying to open in new tab and view at the parent site.
Consider uploading to the fediverse or using a privacy-respecting hosting service like postimages.

If you watched the Odyssey recently you might think that Agamemnon got a raw deal. The reality is that his family bears a curse earned through intrigue, betrayal and horrific brutality. The Literature and History Podcast did a reading of the Greek plays that tell the story of his bloodline:
https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-027-the-bloody-king/
https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-028-a-mothers-curse/
https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-029-the-mound-and-the-furies/
TL;DR: The iconic desert landscapes from the movie belong to Western Sahara which is under Moroccan occupation. The indigenous population, Sahrawis, are marginalised by the Moroccan regime, who arrest natives for filming their own land while giving complete permission and assistance to Western film producers to shoot their scenes.
I highly recommend reading the article as it's written by one of the locals themselves.
Why YSK: Seeing how The Odyssey has amassed popularity globally, it is important to know how the illegal occupation of the Western Sahara and the suffering of the inhabitants was swept under the rug in order to produce this film, especially since no other major media outlet wishes to cover this topic.
Why YSK:
Although politicians and journalists often treat it like major platform, or even the "digital town square," X is fairly minor social media platform. The various Meta platforms (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger) have combined 10 billion monthly active users. X (Twitter) is about 5.5% that size. It trails behind not only the obvious giants like Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok (Douyin), but also well behind platforms that are exclusive to one country or region, like WeChat or Weibo, and behind "also-rans" like Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest.

X is not a major platform. It has continued to struggle with outages, trolling, user exodus, and now a little more than an Internet ghost town.
I know a lot of people who think that your US mortgage "restarts" if you refinance. That is not true. If you are able to refinance your mortgage with a new rate just .25% a little bit lower than your current rate, the cost of refinancing can pay off within just a year!
A little bit of "Mortgage theory"
Each and every mortgage payment you make is the sum of three components:
- The interest on your total balance (balance=the amount you owe), which is exactly the interest rate you have (APR) divided by 12 (because the "A" in APR means annual, and you make 12 payments, once per month in a year). This is the what I will call the basic rule of mortgages.
- A principle payment that is exactly what is necessary to cause your mortgage, with your given the APR, to be totally paid off after the duration of your mortgage.
- If you have an "escrow account", then there is an addition of property taxes and property insurance which is independent of the above two.
For a normal fixed-rate mortgage, the sum of 1. and 2. above will never change. Gradually, 1. will decrease and 2. will increase.
What happens when you do a refinance
Every time you make a payment, the part of your payment that goes to "principle" changes what you owe, by making it decrease a little bit. As a consequence, your costs go down if you can lower your APR. You can lower your APR by refinancing, and refinancing doesn't change your principle; what you've already paid off is what you've paid off.
When you refinance, you, do effectively "restart your mortgage", which is probably why the myth I'm discussing here is so stubborn! You had a 30 year mortgage, you were paying it off for 10 years, and then you refinance and you have a 30 year mortgage again. That sounds like a bad deal, but here's what you're missing:
- You can just get a 20 or 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year mortgage. You could get a 15 year mortgage and maybe have a higher monthly payment, but pay off your mortgage 5 years early and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, shorter mortgages have a lower interest rate, saving you even more!
- You can get a new 30 year mortgage at a lower rate, and overpay it, making your monthly cost effectively the same, but you still pay off your mortgage years early! I'm not even sure it's possible to get a mortgage that penalizes paying off a mortgage early.
Sometimes, people say "you pay the interest first". This is simply not true! This is the main crux of this myth. No, you do not pay interest first! You only pay the interest on the existing balance. It just seems that way, because, per my basic rule of mortgages, when you owe more, you are paying more for interest, and as you pay off your mortgage, you owe less!
The catch: refinance fees
It costs money to do a refinance. The bank will charge you "origination fees", they might charge you appraisal fees, in certain consumer-hostile states there might even be a refinance tax, because the banks successfully bribed your state to make those taxes so that you don't refinance.
These fees can be thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars. But they are the only reason that it might take a year or two to "break even" after refinancing. Just subtract those fees from your savings to see the break-even duration. If that duration is less than a couple years, it's probably a good idea to refinance, unless you expect rates to get even lower in that time (they probably won't right now, IMO).
A note on variable rate mortgages
Variable rate mortgages are not necessarily a bad deal and may very well be a good deal. They don't really change the formula above very much other than that the APR can (and will) change. In the interests of simplicity, I disregarded the effects of a variable rate mortgage, other than to say that most of the content of my post probably still applies.
Final notes
Shop Around! Shop around when looking for banks! Even after you have a "preapproval" letter from your bank when you are first house shopping, you can still shop around even though they say you cannot (a contract isn't a contract until money changes hands!).
There was an Ask Lemmy post about descaler and it reminded me of an experience from my own household adventures.
I use both Iron Out and Barkeepers Friend at home to deal with my foundation drains. Both products have different formulas with different mechanisms and they are not compatible. I'm thankful I am so paranoid or else I might not have realized and potentially created a harmful situation in my basement (a particularly bad place for the heavy gas that forms!).
Iron Out
Liquid forms are called Super Iron Out and Super Iron Out Outdoors.


