bitcrafter

@bitcrafter@lemmy.sdf.org
1 Post – 54 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.

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OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word "socialism" refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing "socialism", then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word "socialism" means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)

Huh, I have a Niro EV and it tries pretty hard to extrapolate the range based on the current conditions, so for example if it's colder outside than the range is less (because it needs to keep the batteries warm), and if you switch on air conditioning or the heater then it immediately lowers the range to account for the extra drain. Occasionally it gets the range prediction wrong, but it really does seem to try to do its best. I just assumed that all EVs work this way.

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The energy released was orders of magnitudes greater than that which would have been released by only fusing two atoms, so I strongly suspect that this is just poor wording and/or misunderstanding by the news agency and that what was really meant was that the lasers fused pairs of atoms.

Unlike Twitter, hashtags don't perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it's federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don't share your interests.

If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.

In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it's more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that's just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don't have a basis for comparison. :-)

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Teaching critical thinking has absolutely nothing to do with presupposing the existence of objective truth in political matters.

Given their choice of logo, I am advocating for everyone to start referring to it as Twitter/X11.

One of my current favorite alternative is, "X, the web app you access at twitter.com", though given the logo that they chose I'm tempted to start referring to them as X11.

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In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I've also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)

this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading

I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the "not stressed" end, so I've gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.

That isn't the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn't working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the "not stressed" end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren't saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.

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As much as I've been enjoying Lemmy and really like it as a platform, I don't think any of this this is fine because there are just too many niche communities that are either unwilling or unable to just pick up and move, which means that in practice to the extent that I only participate here and not on Reddit I am missing out on a lot of content that I used to look forward to.

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Is the main advantage of RISC-V's that it is a free and open standard, or does it have other inherent advantages over other RISC architectures as well?

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Ok where do I invest my money then?

Well-diversified mutual funds, or something equivalent to that, and in particular you want a mixture of asset classes such as stocks and bonds. You also want to have a hierarchy of investments, ranging from very low-risk but also low-growth investments for your emergency savings that you can tap at a moment's notice to high-risk but also high-growth investments for savings that you do not need to tap for a long time (such as for retirement, assuming that is far off). "High-risk" in this context doesn't mean "risk of your investment disappearing" so much as "risk of your investment suffering from a dip in value at the time when you need it".

But to reiterate: the most important thing here is diversification, because diversification means that some of your investments can drop in value by a lot or even become worthless without causing you to lose everything. Putting all of your money into a single asset or kind of asset, such as a cryptocurrency, is basically the opposite of what you want to be doing.

I was curious to hear what argument they were making but the article is behind a paywall. Could someone with access to it summarize for me?

I am curious because this seems a bit implausible to me given that the protocol selection process involves an open competition.

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I don't know, this story is very reminiscent of the kind of thing my elementary school age cousin writes, but with a greater mastery of vocabulary and grammar. It's not in any way great, bit it's charming in it's own way when held against that (low) standard.

No, Erlang has a completely different paradigm than Prolog, it just looks superficially similar because the people who created Erlang liked Prolog's syntax so that's what they used as the basis for Erlang instead of the more standard ALGOL-derived syntax that most of us are used to.

I get it, and that is a totally valid experience that you and probably many other people have had, but I personally never considered myself to be doomscrolling when seeing what was new with the Haskell programming language, going through what crazy experience people have had playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup lately, learning from the the really insightful in-depth explanations of history that were posted to AskHistorians, and so on. I do not consider the subtraction of these things from my life to have ultimately been a benefit, it just makes me feel less in the loop about the things that I care about.

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You make an excellent point, sir! It's not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid... umm... nevermind.

Reddit wasn’t always the shining beacon of communities you think it currently is.

You are putting words into my mouth that I did not speak nor do I think; I have only pointed out that there are communities on Reddit that do not have a strong presence here whose absence I miss.

People move and adapt.

While I hope you are correct in this case, this is not always true. Sometimes good things are simply lost.

Activity Pub is a clear improvement over Reddit, and separating from Spez’s incompetence is a bonus.

I agree, which is why I have shifted the vast majority of the time I spent on Reddit here instead.


Edit: Ah, lovely, a downvote without a reply. Glad to see that the Lemmy community is such a dramatic improvement over the Reddit community. :-)

The Year of the Lemmy Desktop

I don't know much about Void Linux. What is it's selling point that makes it unique?

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Rooibos is just an inferior version of honeybush.

Change my mind.

It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.

I mean, maybe you don't consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don't agree with this position, but I also don't think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.

