Most of them are going to use the laser diode out of a Blu-Ray, set in a heat sink that’ll let them at least try to run the thing at about a watt.

This will let them kind of mar the finish on some wood I guess. Compare this to a CO₂ laser that start at about 30 watts that can punch right through plywood and acrylic and diode lasers are just 1. uselessly pathetic and 2. will blind your ass in the ugliest way possible.

You see, something like a CO2 laser is far-infrared, the tube itself glows a nice purplish pink but the laser light is invisible to the human eye; even if your rods or cones reacted to it, which they don’t, your cornea is opaque to it. You get shot in the eye with a CO₂ laser, you’re going to get burned on the cornea. Which, thanks to motorcyclists, might be an injury a surgeon can fix, if your entire eye doesn’t just pop like a superheated zit.

Diode engravers use blue light. As in, in the visible spectrum. Pretty close to the wavelength your blue cones respond to, actually. Since your eyes are designed to use that wavelength of light, your corneas are transparent to that wavelength. So if you get hit in the eye with a blue laser, you just get a third degree burn right on your retina. None of the sciences or religions can fix that; there’s just going to be a blind streak in your vision from now on.

Wear your goddamn safety glasses while working around class IV laser devices.

Batman sold his giant penny on an episode of Pawn Stars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y2JMnW5Pg4

one way and then another.

I’ve never been told my dick is small by a woman who hadn’t already told me it was big. This leads me to have two competing hypotheses about the size of my penis. It either:

1. undergoes a cycle of drastic size changes that follows a sawtooth function, gradually decreasing throughout a relationship to a minimum during the relationship-ending argument only to instantly shoot back up to a maximum upon getting with the next chick, or it:

2. Remains a consistent normal size while a series of women repeatedly told the same set of contradictory lies as a method of manipulating my feelings one way and then another.

Now to design an experimental apparatus to test these hypotheses.

Hit by a self-driving car while holding his sign.

Done. Now what?

As in, they’re gonna stop making redundant bullshit proprietary memory cards in formats no one else uses?

Great. Glad to hear it. Good riddance. Don’t let the casket lid hit you on your way out.

This comment puts me in a nuclear disaster state of mind.

I’ve seen two world leaders giving interviews about nuclear disasters, Gorbachev about Chernobyl, and Naoto Kan about Fukushima. Both of them talked about how they couldn’t get decent information to base decisions on because people kept blowing sunshine up their asses. That it doesn’t really matter how much or little top leadership wants to or can help, layers of functionaries afraid of losing their cushions will delay and downplay until it’s too late.

That’s…not what’s happening in the executive branch.

“Somehow” he owns the only PC video game store that matters.

No that’s fortified swine, and it’s from Porktugal.

On the surface, that works. Problem is, to use the Fediverse you have to get a bit deeper into it than with email.

Email is designed to evoke the UX of the physical post office. To use the post office, or email, you need to know your address, and your recipients address. You need to know where to put outgoing letters, and where to get incoming letters. Even if you’re vaguely aware of Grumman LLVs and letter sorting machines and trucks and trains and whatnot, you can still get away with conceptualizing it as, you put a letter in a box, it is then “In the mail” until it is delivered to the recipient. Email presents itself to the end user as exactly that.

ActivityPub might be “just another protocol” like smtp or pop3 or whatever but the user experience is vastly different in ways people really haven’t had to deal with before. Lemmy isn’t lke the post office, it’s like Reddit, except there’s 90 little Reddits each with their own slightly different rules and a complex web of which will communicate with what. The format of the electronic communique is of no consequence to the end user.

On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.

The several apps thing I don’t see as much of a barrier to Redditors; most are already used to the platform’s official app being garbagepuke and going with something else so they’ll figure that out relatively quickly.

I haven’t yet seen the “Pick an instance to sign up with. It doesn’t matter, well actually it does, for reasons we’re not explaining right now” problem really addressed in a meaningful way. Those lists of instances to join when you go to Lemmy or pixelfed or whoever’s website? Most of them don’t get filled out correctly by instance admins; so they’re either the default boiler plate, or they’re the first two-thirds of the first sentence of a paragraph about what Lemmy is.

Lemmy.world

Lemmy is an open source, federated link aggregator platform powered by ActivityPub, the fastest growing…

A major way is usually the engine runs at higher RPM while choked, so without the brake on, idling with the choke on will likely move the chain with “don’t want it up your crotch” amounts of power.

I’m a flight instructor. We get prosecuted if we’re that bad at our jobs.

Some fans of Lexx.

Splash on some 100LL. Eau de Boomer Brain

Who won?

Is anyone else here enough of a 90’s kid to remember the TBS show Dinner and a Movie? The theme song for it just popped into my head. Doot, doo do beans and cornbread doot doo do beans and cornbread.

That’s Another Day In Paradise by Phil Collins.

I first heard the song as a child, on the radio being driven around by my parents. Didn’t really take the verses on board, and the chorus is simply repeats of “Oh, think twice. It’s another day for you and me in paradise.” With that big romantic hook and the warm breezy feel, as a kid I interpreted it as a groom asking his bride to consider extending their tropical honeymoon. I filed it in the same mental folder with Fields Of Gold.

It’s a song about abject poverty, about haves and have nots. Verses are about beggers on the street calling out to the wealthy who pretend not to see them. It lands like a brick.

Reagan used Born in the USA as a campaign song.