Both have oxalic acid as the active ingredients although the SDS for Super Iron Out says Oxalic acid and the Iron Out Outdoors says Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate.

Both Oxalic acid and Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate are powders, not solutions. On the surface this probably seems extremely autistic of me and it is, but it's also really important.
Let's look at the CAS number given on the SDS. Oxalic Acid is given CAS 144-62-7 Ethanedioic acid, dihydrate is given 6153-56-6. Ethanedioic acid is another name for Oxalic acid and the reason for the different CAS number is the "dihydrate". This distinction only matters in solid form. If it's in a solution it's the same damn thing (except for the fact that it ionizes into two forms and the relative abundance of each depends on pH). Therefore it is needlessly confusing and wrong and I hate that lol. That's not the point of the post but I needed to get that out.
The solid form of Iron Out is a mixture of different compounds, none of which are any powdered version of Oxalic acid.

It contains Sodium hydrosulfite, Sodium metabisulfite, Sodium sulfite, Sodium Carbonate and Citric acid. It's super tempting to break these out into what they do but they can perform multiple roles and that will come up later.
Barkeeper's Friend
Barkeepers Friend also has solid and liquid versions.
The solid version is called Cleaner and Polish or Cookware.


The active ingredients are Oxalic Acid (CAS #144-62-7), a surfactant and an abrasive. The difference in the two formulas are the surfactant and abrasive, but neither of these are involved in why the two formulas are not compatible so I'll gloss over that.
The liquid versions are called Soft or Multipurpose.