The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.

But there are % signs after all the numbers...

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In fairness, I am also jealous of their Supercharger network, having had some bad experiences on the very few occasions when I've needed a DC fast charge and it seemed like nothing around was working. I hope that it gets upgraded to support CCS in at least some locations so I can start being able to use them.

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You are conflating capitalism with corporations; they are not at all the same thing. The former is an economic system, whereas the latter is the legal creation of a fictional "person" for the express purpose of shielding private individuals from legal consequences.

Mind you, that is not always a bad thing. If someone decides to start a new business using a portion of their savings, it is arguably good to allow them to do so in such a way that if the business fails (and my understanding is that something like 90% of them do, so this is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome) then they lose only their investment and not their entire life savings or worse end up deeply in personal debt because otherwise we as a society would lose out on a lot of beneficial enterprises due to them being too risky. The problem comes in when this legal fiction acts as such a strong shield that it enables and encourages people to act in extremely harmful ways with virtual impunity because only the fictional person that is the corporation gets punished rather than the individuals who made the harmful decisions.

Being absolutely terrified of the ambient noises in Doom.

Yeah, when I was a kid and Doom had first come out, I got scared to death when I walked around a corner and ran into my first pinky; it was horrifying!

Hence the "unless there's something seriously wrong with the previous research" part. That is always a possibility, of course, but it's much less likely that is the case then that this single study is the thing that is wrong.

It can be nice not to have to worry about types when you are doing exploratory programming. For example, I once started by writing a function that did a computation and then returned another function constructed from the result of that computation, and then realized that I'd actually like to attach some metadata to that function. In Python, that is super-easy: you just add a new attribute to the object and you're done. At some point I wanted to tag it with an attribute that was itself a function, and that was easy as well. Eventually I got to the point where I was tagging it with a zillion functions and realized that I was being silly and replaced it with a proper class with methods. If I'd known in advance that this is where I was going to end up then I would have started with the class, but it was only after messing around that I got a solid notion of what the shape of the thing I was constructing should be, and it helped that I was able to mess around with things in arbitrary ways until I figured out what I really wanted without the language getting in my way at intermediate points.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that this is the only or best way to program, just that there are situations where having this level of flexibility available in the language can be incredibly freeing.

And don't get me wrong, I also love types for two reasons. First, because they let you create a machine-checked specification of what your code is doing, and the more powerful the type system, the better you can do at capturing important invariants in the types. Second, because powerful type systems enable their own kind of exploratory programming where instead of experimenting with code until it does what you want you instead experiment with the types until they express how you want your program to behave, after which writing the implementation is often very straightforward because it is so heavily constrained by the types (and the compiler will tell you when you screwed up).

Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn't care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it'd be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.

Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.

There's essentially an open standard for streaming video so it's not like the old days where you needed to download a platform-specific component to watch streaming video. I use Linux as my primary environment and I can't even remember the last time I had trouble with it; certainly not for several years at least. I've used Netflix, DisneyPlus, Amazon, Paramount+, and probably others.

Just as a heads up, though, if you are using Firefox then the first time you go to any of these sites it will prompt you as to whether you are fine with enable support for DRM video, and you need to click "Yes". This is a one-time thing, though. (It does this because if you are an open source purist then you might not want to do this so it likes to get your permission first; most browsers just assume that you don't care and enable it by default.)

Because that way you can use it wherever something accepts WASM. In particular, as mentioned in the linked article, Javy started its life as a way for you to submit code to Shopify Functions in JavaScript, as Shopify Functions lets you submit code as WASM so that you can program in whatever language you prefer.

I can't speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a "Refresh Install" option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn't happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in "Refresh Install" mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn't have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.

I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it's basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.

Nice parks are one of the amenities that can be put in a "15 minute city"; the nicest city I've ever lived in, Brisbane (in Queensland, Australia), had beautiful large parks within easy access of the downtown areas.

By contrast, currently I live in a suburb, but it doesn't really give me a nature fix when I need it so I have to go to elsewhere anyway.

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If we talking about preserving birds I would still address the cat issue before the wind turbine issue.

I for one fully support never allowing cats outside unless they have a wind turbine attached to them.

Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda.

Huh.... do kings normally consist of commands that need to be run on a regular basis at scheduled times?

I'd be interested in hearing what it is about the language that has gotten you so excited about it.

It is hard to see how the explicit goal of not receiving updates too early is reconciled with the goal of not sacrificing security. Shouldn't there be no such thing as "too early" when it comes to security updates?