That might be good. With text to speech getting as good as it’s getting, it’s probably getting in the realistic territory, too.

Hah, I had the exact reverse experience. For years when I had a delivery they would come by once (of course not staying nearly long enough to allow me to answer the door) and leave a notice saying the package would be at their warehouse the following day starting at 17:00.

The warehouse was pretty far. The round trip would take nearly 2 hours by bus. And since they opening hours weren’t ideal, if I happened to have a class or be otherwise busy the one night of the week they’re open late, well I guess I’d better find a solution, because they’ll only keep it for a week.

I would plead with them. Can you come back? Can you leave it at my door? It’s not even worth that much! I’ll take the risk! No. At least one thing they did agree to do was keep my package a bit longer once when I realized I had absolutely no way of retrieving it in time. But they only gave me two days.

It was only when COVID hit that delivery companies started just leaving packages. Sometimes they just wouldn’t tell you at all about it, and you’d have a surprise when you’d open the door and hit your foot on a surprise package, if you hadn’t kept up with the tracking.

Some people complained, because they were scared someone would steal their stuff, but I was so glad they were careless. I’ve worked from home ever since COVID.

Finally, I can order a thing and actually receive it at home.

How would you tackle that? Unless you build a really intelligent system that’s allowed to interpret and reword and understand the significance (or lack thereof) of emojis in context, it sounds tough. Like, generally speaking, you just wouldn’t be able to tell how important an emoji is to the message, when writing an algorithm.

My company used to allow it, but then it became clear people were doing too many dumb things with their work computers to control them normally. For example, some people would explicitly turn their PCs off without updating the OS every Friday and were nearly a year out of date.

That, plus other security concerns I don’t remember surrounding the tightening of our policies for security certifications required to net a very demanding client, made it so that we needed to institute mobile device management (MDM) for everything.

We went with Microsoft’s version because there were some crucial things I forgot that only it could do. But it didn’t support Linux.

So our few people using Linux had to choose between Windows and Mac OS.

That’s what my current bank uses for the web portal now to think of it. Client number, and 6-number PIN. I guess they’re only doing this because they really trust their “unusual activity” protocols, but I’ve got a feeling they really shouldn’t only rely on those.

Wow that’s a big oops

You remind me of my bank about 17 years ago. Everyone had to have a 10-character password, exactly, and it had to include exactly 2 numbers and 1 symbol. I wasn’t very knowledgeable about computers at the time and it already felt dumb.

To be honest I just look at the state of the world and laugh like I’m watching a sad comedy.

And I avoid thinking about how I’m in it and I have basically zero power over it.

I vote for whomever is the least bad candidate and try not to think about it too much the rest of the time.

A few days? Depending on the person’s condition, it might turn out badly.

First, start with one day. Second, and most importantly, consult with a medical professional to make sure you don’t have any counter-indications.

To the disappointment of evil prankers everywhere. Reminds me of “format c:”

This is speculation. I’m not a physicist.

Gravitational effects. It would almost certainly disturb a lot of asteroids and comets into new orbits. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe for Earth , given the protection of the gas giants, but it would probably increase risks for the next few decades/centuries/millenniums. Depending on the exact trajectory of the planet, it would probably also disturb other planets’ orbits a little. Anything radically different would be unlikely, but maybe something light and relatively unstable like Mercury would go nuts. As for Earth, in the likeliest scenarios, at most maybe the length of a year is altered.

The collision (perfectly head-on). It vastly depends on the speed. If it’s very slow, it’ll probably be diverted from the sun by the other planets and solar winds. If it’s fast but not relativistic, it’ll probably cause massive solar flares and very obvious sun spots for a while. At relativistic speeds (a sizeable fraction of the speed of light), though, it would be a lot of energy. Something big would probably happen when the extremely fast planet smashes into the dense core of the sun, probably. I’m not sure what though. Maybe it would temporarily strengthen fusion and cause some sort of micro supernova?

The collision(glancing blow). The sun is massive but most of its volume is pretty wispy. Most of its volume is a lot less dense than a planet, so the planet would likely have a pretty dramatic effect on it. If it’s fast enough, it might even come out on the other side, smashed to pieces by gravitational forces and thermal shock. It might expel a lot of plasma in a stream, like a squishy body shot with the fastest bullet in the world. A bullet on a curved trajectory though, because the proximity to the sun’s core would likely steer it significantly. If the planet was going fast enough to escape despite the friction having it slowed down and the massive gravitational pull, then I could imagine pretty much a shotgun of planet chunks shot through the solar system. It might not hit anything, and probably won’t considering how much of the solar system is empty space, but if it does, it would be catastrophic for, say, Earth.

As for long term effects, if the planet indeed merges into the sun, it would increase the sun’ metallicity (content in elements heavier than helium) by a tiny percentage. It might affect its long term evolution by a very small margin. If it’s a glancing blow that’s not extremely fast and it’s just right to create a mostly stable orbit, it might form a new asteroid belt that may or may not coalesce into a new planet in time.

I could see that if a planet slowly spiraled into it, but the question specifically asks about a direct collision.

Do you really think silicon and iron and other relatively heavy elements can simply be vaporized that quickly?

That’s genius. Absolutely evil, but genius.

Blacklist-based ad blocking.

I don’t mind ads when they’re reasonable. If it helps fund your website at all, advertise away. But when there’s a sticky banner plus an autoplay video ad reducing my mobile viewport to a ridiculous degree, and the X buttons are too small to click and ad loading completely breaks the search bar until it’s done (hi fandom wiki) I want to be able to say “fuck these ads in particular”

So which instance an account is from matters regarding which communities you can join? Huh.

I heard what lemmy is. I googled Lemmy. I downloaded an app. I pressed sign up. I ended up on Lemmy.world.

I’ll be honest I don’t even really understand what different instances do.

I can see why they would want that. They may consider email to be inherently less safe than their platform, so they don’t send any sensitive information there.

Canada’s government stuff also generally works that way, except without any links.

I’m not sure how legit their concerns are, but it’s a thing.