Basically I'm trying to de-clutter the cables to my charging station, and was hoping to use a 3-way cable for my phone, watch, and headphones.

My main concern is if one device is able to successfully negotiate QuickCharge or PD, would that send 9-20 volts to the other devices?

e.g. if I grabbed the wrong cord and hooked it into my laptop, the laptop requests 20v, would that PD negotiation succeed and also send 20v to my 5v devices on the other two leads?

I've only used these kinds of cables with USB-A and chargers that can only output 5V. Most of my chargers now are QC/PD so I'm curious if I should avoid those or take any particular precautions.

Github seems to be down.

Edit: After I made this, their status page finally updated to indicate an issue.

Update - We are experiencing interruptions in multiple public GitHub services. We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back.

Mozilla's interim CEO Laura Chambers "says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years," reports Fast Company, "hoping to reestablish the browser as independent alternative to the likes of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.

"But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that's been sticking with Firefox all these years..." Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years as it chased opportunities outside the browser, such as VPN service and email masking. When she replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO in February, the company scaled back those other efforts and made Firefox a priority again. "Yes, Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox," she says. "Obviously, it's our core product, so it's an important piece of the business for us, but we think it's also really an important part of the internet."

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers. In June, Mozilla added vertical tab support in Firefox's experimental branch, echoing a feature that Microsoft's Edge browser helped popularize three years ago. It's also working on tab grouping features and an easier way to switch between user profiles. Mozilla is even revisiting the concept of web apps, in which users can install websites as freestanding desktop applications. Mozilla abandoned work on Progressive Web Apps in Firefox a few years ago to the dismay of many power users, but now it's talking with community members about a potential path forward.

"We haven't always prioritized those features as highly as we should have," Chambers says. "That's been a real shift that's been very felt in the community, that the things they're asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life."

Firefox was criticized for testing a more private alternative to tracking cookies which could make summaries of aggregated data available to advertisers. (Though it was only tested on a few sites, "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" was enabled by default.) But EFF staff technologist Lena Cohen tells Fast Company that approach was "much more privacy-preserving" than Google's proposal for a "Privacy Sandbox." And according to the article, "Mozilla's system only measures the success rate of ads — it doesn't help companies target those ads in the first place — and it's less susceptible to abuse due to limits on how much data is stored and which parties are allowed to access it." In June, Mozilla also announced its acquisition of Anonym, a startup led by former Meta executives that has its own privacy-focused ad measurement system. While Mozilla has no plans to integrate Anonym's tech in Firefox, the move led to even more anxiety about the kind of company Mozilla was becoming. The tension around Firefox stems in part from Mozilla's precarious financial position, which is heavily dependent on royalty payments from Google. In 2022, nearly 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from Google, which paid $510 million to be Firefox's default search engine. Its attempts to diversify, through VPN service and other subscriptions, haven't gained much traction.

Chambers says that becoming less dependent on Google is "absolutely a priority," and acknowledges that building an ad-tech business is one way of doing that. Mozilla is hoping that emerging privacy regulations and wider adoption of anti-tracking tools in web browsers will increase demand for services like Anonym and for systems like Firefox's privacy-preserving ad measurements. Other revenue-generating ideas are forthcoming. Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a "design sprint" model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser's experimental branch.

Chambers "says to expect a bigger marketing push for Firefox in the United States soon, echoing a 'Challenge the default' ad campaign that was successful in Germany last summer. Mozilla's nonprofit ownership structure, and the idea that it's not beholden to corporate interests, figures heavily into those plans."

See the "New Features -> Link Previews" section below for descriptions of the screenshot.

• Full Changelog
• Docker Tags:
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.7
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.7
  • ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Changelog is pretty long this time, so use the link above for the full details. Only the highlights will be covered here.

New Features

Link Previews

Under Settings -> General is a new option called "Preview Links in Modal". This is enabled by default but can be disabled. It is also under the quick options.

Clicking markdown links (in post body, comments, sidebars, etc) will do a server-side metadata fetch and render a preview. "Internal" links that load in Tesseract will not preview and simply use the user's "open links in new tab" preference.

The preview includes:

• Link metadata if available (thumbnail image, embed video, description, title)
• Alternate source selector
• MBFC report (if available)
• If link is to a supported media type (YT, Invidious, Piped, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Odysee, PeerTube, etc), will show the media as an embed
• If metadata description contains links, they will preview in the same modal, and a "back" button will be enabled to return you to the previous preview.

e.g. If someone drops a bare Youtube link, it will render in the modal using your preferred YouTube frontend. Same for a Spotify, Bandcamp, etc link. The link is processed through the same rendering chain as posts, so any supported media should render as if it were posted to the feed.

It also has the alternate source selector and the MBFC plugin tied in, so a news article link in the comments can be vetted for credibility, previewed, and followed.

