I was at the Fagradalsfjall eruption at 2023. Had been to Iceland for two weeks w wife and daughter, and on the last day (since the signs were there) I decided to postpone travel home for two days (w + child wanted to go home). On my last day, the hike opened up and I went at approx 2100 hours to the volcano. That was an approx 10 km hike one way.
Amazing experience. A bunch of us were stupid as can be, but got as close as approx 50 m. Sounds really dangerous, but the sputter were not that violent yet, and the ground sloped away from us. Still, really stupidly dangerous (the sputter wall could've broken down, wind direction change, etc). But it didn't. Lots of moss fires, and walked into a small slope and immediately felt a sting in my nose and lungs from trapped gases so took that as a nope and went back.
Started walking back at 0130 something, boarded flight at 0600, fainted (I had done Mt Esja in the morning too). Sorry other passengers, it was inconsiderate of me and I was an asshole for that. But... that experience...!
IIRC lego had two actual patents: the basic brick, and the classic figure. The brick is expired while the figure isn't. Hence you can find "alternate" bricks, but not figures. They do own a shitload of trademarks, and aren't afraid to enforce them (which they legally must or they risk losing the TM).
Fun story: my wife ordered a couple of those "alternate" sets, and none inflicted on Legos patent nor TM (no lego branding, not a copy of a lego set, etc). The Swedish customs acted on their own (baffling to me) and stopped the package, sent her a letter in stark wording to accept forfeit. She challenged this, then Lego's lawyers got in contact with us and, using the figure patent, claimed this was a copy and we should forfeit or they would sue her. Very harsh letter, very stark wording.
Left a very bad taste in my mouth, haven't bought any Lego (or alternatives either) since.
There is jazz improvisation handbook "Harmony with Lego Bricks" written in the 1980's by Conrad Cork in the UK. It's pretty niche. Conrad approached Lego at the time and they gave him permission to use the Lego name. It's written "LEGO(R)" on the cover. Those were more innocent times I guess.
(edited for a typo)
The patent expired, but the minifigs is also a EU 3D trademark. This is not possible for the brick which (only) serves a technical function, namely to hold on each other. Trademarks do not expire while in use. Another example for a 3D trademark, also in this US, is the Coca Cola bottle.
the minifigure is not patented, but protected by a 3D design mark. design marks don't expire, and attempts to challenge the mark and get it removed so far have not been successful.
LEGO is using design marks to protect all new bricks they create. design marks can just be registered without any review. but they can be challenged, and some of these challenges have been successful.
It's not just cost and ads. It's having the possibility to reduce attempts to manipulate my inner reptile brain. With various clients, you can disable shorts, recommended, you have sponsorblock, you can replace youtube-face-thumbs with actual thumbs and get crowd-sourced titles that better reflect the contents.
I also don't need to manually go set speed to 1.75x and enable subs in english, it's a one-time setting. _Further_ I can download a video locally, for whatever reason (later viewing, bw throttling, risk of deletion, etc).
As if that weren't enough, I don't have to watch videos logged in, my client is just set up to download my select channels.
I would assume, yet _another_ standard. There are a bunch of them, and product builders are taking a long long time to properly implement, and often buggy. And they often result in the consumer need to buy yet another gateway/router, and learn the ins/outs and quirks of another protocol that won't work properly in years, all the while two new competing standards have been introduced. An example - how long has Matter existed? Yet, it hasn't had a profile for smart plugs with energy monitoring (eg the 12$ IKEA one). Such a basic use case...
And all this so Samsung et al can siphon off more user data and show more ads.
> An example - how long has Matter existed? Yet, it hasn't had a profile for smart plugs with energy monitoring (eg the 12$ IKEA one). Such a basic use case...
That was added with version 1.3 of Matter, released in the middle of this year. You just need to wait for your smart home ecosystem to support it and for IKEA to release a firmware update.
As far as ecosystems go, Home Assistant (HA) fully supports it, as does Samsung SmartThings. Google has a public beta, from what I've read. Amazon and Apple are in the on the way stage.
As far as device goes, all my energy monitoring smart plugs are Tp-link Tapo, and they have been quick to update firmware. I'm using several Tp-Link Tapo P110M Matter smart plugs [1] and a Tapo P316M Matter smart power strip [2] with HA.