They still use oxalic acid as the main ingredient but again different quantities (or no) abrasives and different surfactants.
What's your point?
You should not mix Oxalic acid and sulfites. Sulfides can react with acids (even weak ones) and form hydrogen sulfide gas. I have more experience with SO2 than I want and I can give you my professional option that it fucking sucks.
So if you are not careful and assume Iron Out and Barkeepers friend are interchangable you may have a bad time. Or, if you are using them for different purposes (powder iron out to remove iron deposits and oxalic acid to control biofilm growth) you may also have a bad time.
Don't they do the same thing? Why are they not compatible?
Kinda but not really.
Rust is stupid complicated actually. It's often simplified as Iron(III) Oxide but that's absolutely not the whole story even though it sounds super technical. It's useful because if the three oxidation states of iron this is the one that flakes off most easily.
There are probably multiple reasons but intended use of both products is likely why the formulas are different.
Barkeepers friend is primarily used on metal surfaces which might have corrosion and to remove the resultant rust. The reaction between oxalic acid and rust isn't one step and it isn't simple because both the iron oxide and the oxalic acid exist in different states in solution, largely dependent on pH.
I think the easiest way to explain is to contrast with Muriatic acid (HCl). HCl is a strong acid (It's got an estimated pKa of -5.9) and will brute force the insoluble iron oxide apart and form a soluble Iron chloride. The iron oxide is acting as the base in the acid-base reaction. If the acid then goes on to contact more iron in the metal it will oxidize it so that the formation of oxides will occur more readily. So it can remove rust and encourage new rust. Neat.
Oxalic acid is a weak acid. The two forms have pKa of 1.2 and 4.2. Oxalic acid is not doing an acid-base reaction with the oxides. It reacts with Iron(III) oxides to form a soluble complex. This is called chelation. It's more complicated than that of course but what is important to remember is that it is reductive not oxidative. It's not absolutely safe for stainless steel but it's way less aggressive than Muriatic acid.
Iron Out on the other hand is more focused on removing iron deposits on non metallic surfaces. The combo of sodium hydrosulfite and sodium metabisulfite was patented by Hach as a rust remover from non metallic surfaces. They are stable powders that when made into solution form soluble iron sulfite from iron oxide via reduction.
Citric acid and sodium carbonate also work together. Sodium carbonate raises the pH of the solution so the citrates can still do chelation without the level of attacks on metal metal what would occur at lower pH.
Sodium sulfite is probably there as an oxygen scavenger and corrosion inhibitor so that any oxidized iron that exists does not as easily form an oxide. Again this is likely related to the use of both products as iron out powder isn't always rinsed off right away like barkeepers friend is.
So while Iron Out also considers risk to metallic surfaces, the cleating agents likely selected knowing use on metal is not the main intent. Cost is probably also a factor.
TL;DR:
Maybe just don't mix cleaning chemicals ever. Even if they have the same "purpose" or even the same name they might use different, incompatible active ingredients.
The GFDL is a free documentation license that's designed, among other things, to be easy-to-use alongside the GPL and LGPL software licenses. Whenever you go to submit something on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc., there's a clause stating that you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the GFDL.
![An edit summary form on Wikipedia. A box highlights a section of text that reads: "[by publishing your changes,] you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License and the GFDL."](https://thelemmy.club/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F0dcf62b8-d56b-42c7-a9c4-ec8c38cc6197.png)
The article 'Wikipedia:Copyrights' gets into more of what "most" means here if you genuinely want to reuse its material for your project. Notably, the amount of text that's actually been imported under CC BY-SA 4.0 and thus cannot be licensed under the GFDL is quite miniscule; I don't think I've ever seen this happen before.
(Notably this is not the case for Wikimedia Commons, where each piece of media has its own licensure.)
Why YSK: Probably a lot fewer people know about Wikimedia's usage of the GFDL than they do about Creative Commons (BY-SA 4.0). If you're making a project licensed under the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL, GFDL material will slot in much more elegantly than CC BY-SA 4.0, meaning you can easily reuse material from these major open knowledgebases.
Why YSK
You may already know this, but your friend or family may not.
These things can cause great harm to your bowels, and your body at large
When I was a Seventh-day Adventist, there were a lot fringe people that milked others for money, and that included bowel cleanses.
The types of testimonies I heard was things such as "I never felt so much better" "I feel so good right now after doing this" "I feel like I am not bloated" "I am even pushing out mucous and am detoxifying everything"
First, if you are seeing mucous come out of your bowels, that is a BAD THING, and is something you should be seeing your doctor about. Either the protective mucous is coming out, or you have some pretty bad inflammation that should be checked out sooner than later. Mucous should never becoming out of your butthole. If it is, you need to make sure you tell your medical provider immediately.
Second, our bowels have more than just poo poo that go through them. Of course there is good bacteria, but there is also fluid and electrolytes down there. Having a sudden shift of fluid being taken into your bowels in order to flush those "toxins" out carries the risk of becoming severely dehydrated and losing electrolytes. That is also bad.
Do not pay money for those. I am sure (or hope) I am preaching to the choir, but those bowel cleansers can cause some serious harm.
If you feel you are suffering from something in your bowels, please speak to a qualified healthcare provider like a medical doctor, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, etc who has experience in said field. A GI doctor is more than skilled and knowledgeable enough to get to the root of what may be causing you issues. They have the tools to look straight into your bowels via colonoscopy, EGD, take biopsies, interpret the results, and help you make changes or give meds to help.
After you are seen, ask the doctor if they know of any good registered dieticians, none of that nutritionist bullshit (unless that is the qualified are called in your country), in case you were diagnosed with, say, celiac, IBS, etc.
If you are suffering from bowel issues, the people selling things only want your money. That is especially so if they sell it in their own "clinic." You aren't anything to them.
Perhaps it is the same with a medical doctor, but at least they are actually qualified to do something.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Paywall free link: https://archive.ph/6YIDb
Sellers on Amazon and TikTok Shop have sold jewellery containing illegal amounts of a cancer-causing metal, an investigation by The Sunday Times has found. Items have been sold on the marketplaces containing large amounts of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that is carcinogenic. The legal limit for this element in the UK is 0.01 per cent in any piece of jewellery. One £2.99 ring bought on Amazon that was advertised as 925 silver contained more than 9,000 times the maximum allowance and was estimated to be made of 92.3 per cent cadmium.
YSK this because the high amount of public debt, which has been getting a lot of attention in the US, is actually by design.
In our double-entry bookkeeping system, money is created via bank lending and government spending, adding to the economy, and is destroyed via loan repayments and taxes, subtracting from the economy.
Central banks create a wealth pump mechanism into assets through money printing, which erodes consumer purchasing power, driven by deficit spending, which creates money for the private sector.
Profits are privatized; losses are socialized.
The reason this is important and timely is because the messaging around these tools implicitly suggests there is an air of authority and integrity it would be impossible for them to have given that no journalists have examined and analyzed the mechanisms of these tools at any stage of their development.
In my opinion, that is a worthy YSK because people don't know that they can view and interact with Bluesky content without giving your data to an American for-profit entity.
In France, there is a powerful left-wing politician named Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
He was senator for decades. He was previously a minister. He has run for President multiple times. People close him describe him as a political beast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon
On october 3th 2023, the newspaper Le Monde published an absolutely astonishing investigation into his girlfriend. They reveal that his girlfriend SCREAMS and HUMILIATES ordinary people. And he knows that.

