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bitcrafter

@lemmy.sdf.org

bitcrafter 62 points 3 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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bitcrafter 60 points 3 years ago

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.)

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bitcrafter 42 points 3 years ago

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.

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bitcrafter 37 points 3 years ago

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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bitcrafter 26 points 3 years ago

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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bitcrafter 21 points 3 years ago

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

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bitcrafter 18 points 3 years ago

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

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bitcrafter 17 points 3 years ago

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.)

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bitcrafter 15 points 3 years ago

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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bitcrafter 13 points 3 years ago

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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bitcrafter 12 points 3 years ago

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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bitcrafter 10 points 3 years ago

Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.

Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.

(In fact, in the later books a "corrupt" version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)

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bitcrafter 10 points 3 years ago

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.

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bitcrafter 9 points 3 years ago

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.

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bitcrafter 9 points 3 years ago

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

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bitcrafter 8 points 3 years ago

I actually liked the premise of the Ori because basically up to that point they were fighting people who claimed to be gods but were really just aliens with advanced technology, whereas with the Ori they were fighting beings that basically were gods so it was a whole lot harder to convince anyone to side with them. The biggest problem I had with it was that the show seemed to run out of money before they could properly tie everything up, a bit reminiscent of the final season of the Expanse (over which I am still very bitter, though at least it motivated me to read the books, which do satisfyingly tie everything up). In particular, in the episode ::: spoiler spoiler where they kill all of the Ori by sending the bomb thing through the portal ::: they have basically a huge dramatic victory that merited some kind of visually impressive spectacle and instead all that happened was basically that they just turned to each other and said, "Well, so I guess that means we succeeded. Yay."

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bitcrafter 6 points 3 years ago

Speaking personally, it's consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I've installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn't true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)

I also really like its "Refresh Install" feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I've used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.

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bitcrafter 6 points 3 years ago

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.

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bitcrafter 6 points 3 years ago

As I understand it, there are two kinds of costs that need to be considered: the cost of viewing content, and the cost of receiving content. The first is incurred every time you access your instance and is limited to your instance, whereas the latter is incurred every time something you've subscribed to has received an update, and is incurred not only by your instance but also by the server hosting the community. My concern is that, while hosting my own instance would reduce the load on other servers by absorbing the first kind of cost, it would also increase the load on other servers by increasing the second kind of cost.

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bitcrafter 6 points 3 years ago

I don't know, I thought it was kind of fun that they mixed things up for a change and had the protagonist be the villain and the central plot be about his triumph over the antagonists who are the heroes; the movie ending with him relaxing and enjoying the sunset now that his great work was over and so he could retire and put down his burdens was a really nice touch.

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