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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • While I also like Huy Fong Sriracha and was delighted when I first ran into it, I believe I remember reading about them changing the recipe at some point.

    EDIT: Oh, sounds like they didn’t change the recipe intentionally, but at least the first batch they had after they had a fight with their pepper supplier tasted somewhat differently. I assume that they’re aiming to keep the flavor the same.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.worldTanks
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    4 hours ago

    This is, in fact, the etymology.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank

    The word tank was first applied in a military context to British “landships” in 1915 to keep their nature secret before they entered service.[3]

    Origins

    On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place at the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction’s Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as “Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers.” In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:

    Mr. (Thomas J.) Macnamara (M.P., and Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) then suggested, for secrecy’s sake, to change the title of the Landship Committee. Mr. d’Eyncourt agreed that it was very desirable to retain secrecy by all means, and proposed to refer to the vessel as a “Water Carrier”. In Government offices, committees and departments are always known by their initials. For this reason I, as Secretary, considered the proposed title totally unsuitable.[a] In our search for a synonymous term, we changed the word “Water Carrier” to “Tank,” and became the “Tank Supply” or “T.S.” Committee. That is how these weapons came to be called Tanks.



  • I don’t care that much, if one is strictly speaking talking about removability, given current battery lifetimes.

    But I do care a lot about size.

    Batteries that are removable and extend out of the case are amenable to being replaced with larger batteries. Vendors don’t do that these days, since batteries are generally internal.

    Also, US flight restrictions permit for more than 100Wh batteries in a device if they’re removed – the Toughbook can do this. So one can run 200Wh with a laptop with two 100Wh removable battery slots. Can’t do that with fixed batteries.

    So there are some very real potential capacity benefits to removable batteries.


  • If you had the wedding photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they’re still around, might have copies. I don’t know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can’t hurt.

    This place says up to a year:

    https://www.wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-keep-photos/

    Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.

    This guy says forever:

    https://old.reddit.com/r/WeddingPhotography/comments/96ckow/how_long_do_you_hold_on_past_wedding_photos/

    I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line


  • I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.

    I’m assuming that the reason that he didn’t just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it’d be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.

    I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second new drive and have done that transfer just so that there’s a backup. I mean, it doesn’t really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.

    Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you’ve got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I’d want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.


  • I’m pretty sure that it defaults to best quality.

    goes looking at man page

       By default, yt-dlp tries to download the best available quality if you don't  pass  any  options.   This  is  generally
       equivalent to using -f bestvideo*+bestaudio/best.  However, if multiple audiostreams is enabled (--audio-multistreams),
       the  default  format changes to -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best.  Similarly, if ffmpeg is unavailable, or if you use yt-dlp
       to stream to stdout (-o -), the default becomes -f best/bestvideo+bestaudio.
    

    So I think that it should normally pull down the best audio unless you get into some situation where YouTube doesn’t offer a format that simultaneously has the combination of highest audio quality with the highest video quality; if it has to do so to get the highest video quality then, it’ll sacrifice audio quality.

    EDIT: Hmm. I could have sworn that there was more text about prioritizing relative audio and video quality at one point in the man page, but I don’t see anything there now. Maybe it can just always get the best audio quality, regardless of video quality, can pull 'em entirely separately.


  • Some context: this was 130 years ago, back when the US had an okay — but certainly not top-tier — navy, and a relatively-weak army. We’ve got some hindsight to see how things played out.

    On annexations of islands:

    • The Cook Islands today are a country in free association with New Zealand.

    • Fiji is an independent country.

    • Hawaii was annexed in 1898 and became a US state in 1959.

    • I’m not sure why Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands are listed separately. Might be terminology in 1895 differed from present-day terminology.

    • Cuba is an independent country.

    • Haiti is an independent country.

    • I think “Friendly” refers to Tonga, which is an independent country today.

      Tonga became known in the West as the “Friendly Islands” because of the congenial reception accorded to Captain James Cook on his first visit in 1773

    On “Licking John Bull out of his boots” — at the time, the British Empire and the US considered each other fairly likely candidates for fighting in a war, made war plans for each other, and the conflict never actually happened. After the US wound up fighting alongside rather than against the British in World War I and World War II, the two wound up allied.

    On “sweeping his enemies from the seas”, yes; the US is the biggest naval power (and allied with most of the other substantial naval powers). We’ll see where the growing China rivalry goes over time, though; in 2024, China has more warships than the US, though the aggregate tonnage of US warships is significantly larger than China’s.

    On “establishing formidable and invulnerable coastal defenses”: well, not really in the sense that Puck would have thought of it, with naval forts and guns, but due to aircraft and warships, it could ward off a naval invasion easily, so kind of functionally similar.

    On the Monroe Doctrine: I’m not sure that it’s quite as meaningful today; it really dealt with an era where there was a potential “scramble for the Americas”, where the US didn’t want opposing major powers entering the Americas. Kerry called it obsolete, Trump’s referenced it. I suppose if a major power started annexing new chunks of the Americas, the US would probably take issue with it today, but unless China decides to do so, I don’t think that anyone’s likely aiming to do so, so…shrugs






  • For context, I don’t actually think that the sugar tariff wound up getting dropped, in fact, at least not fully.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinley_Tariff

    The Act removed tariffs on sugar, molasses, tea, coffee, and hides but authorized the President to reinstate the tariffs if the items were exported from countries that treated U.S. exports in a “reciprocally unequal and unreasonable” fashion. The idea was “to secure reciprocal trade” by allowing the executive branch to use the threat of reimposing tariffs as a means to get other countries to lower their tariffs on U.S. exports.

    https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13856/c13856.pdf

    Table 6.4. The fate of reciprocity treaties, 1840–1911

    1901, Russia, Senate rejects

    https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program#an-overview-of-u-s-sugar-policy

    An Overview of U.S. Sugar Policy

    Barriers to imports of sugar have been employed nearly since the republic’s founding; a tariff on the product was first passed in 1789. Duties remained in place almost continuously save for a four-year period from 1890 to 1894, but modern-day sugar protectionism can be traced back to the 1934 passage of the Jones-Costigan Amendment. This legislation, passed as an emergency measure to provide assistance to sugar farmers and later incorporated into the Sugar Act of 1937, had as its key provisions domestic production quotas, subsidies, tariffs, and import quotas, all designed to restrict sugar supplies and boost prices.


  • After posting an old Puck political cartoon in another comment, I thought I’d go take a look at the archive at the Library of Congress. They have high-resolution TIFF scans of a ton of them, so I thought I’d have fun skimming through them, maybe compress a couple of them as webp, and throw 'em up here.

    Given that we’re arguing about the merits of tariffs today, just like back when McKinley was in office and doing his tariff thing, seemed germane.

    Puck is an American humor magazine that ran until 1918; I’ve enjoyed some of its political cartoons before.



  • “Despite repeated requests from the Iranian side for various types of weapons – air defence systems and fighter jets – none of this has been transferred to Iran by Russia to date,” Smagin said.

    Partly due to its entanglement in Ukraine and its growing ties with other regional players, including Saudi Arabia, Moscow has shown little urgency on propping up Iran, even as Tehran’s position has weakened after blows against its key proxy, the Lebanese movement Hezbollah.

    I think that Russia is probably kind of short on functioning air defense systems herself.