Post links are not tied into this since the post itself acts as the preview / renderer. This can be implemented, and easily, but it seems pointless to me. If I get feedback saying it should handle the main posts links through that, then I can enable it or at least make an option to.

Image Descriptions: The post image demonstrates the preview modal that's loaded when clicking the raw Youtube link in the comment shown above. The second image shows the preview for a news link posted in the comments of another post.

Badge-ified Community and User Links and Hashtags

Community and user links in post and comment bodies are now badge-ified and load the community or profile modals upon click (versus the old behavior of being a dumb link to the profile/community pages).

Currently, user links are blue, and community links are orange.

Hashtags are now converted into badges/flairs and are yellow.

Feature: Alternate Source Selector

Implementation Difficulty: Easy

Live Example: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/news@lemmy.world (The "link" icon to the left of the post's URL.)

Rationale: I'm quite annoyed with people whining "pAyWallED!" in news post comments, and this is Tesseract's way of addressing that (for users of that UI, anyway)

Description:

On posts with links (that aren't images, audio, video, Youtube, or other media), a dropdown menu is added with links to alternate sources.

Each one will search for the URL in the selected archive provider (currently Ghost Archive, Archive Today, 12ft.io) or Ground News (new in 1.4.5).

Lemmy-UI kind of does this, but completely ass-backwards (only during post creation to set the post link; I'll spare you my spiel about how that's a horrible vector for misinformation).

On Youtube-like posts (YT, Invidious, or Piped), the options are changed to go to the canonical YT link, your preferred Invidious instance, or your preferred Piped instance, but that's just a secondary (but still nice) feature of that component.

Would love to see something like this more widely adopted and am more than happy to answer any implementation questions.

Tax Act sends multiple promotional emails daily. Attempting to unsubscribe does nothing, and I've tried for months.

Finally, today, I opened the browser dev console and see that it's throwing JS errors when you attempt to save. I'm 100% sure this is a feature and not a bug. The only other way they will remove you is by writing a physical letter and mailing it out to them.

Moral of the story: Do not use TaxAct. Fuck Tax Act.

Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday that will allow businesses to use crypto currencies in international trade, as part of efforts to skirt Western sanctions imposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report:

The law is expected to go into force in September, and Russian central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, one of the backers of the new law, said the first transactions in cryptocurrencies will take place before the end of the year. Russia has faced significant delays in international payments with major trading partners such as China, India and the United Arab Emirates after banks in those countries, under pressure from Western regulators, became more cautious.

"We are taking a historic decision in the financial sphere," the head of the Duma lower house of parliament, Anatoly Aksakov, told lawmakers. Under the new law, the central bank will create a new "experimental" infrastructure for cryptocurrency payments. Details of the infrastructure have yet to be announced.

For the first time in 6 or 7 weeks, it was cool enough last night to open the windows instead of running the A/C. Before bed, I opened up all the windows downstairs and upstairs to make sure there was good circulation.

That part was successful; house was 72 degrees when I got up this morning and very comfortable. Maybe I'll even weep a little less when I open this month's power bill. Except, what's that horrible smell?

Nearly gagging, I think, "Aww, man. Did one of the dogs have an accident?" The smell is omnipresent throughout the house, but after checking everywhere, no obvious source could be found.

As I stepped outside with the dogs, the stink became much thicker, and I realized what I smelled inside was coming from outside. The whole neighborhood reeks of dead animal, and now so does my whole house.

Update: Just called animal control, and they're going to come out and try to find/remove it.

Somehow, this two and a half minute skit perfectly captures the essence of the entire series.

Shamelessly posted based on a comment in another post from @Heikki@lemm.ee

At EPFL, the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (EM+) specializes in this technology and has developed a program that turns the terabytes of data generated from the tokamak simulations and testing carried out by EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) into an immersive 3D visualization experience. For the general public, the visualization is a journey into a ring of fireworks illustrating a possible future source of energy; for scientists, it’s a valuable tool that renders the complex phenomena of quantum physics tangible and helps them grasp the results of their calculations.

The 3D visualization – a panorama measuring 4 meters high and 10 meters in diameter – is a faithful reproduction of the interior of EPFL’s variable-configuration tokamak (TCV), rendered in such stunning detail that it rivals even the best-quality gaming experience.

Note: The 3D visualization is a physical display at their facility. I spent far too long parsing multiple articles trying to find a link to an online visualization. The article is still good, and there are images of the visualization.

Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.

While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in "magic mushrooms," to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.

The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. "Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we've tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected," said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. "It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size." Brian Mathur, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, says these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but "it's possible psilocybin is directly causing" the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently.

The next step is to determine whether psilocybin's blood-flow changes in the brain or its direct effects on neurons, or both, are responsible for the brain-network disruptions. "The best part of this work is that it's going to provide a means forward for the field to develop further hypotheses that can and should be tested," Mathur says.