The P316M, purchased in the middle of October, came with firmware that supported Matter 1.3 out of the box. I simply added it to HA using the "Add device" button on the HA screen and it worked.
The P110Ms, purchased at the start of this month, came with older firmware so they did not show energy use out of the box in HA. A quick trip to the Tapo app to add them to it during which it checks for and installs the latest firmware, brought them up to the latest firmware. After that the energy monitoring information showed up in HA.
I do believe that humor and being funny can be learned, and thus taught. Everything from language structure, pacing, expectations (eg the listener builds an expectation or belief of what the comedian talks about, but in the last few words, it is revealed that you were completely wrong). Hm. I find I have a hard time expressing myself, I lack the words and terminology and frameworks I think...
I can see this being huge for 3d-printing. Apply on a sculpted .stl, reposition and download/save the new pose. There is already stuff in Blender to do stuff like that, but Blender is almost like a hobby in itself, just like the actual printing is like a hobby (to learn and master).
Isn't that the inverse? Ie auto-accept just to get rid of the UI box?
Edit: their FF-page says,
Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!
This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are privacy researchers that got tired of seeing how companies violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Because the organisations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add-on to help them out.
We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.
Is the joke that they are respectful with regards to allergies? Or am I reading a bit much of an attitude into your comment? Because it comes off as rude and tone deaf.
With a child that has PA on anaphylaxis-level and has had such an reaction a couple of times, and she has thusly built up a fear and anxiety, not being able to casually just let her attend b-day parties etc etc etc, I can assure you it's not a joke to us.
And no, we are not overly clean, in fact love going outdoors into the woods and getting dirt under our fingernails. Nor did we hold her off peanuts when small, her first reaction came when she just had learned to walk at about 10 months and ate a tiny piece found on the floor. And we as parents work very hard on trying to have a casual attitude towards life and work on her anxiety, and not let the PA define who she is or does. But then something like last week happens - those who make the food for school messed up her box of food and she ate mashed pea pattys and got really, really bad, worst in years. Boom, all her confidence in school down the drain.
It's heartbreaking, really. To find her have all that fear and pain, and we can only do so much to help her with that. And it's heartbreaking to see it being a joke to some. When I see such attitudes, I try to think that it comes from someone who is living a happy-path life, and well, good for you.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and smash that bell button.
Shouldn't you as a customer be in control of which food is served to you? If you have an allergy, ask for the component list and then decide what to order.
Like in rich neighborhoods people cannot talk and should be babysat by the serving staff.
The joke is that there is a group of people who are fashionably allergic to various things. Remember 15 years ago when suddenly everyone was celiac? I'm all for cutting junk carbs out of the diet, but this was something people were just "discovering" for themselves. It always seems to be some sort of health-nut crowd which is often far more vocal than those actually suffering.
I never heard people self-diagnosing as coeliac, that would be ridiculous - diagnosis for that requires both a positive blood test for the antibodies and then a gastroscopy/biopsy. The 'trendy' crowd tended to be self-professed as "gluten intolerant" or "gluten sensitive".
18 years of restaurants checking in, and we did everything we could to be respectful of allergies but the onus was always on the customer to tell us. Now when I go to places to eat they ask me, which is a different approach and like comment OP one I find much more often in more expensive restaurants. I think you're reading way too deep into this comment. What do you think, chat?
I just think it seems hugely inefficient for a waiter to ask hordes of non-allergic people for allergies for every one allergic person that could just as well announce theirs.
A lot of restaurants automatically bring you refills without even asking. The reason they do it is that it's good service, and people appreciate that kind of minutiae, if you don't drink it, it's no skin off your back, and it costs so little that it's worth having that simple win on the customer service side because it creates repeat customers, and if you're not the allergic person, you should consider the number of other things they're doing as a courtesy to provide good service to you, a non-allergic, I guarantee you'll notice a number of things.
So what? It's a trivial kindness and it takes a few seconds. What else were they going to do with those seconds? It's different if it's fast food, where maximizing people I/O does matter. But that's not the case here.
Further if the restaurant asks ahead of time, that's a signifier that they take it seriously. If you have to tell them, it's much more likely you will encounter cavalier treatment of cross-contamination and such. For some people, that really can be life or death.
>It's a trivial kindness and it takes a few seconds
We're doing 2200 covers tonight. If you know what that means then you know I don't have a few seconds to spare, and if you don't then you're not really qualified to have this discussion.
