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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
    People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
    This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.

    America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
    As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
    Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.


  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.



  • Technically correct. The best kind of correct. :)

    I basically solved for shotgun, confirmed in was in the ~100V range and disregarded every other consideration for actually doing it.
    I’m pretty sure most hand sized capacitors would just pop if you actually tried to put that much in them.


  • Depends on the voltage it’s charged with, but household current would give it more energy than a shotgun has.

    Realistically one would not do that unless you were dealing with something industrial. You would use them otherwise for things like dampening lower voltage systems that need a lot of current.

    Closer to the danger level of someone holding two exposed wires plugged into the wall.



  • Some of your emphasis is a little backwards. In the cloud computing environment, Amazon is bigger than Microsoft, and windows isn’t even particularly significant. Azure primarily provides Linux infrastructure instead of Windows. AWS is bigger in the government cloud sector than Microsoft.

    For servers, Linux is hands down the os of choice. It’s just not even close. Where Microsoft has an edge is in business software, like Excel, word, desktop OS and exchange. Needing windows server administrators for stuff like that is a pain when you already have Linux people for the rest of your stuff which is why it gets outsourced so often. It’s not central to the business so no sense in investing in people for it.

    Microsoft isn’t dominating the commercial computing sector, they’re dominating the office it sector, which is a cost center for businesses. They’re trailing badly in the revenue generation service sphere. That’s why they’ve been shifting towards offering their own hosting for their services, so you can reduce costs but keep paying them. Increased interoperability between windows and Linux from a developer standpoint to drive people towards buying their Linux hosting from them, because you can use vscode to push your software to GitHub and automatically deploy to azure when build and test passes.
    Being on the cost side of the ledger is a risk for them, so they’re trying to move to the revenue side, where windows just doesn’t have the grip.



  • While money is used to by goods and services, it isn’t those goods and services. It’s essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

    People don’t go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they’ll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it’s cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

    The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
    In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there’s intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
    This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There’s also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren’t relevant to this.

    To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

    All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it’s given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
    This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
    There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

    Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn’t cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

    That being said, while they can’t solve it they’re certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we’d be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
    One person doesn’t have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn’t exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.



  • Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

    There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
    An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
    So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

    I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.


  • For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

    It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

    Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
    You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
    This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
    Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.





  • Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.

    The read this doesn’t work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won’t have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that’s the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
    So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you’ll be.
    Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it’s important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like “no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping”, “teenagers old enough to have a job aren’t allowed to work late on school nights”, and what specifically constitutes “after hours or weekend labor” for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your “weekend” would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.

    Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.

    Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.

    We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It’s just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that’s interpreted many different ways.


  • exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1

    I specified countable to keep them in the same class of infinity. :) not about to make that mistake when bringing pedantry to a silly fight. .

    Since it’s implied that they have names, I’m going to use that as my argument for there being a countably infinite number. If you want to argue that only certain special angels have names, like Michael or π, then I’d say they’re uncountable.
    If you wanted to argue that omnipotence means a deity could defy logical restrictions and allow contradictory truths to coexist, then I’d say I’m far too sleepy for that discussion but I love where you’re heads at. :P



  • I’ve been told it ranges from “it’s a quick pinch”, through “that’s just the way it is” to “we could give a numbing shot, but it would be just as uncomfortable and make this take longer so there’s no point”.

    As a man looking in from the outside, women’s reproductive healthcare has a level of dismissiveness around pain that makes the dumbest machismo look quaint. There’s the male doctors who just dismiss women’s pain, and the female doctors who know and just “that’s how it is” it. And then the one 50 year old obstetrics doctor in the country who understands the balance of “childbirth intrinsically hurts” and “we can manage the hell out of pain if we actually do our jobs” who gets to enter a room for 30 seconds, implicitly convey that they’re a saint and perfect human being and then immediately get paged to perform emergency surgery for a car accident involving multiple pregnant women, at least in our experience.

    That last bit is the only exaggeration. I’m sure there’s actually two or three doctors like her per state. The rest is true.

    Dismissiveness towards women’s pain is upsettingly common in healthcare. From plain old sexism (a woman’s 7/10 is a mans 4/10 because women are sensitive) to women’s symptoms manifesting differently than men’s (women’s heart attacks don’t present the same as men’s, and differences in abdominal anatomy means there’s more ways for pain to mask itself as coming from somewhere else.), the end result is that I can’t think of a women I know and have talked to about it who hasn’t laughingly referenced a doctor dismissing their pain and ordering a pregnancy test.


  • Okay. You’re still doing tech support either way. I have no way of knowing how much free tech support you’re willing to give, hence my caveat of how much you’re willing to support them.

    Netflix would disagree. People feel like they’re supposed to be getting access to a service, and if they’re not getting it they’ll complain to the nearest party to what isn’t working. In this case that’s you or Netflix being asked questions about why the router isn’t working.
    That it’s wrong or irrational has nothing to do with who’s getting asked the question, and who’s the first line of troubleshooting when the service doesn’t work.

    If people didn’t ask the wrong people questions, Netflix wouldn’t need support articles on how to reset your router.