3 days later, on october 6th 2023, Melenchon took a trip to Morocco.
Believing he was far away for any camera, he made a cynical confession to moroccan university students:
"I really don't care what newspapers reveal. The vast majority of voters don't read newspapers. They watch online videos"
"We are now in the great era of social media"
Elon Musk regularly attacks the New York Times.
On social media, he urges people to not read it.




That's because the New York Times has published incredible stories about him.
Elon Musk knowingly lied about the safety of self-driving vehicles. Multiple people were killed
Musk is sexually harassing SpaceX engineers
The Musk Foundation is breaking the law:
When powerful politicians and businessmen tell you "don't read newspapers", they aren't trying to give you good life advice.
It's a manipulation attempt.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49778353
Also
/c/modabuse. Also/c/yepowertrippinbastards. Alsolemmy.ml/c/worldnews,comrade,ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.
If you're just tuning in
Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.
Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.
I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.
There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.
Verify all of it in ten seconds
curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.jsonThat's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at
/data/policy.datas well.It filters criticism of moderators
lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards— listedlemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk— listed- community regex
power ?tripping?- keyword
censoring meCall the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.
It filters words
The 32 community name patterns include
Communis(t|m),Conservativ(e|es|ism),Leftis(t|m),Libertarian(ism)?,^Green Part(y|ies),Zionis(t|m),(Police|Cops),guillotineandbillionaire.Keywords include
comrade,ACAB,neoliberal,proletaria(n|t)anddeath to.Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked:
lemmy.ml/c/worldnews,lemmy.today/c/news,lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada,lemmy.ca/c/usa,infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.The 552 users aren't bots
67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.
355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.
Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.
I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.
And it lies about it
When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."
Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.
For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.
Admins can't switch it off
Tesseract has env vars for
PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST,PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLISTand the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist.enableToxicModebypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.
Before someone says it
A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.
The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.
And
/c/modabuseis not spam.Asks
- Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
- Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
- Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
- Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.
It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.
If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.
Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.
Why YSK: consuming too much sodium can lead to high blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. In my country (USA), the average daily sodium intake is over 3,300mg, exceeding the recommended maximum of 2,300mg. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends an even lower maximum of 2,000mg.
Also: with the rising cost of food, being mindful of additives that increase sell weight is important.
Never have I felt so understood. I am so glad/sad I know of this now.
Excerpt:
adomania
n. the sense that the future is arriving ahead of schedule, that all those years with fantastical names like '2013' are bursting from their hypothetical cages into the arena of the present, furiously bucking the grip of your expectations while you lean and slip in your saddle, one hand reaching for reins, the other waving up high like a schoolkid who finally knows the answer to the question
When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.
I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.
This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.
- They have been found to have been altering the contents of the archived articles.
- They have DDoSed a server using our browsers when we visit their site
- Wikipedia has blacklisted it
- It's DNS is banned widely
Guidance published ... asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content;
Recommended alternatives include: Internet Archive Ghostarchive Megalodon
The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.
Cromite browser was a privacy and security oriented Android browser.
Their latest update was in 21th of May: v148.0.7778.168.
Their commit history also suggest that the browser is slowly being sunset.
To put it into context, the current version of chrome on Android is 150.0.7871.63, released on 30th of June.
Content Warning: a lot of this stuff is obviously NSFL
Don't go through this footage if you're not fully prepared to see things you may never be able to unsee.
It includes:
- 64,537 videos
- 17,905 photos
- Ability to download individual videos
- Searchable index
- Exhaustive sources list (300+ journalists)
- Geolocation data
- Livemap with minute to minute updates
- Victim list
In a news media environment that doesn't want us to know/remember that a genocide is even happening in the first place, archives like this will preserve the record for future generations and ensure that the victims of this slaughter are not erased from history.