At the end of the day, you are the only one who is genuinely interested/invested in ensuring that your ass is protected with a rental vehicle. Rental insurance is one of the things you should neveral generalize; always investigate and fully understand your specific car rental. Never trust that just because you’re in province/state X that the rental vehicle must adhere to the local insurance requirements - rental companies often register vehicles outside a specific province/state (because its cheaper) and the liability limits may be very different. Vehicle rental companies generally offer add-on insurance - if you want to go this route then fully read the details and ensure that you are satisfied that you’re adequately covered; this is particularly important when you’re out-of-country.

Personally, when feasible, I always pay for my rental with a credit card that includes rental insurance that I have confirmed adequately covers me. As a backup, my personal vehicle’s insurance also includes full rental coverage. In all cases, make sure to speak with the insurer ahead of time and discuss the limits of the insurance and what their procedure is if you get into an accident, particularly when you’re out of your home province/state or country.

Electric kettle + Celestial Apple Cinnamon tea in a Yeti thermos. Let brew for 3-4 hours. It is absolutely glorious.

I’ve got a Meebook M6 that I’m very happy with. Its basically an e-Ink Android tablet with and SD slot and Google Play, so you can load the Kindle app or whatever you want if you’ve got that stuff. Most importantly, I use the Moon+ Reader app and load .epub/.cbz/etc formats plus it does an awesome job of reformatting .txt/.pdf/.lit. Bonus for me: Moon+ also supports custom fonts, so I can use Dyslexie.

I had been flip-flopping for a while, but I figured that it was finally time to get off of Digg.

Flash Gordon

Wherever you go, there you are.

Yes. 50s. Canada.

I taught myself. I was 19 and working for a small company (3 employees total) and had a van for work for hauling around equipment. My boss called me to his house one day and told me that he was taking the van for a six-week fishing trip. “You can take my BMW. You know how to drive stick, right?” I shook my head “no.” “Well, you’ll figure it out”. Fortunately, he lived in the country so it was all quiet backroads for most of the trip home. By the time I got into the city, I (usually) didn’t stall it at traffic lights.

A couple years later, I took a three-day motorcyle (newb to driving licence) course. Three out of fifteen students knew how to drive a manual transmission car. Only the three of us passed and got our licence - the others were having trouble stalling 'cause it was the first time they had ever dealt with a clutch. (note: this was typical, the ones who didn’t pass could come back and try the final test again the following weekend).

I think it’s extremely unlikely that he’s not dead. If Prigozhin were to surface elsewhere in the world (e.g. Africa), Putin would be even more of a laughing stock. Putin simply wouldn’t risk anything less than absolute certainty.

However, I doubt that Prigozhin was alive when the plane took off; most likely Utkin and Chekalov were dead as well. Best guess is that the three were killed the night before.

If anyone is interested a Defederation Investigator has been created. You can check to see which instances have defederated from your own.
Announcement Post: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2137736
WebApp: https://defed.xyz/

HELLO

I wrote a bash script that runs daily which 7z (AES256) the databases (well… I dump the DB as text and then 7z those files), web files (mostly WordPress), user files, all of /etc, and generate a list of all installed packages, and then copy the archives to a timestamped folder on my Google drive (I keep the last two nights, plus the last 3 Sundays).

TBH, the zipped content is around 1.5GB for each backup. So my 17GB of free GDrive space more than enough. If I actually had a significant amount of data, I’d look into a more robust long term solution.

If there was a catastrophic failure, it’d take me around six hours to rebuild a new server and test it.

^this

I had been going to Sunday School for a year or so and frankly the whole religion thing didn’t make any real sense to me in explaining the world around us, humanity, higher powers, or anything. It was a lot of ‘trust us’ with no substance. So, I told my mum that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and she said ‘ok’ - and we never did again.

I was four (almost five) BTW. At no time in the subsequent 50-odd years have I ever had any doubts about my atheism.

GRINDR used to have this feature;. Usually, it was just annoying with randos (who never read my profile and had nothing in common with me) messaging me simply because I’m in the vicinity. Occasionally, guys got creepy/stalky and randomly knocked on neighbours doors trying to find me.

I don’t recommend resurrecting it.