>Further if the restaurant asks ahead of time, that's a signifier that they take it seriously. If you have to tell them, it's much more likely you will encounter cavalier treatment of cross-contamination and such
Is it really healthy for people to fret over minor allergies they probably don't even have, and pass that anxiety onto their kids? And can't this behaviour even cause allergies, and cause people with real allergies to be taken less seriously.
You know who "those people" are, don't pretend you don't. You just don't want them mocked either because they make you feel comfy or because you get mistaken for them.
The absurd thing to me is that e.g. an ice cream place asks if dairy is OK. We all know ice cream contains dairy by default. If you are allergic, you know. It's a pretty surreal way to be considerate.
(If you're allergic to something more exotic, you also know to not blindly trust the reassurances of people who, while good natured and friendly, never had reason to learn the fine points of allergy stuff.)
Also, people don't generally identify with their allergies, it's not like acknowledging the existence of allergic people in a redundant way validates them or something. A sign notifying that milk-free options are available is plenty.
I'm leaning towards you in this case, since it's so strongly associated ice cream <-> dairy, but nowadays there are all kinds of frozen ice cream-ish products. But yes, a sign is often enough. Not always, since if the allergy is severe enough, you also can't risk the server not to use the same spoon as peanut ice cream, or a separate spoon but rinsed in a bucket with the others. And it's enough with one slipup.
So, for me, I take it as a positive signal that such a place is likely more aware than other places, and is more comfortable with my probing questions. Many places aren't, and yet others try to assert something they actually can't live up to.
The joke is on parents who have made it a class signifier that they can afford to be more involved in their childs' life. This then extends to the business they frequent.
What is heartbreaking for me is all the wasted effort and pressure parents are putting on their children for little tangible gain.
I get you are speaking broadly and with apparently quite an opinion already (eg, is that common, really? or just your caricature view of an allergic person?), but I can only offer you my/our perspective.
Daughter, highly allergic to peanuts since infant. Had a couple of anaphylactic reactions. This causes your whole system to want to f** you up, as violently and as quickly as possible. Rocket vomiting, throat swelling, asthma constricting your airways, intense feeling of heat and sweating and rashes. And anxiety deluxe, since you feel like you are gonna die, since that's literally what happens. It's a cascading system fault, which will lead to organ failure unless you stop it quickly. You do that with an Epipen, which is bug effin needle that hurts (I've taken one), and leaves you shaking from the adrenaline. And you'll be so full of anxiety and stress so you can't take one yourself, you need someone to give it to you. So you hope that adults around you know to recognize what's going on, and know where your shots are, and know how to administer one.
But you are still not safe, since that might not be enough, you may need another shot within perhaps ten minutes, or six hours from rebound effects. And you know, that due to all this you can't just "take a shot and chillax the rest of the day", you'll need an ambulance and stay under observation for those hours, then you'll be tired like after running a marathon, for several days.
Now consider what that does to you, when just a tiny tiny slip-up from someone is enough to send you down that funnel, and you constantly need to be sure you have your shots with you, anything you eat is safe. It's a constant state where you can't just relax and eat snacks with friends, or a million other things you take for granted.
We as parents do what we can do, and try our hardest to not let her get stuck in thinking about it. She should not have to be responsible for those things working, she should just be another kid to the fullest extent.
Then, as mentioned, a reminder comes in the form of school lunch messed up and the teacher that found her panicked on the thought of giving her that needle, so they gtfo out of there.
Final thoughts. I understand, there are those parents who think that their little angel is the most tender fragile thing in the world. I don't know how warranted that is, perhaps there is a real risk for their child, perhaps not. People take risks differently. I can only offer another perspective and hope for better understanding.
Amazing experience. A bunch of us were stupid as can be, but got as close as approx 50 m. Sounds really dangerous, but the sputter were not that violent yet, and the ground sloped away from us. Still, really stupidly dangerous (the sputter wall could've broken down, wind direction change, etc). But it didn't. Lots of moss fires, and walked into a small slope and immediately felt a sting in my nose and lungs from trapped gases so took that as a nope and went back.
Started walking back at 0130 something, boarded flight at 0600, fainted (I had done Mt Esja in the morning too). Sorry other passengers, it was inconsiderate of me and I was an asshole for that. But... that experience...!