windy.com with a VPN in a private browser window. They can’t track you if they don’t know where you are!

Yeah, I concede that small caps are more likely to be carried away by rainwater than whole bottles :D. What I meant was that for every loose cap on the ground there is a bottle lying around somewhere, and also there are bottles with caps on. No one is tossing their cap into the bushes and then taking the bottle to the recycling center.

I pick up street litter, and having picked up thousands of pounds, I have never felt that loose caps are a problem, let alone one that requires such a solution. The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps, and the amount of plastic in every bottle dwarfs the plastic in a cap. Fixing the cap to the bottle will do nothing to improve the recycling rate of plastic if entire bottles are already tossed anyway.

I consider the idea of cap tethers as adversarial memetic warfare thrust upon us for some unknown ulterior purpose, possibly to make us hate the very idea of environmental consciousness. Same as paper straws. I like plastic bag bans though.

As far as picking litter is concerned, I personally prefer finding bottles without a cap. At least those are empty, all liquid having evaporated after the bottle has spent several months in the bushes. The capped bottles are often half-full and are just nasty. (Who even pays for a bottle of drink and not drinks half of it anyway?)

This is a great gotcha! I just recently learned that 700C, the “29er”, and (some) “28 inch” are all the same wheel.

To be fair, when I was little I too was guessing that “C” stands for centimeters or something metric. Now I know that “C” in “700C”, the most popular road/hybrid wheel size, stands for the third size in the French “ABCD” notation, where sizes “700A”, “700B”, and “700D” are obsolete and are no longer manufactured.

I’d love to use ISO sizes, but even if I know that I need a 40-622 wheel, there is no way to search for it on the storefront if every single seller made gross mistakes in labeling their product! I have to ignore the specs shown entirely and make educated guesses based on title alone. For example “WHEEL AL 700 FRONT ALEX AP18 QR Silver UCP” in the picture is almost certainly a 700C wheel and NOT an 18-inch wheel. The “18” in the title probably stands for 18mm rim width, which means that this wheel will fit my bike and tire, but is a bit more narrow than ideal 23mm. The sellers must be copying the title verbatim from the manufacturer, and then haphazardly filling out the specifications without knowing or understanding the actual numbers. The ISO size is not mentioned at all.

I wanted to go with this, but had to go even bigger. The largest mine truck according to the wiki is BelAZ 75710 (as seen in the picture) which has “59/80R63” tires that are merely 402.7cm big.

I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble.

Thank you for being aware! I’ve experienced this on github.com. I’ve tried to submit issues several times to open source projects, complete with proposed code to solve a bug, but github shadowbans my account 6 hours after creating it (because I use a VPN? a third-party email provider? do not provide a phone number? who knows). I can see the issue and pull request when logged in, but they only see a 404 on their project page even if I give them a direct link. I ended up sending them a screenshot of the issue page just to convince them this was even possible. Sad to hear gitlab does it even worse now by making phone mandatory.

Am I the only one for whom "open"subtitles.org hasn’t worked in years? I literally cannot find the download button, like in those okboomer memes. Never used the API. Switched to subscene.com and haven’t had problems since.

German is perfect. Everyone will agree how to spell Schifffahrkarte the moment they hear it.

far more maddeningly, some sites tell me that my username and password combo are incorrect when I’m using a VPN

Brb, gonna wiretap the judge’s house. It’s not a crime as long as I don’t act on the information I hear so there is no injury.

The list of tor exit ips is publicly viewable. Some IPS block the entire list contrary to Tor Project’s request not to do exactly that.

I live in New York. 9/11 was like 35 9/11s for us.

I assume this “VPN Server” that they can see is the “entry node”, and not the “exit node” (i.e. my IP as seen by the world) - but never got a clear answer to that

Traditionally, the entry node and the exit node have been the same VPN server/ip. In that sense, your ISP does know the IP of your exit server, since they are the ones connecting you to it.

For example, your X ISP’s logs could show “At 15:00, user #123 connects to IP 1.2.3.4, which lookup shows is assigned to “CheapVPNs Ltd”. At 15:01 our email server received 1,000,000 emails from IP 1.2.3.4 all angrily complaining about how “X ISP sucks”. Correlation implies user #123 is responsible for the mail bomb attack against our servers.”

At the moment, Mullvad specifically does use different entry and exit IPs, but they are all still located in the same datacenter and subnet. That is, you could be connecting to a Mullvad VPN server 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, or 1.2.3.6 in London, and they all exit out through 1.2.3.1 in London. This is just something Mullvad does. Other VPN services may not do it and Mullvad hasn’t done it in the past. Someone analyzing ISP logs could correlate these IPs if they really wanted to.

Mullvad also offers “multihop”, but the way they have it implemented currently (changing the destination port number), an ISP could still deduce your exit IP if they bother looking up records of Mullvad network structure (which are publicly available), since they know the IP number and the port number of your entrance node.

The only way to hide your VPN exit IP from your ISP currently is to use multiple VPN services and nest them inside each other (or use one service and nest it inside itself using the “multiple devices” perk). Then only a state-level actor could hope to correlate your traffic by monitoring the ingress/outflow of multiple IPs simultaneously.

Look at this fatcat using a water bottle! You can drink perfectly fine water from the tap. Don’t even need a cup if you put your palms together.

Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don’t have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can’t afford the product they used to make.

They tell us “Replacing jobs is OK! We’ll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!” but the new jobs are mostly “telemarketer”, and “tech support scammer”, and “ornamental hermit” at factory owner’s mansion.

But all that still doesn’t convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!

I too think having factors of 3 and 4 would be neat, which just proves we should change our number system to base 12, as somebody else in the thread suggested 😊.

That’s true! Receipt checks can get lost! I was replying to “They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen” though. The “can’t” is a store policy thing, not a law thing.

The fractions don’t help me when I go to the grocery store and unit price of one bag of nuts is “per pound” and the unit price of another is “per ounce”. You’d better be good at dividing by 16 in your head if you want to price-compare! And you’d better be good at remembering how many fluid ounces are in a quart when you go to the olive oil aisle (hint: it’s not 16).