I wear Haines X-Temp - boxers when I’m wearing loose shorts or sweatpants, boxer-briefs when I’m wearing more fitted trousers or snowboard gear or motocross gear. Both the boxers and boxer-briefs are very stretchy and comfortable, plus they don’t hold sweat or chaffe when I’m exercising. My decisoin to wear Haines isn’t a cost thing at all - its solely comfort and utility; and, frankly, I look really good in the boxer-briefs.

as I’m reading it: Your post is top

WooHoo! Everything is coming up Milhouse

I agree with you that this is not going to be quick/easy to solve and that beta testing several alternatives is a very good approach. Getting the algorithm right is far more of a user experience issue than a programming issue. Right now, everyone is tossing out some simple concepts, but in the end this will need far more of a complex multi-dimensional, logarithmic ranking to get it right.

I would rather see a sort/feed option which limits the number of posts shown from each individual subsciption (e.g. max 3 or 5 posts) and also have a “See all from [subscription]” button imbedded. I know that there is an enhancement request in to change the algorithm for top (or hot?) categories to take/order the the #1 ranked post from each subscription followed by the #2 post from each subscription and so on… which may help a bit.

But, frankly, I think we should just ask XKCD’s Randall Munroe - he came up with Reddit’s HOT sort and definitely has more insight on what drives a good algorithm.

Ummm… Reddit is not a “cash cow” - quite the opposite, Reddit bleeds money. But, overall that’s not impacting your question one way or the other.

Both of your points are way over-the-top and unnecessary to discredit Lemmy. They certainly don’t have to even touch Lemmy itself, they simply have to leverage their own platform and their own userbase to circulate negative views of Lemmy and keep people coming to Reddit. They also don’t have to pay news agencies - users seeking trusted media is no longer a thing in a world of social media; some clickbait articles on crap websites are all that’s needed and those will be distributed (and redistributed) for free if they’re jucy enough to attract readers.

Some attack avenues which come to mind:

• Maxist-Lenonist roots of Lemmy itself, along with digging up the backgrounds of various admins around the world and posting wild accusations of their moral character
• Lack of moderation and circulation of far right-wing and left-wing theories
• The structure/reliability of federation. Volunteers running servers which talk to each other, you sign up with one server and who knows if it’ll stick around; and if it does disappear suddenly, then you have to join a different instance and start all over again.
• Conspiracy theories on how/why Lemmy instances are funded. Secret funding from Chinese/Russian governments looking to subvert “the west” through social media? Collecting “dontations” to run Lemmy and diverting the money in support of terrorism?
• Small userbase and relatively small amount of content compared to the vastness of Reddit
• Lack of centralized contact for legal issues - from takedown notices for copyrighted content to privacy to right-to-be-forgotten legislation. And, sooner or later, there will be revenge porn and *sigh* child porn popping up. Federation is going to multiply the issue as posts are propogated and many dozens/hundreds of admins will have to be contacted to take action.
• Your entire post history is open to all - whether it be for training AI, to someone looking to scam you, to governments of the world keeping a close eye on you.

But, to be honest, Reddit doesn’t have to do any of that to maintain their position at the top of the heap. All they really have to do is look internally and stabilize Reddit. Remove Spez and replace him with someone who can build a vision and knows how to communicate. Spend money on their own app to make it usable and accessibilty-friendly. Spend money on a marketing head (and team) who can create a workable/profitable advertising program. Probably, they’ll have to shrink down Reddit’s scope and remove the NSFW subreddits, figure out a way to deliver ads to all users, and adjust costs for “premium”/ad-free experience and API access to roughly equate with with revenue they would have received serving ads. If Reddit puts a new CEO in place and announces the vision for the future withing six months and implement the changes within another six months, they’ll likely keep 85% of their existing userbase.

I learned a long time ago to take control of my life, decide what’s important to me and what’s not, and plan things out including time to relax/vacation/disconnect (by which I mean everything from taking an hour break at lunchtime, to deciding to go out for a hike on Sunday, to taking a three-week snowboarding trip). The biggest problem will always be others trying to manipulate you to do things that they want you to do; you have to learn to be direct and say “no”. You also have to learn to deal with “doing what is expected of you” / “doing what is socially acceptable” / “keeping up appearances”; you have to decide what you’re going to do and not let these things drag you down.

Sorry… that isn’t really advice, or five top-tips for organizing your schedule, or how-to-deal-with-demanding-people… its just a bit of a harsh statement to f*ckin’ take control of your life and be confident in your decisions.

Walking/balancing on curbs, retaining walls, downed trees in the forest - pretty much anything.