The goal posts for both sides are very, very different.
The invading Russian forces have basically failed their first goal; to fully take over Ukraine. They can now claim a minor victory by stealing more territory from Ukraine than just Crimea.
Ukraine’s goal was to stop Russia from wiping them off of the map. Things appear to have changed. Their new goal is to retake all land that Russia has stolen (including Crimea).
The war has largely been at a standstill for a while, and the only times that Ukraine has been able to make progress is when the word has given its attention and resources. Since “Israel vs Hamas” is the guerre-du-jour, Ukraine seems to be getting less of both.
So I may sound like a doomer, but it’s not looking good for the good guys. They have a much harder victory condition, and the resources that they have relied so far may be drying up.
I completely understand blocking or ignoring those who engage you in bad faith, but when someone disagrees with you and also engages in a discussion in good faith, you are merely silencing voices of dissent by blocking them.
How is that approach not creating an echo chamber? It seems hypocritical to label spaces that welcome good faith discourse “echo chambers” while creating your own.
Pretty funny how you can provide an explanation backed by references and then get mass downvotes because libs still have problems engaging with reality after a year and a half of being wrong about absolutely everything.
So you don’t consider charging at a countries capital and dropping airborne troops into a capital trying to take over a country? That’s a really weird take.
Considering Russia denied their intent to invade as they were conducting it, I don’t know that their statements should be considered truth regarding their plans and goals. But here’s Westpoint’s take on the matter:
Initially, the Russian regime may have regarded its invasion of Ukraine as a “regional conflict” with “important” military-political goals, and its classification as a “special military operation” may have been genuine. Indeed, it seems that the Kremlin’s ambitious political objective was to install a new, pro-Russian government in Kyiv by lightning action.
And you are making a statement that seems to suggest absolute knowledge of a country’s intentions are possible with a leader with a lack of credibility and long history of lying on the world stage.
Gee, this is fun. Or were you making some point? Were you expecting some report about their magic mind-reading device?
Were you expecting some report about their magic mind-reading device?
But this is what you have been doing all along. Nothing in reality suggests that total annexation of Ukraine was the goal. Not the words of anyone nor the manner in which Russia has executed the invasion yet here you are somehow reading minds to conjure grand motives and subjecting me to smug Reddittor-speak for the crime of asking you to back your frivolous claims. “Gee, this is fun.” Jesus Christ.
Nothing in reality suggests that total annexation of Ukraine was the goal
Wait, I’m confused, were you looking for “is” or “suggests?” Because I sent you an article all about “suggests.” And, follow-up question, did you think ‘You are unironically sharing a quote riddled with "may"s and "seem"s from United States Military Academy’ is not smug and was a genuinely civil question?
Since it seems you might not be great at this whole “communicating” thing, I’ll be explicit: Yes, those questions were rhetorical. No, you’ve given me nothing to suggest I should care what your response is.
Gee, this is fun. Reality is not wishy washy statements from literal America military institutions. It just exposes you as someone who gobbles American state department nonsense wholesale uncritically. If you watched your Rick and Morty properly you would have known that it is not a smart thing to do. Reality in this case refers to what’s happening on the ground in the war. Like Russia holding it’s annexed territories rather trying to expand indiscriminately.
No, you’ve given me nothing to suggest I should care what your response is.
What a stupid article. It’s like saying “stop using electric vehicles because you can’t use gas stations”. I don’t understand why he’s so adamant about this? It’s not like Wayland had about 20 years of extra time to develop like X11. People keep working on it, and it takes time to polish things.
The article is 3 years old and some things are only presently being fixed NOW and due to filter down to stable distros in 2024. Furthermore wayland proponents have been claiming its totally ready for prime time and not broken at all since 2015 while promoting AMD GPUs that at that point in time still sucked hairy balls.
What blows my mind is how benzos are listed as schedule iv: low risk of abuse or dependence. Except that many, many people abuse and get hooked on them, and along with alcohol, the withdrawal can directly kill you.
Withdrawal can be lethal sure, but you can just overdose on them, like alcohol. They have a very simily mechanism of action to alcohol. It’s also why they’re so dangerous combined. The scheduling system has little relationship to medical reality.
Meanwhile if you smoke too much weed you’ll have a panic attack, see God, fail asleep, and wake up with a terrible hangover. I’ve witnessed it a bunch (and experienced it myself) since the NY market is unregulated so dispensaries push 100mg+ edibles like it’s a normal amount. Hell, I’ve seen drinks with 1250mg/8oz. It’s wildly unpleasant, but way better than death.
Man, I fill with rage whenever I think about how much harm to the American public our “leadership” did with the War on Drugs just so they could have an excuse to be racist and classist
Totally. It’s not impossible to harm yourself with weed/THC, especially if it’s in combination with certain other drugs or medications or interacting with certain health conditions. And some of the doses you can get now in the dispensaries I’ve also noticed are pretty massive. The synthetic cannibinoids are potentially more dangerous, having even more blood vessel constrictive properties than typical cannabinoids (can increase stroke and heart attack risks). But weed doesn’t hold a candle to the dangers and damage of perfectly legal alcohol or tobacco. And there’s plenty of other still illegal without a prescription but more dangerous drugs that are lower on the schedule list than relatively safer ones like marijuana and psychedelics (pretty much all schedule I).
Don’t even get me started on psychedelics. Psylocibin is the only antidepressant that has ever worked for me. 1.5g of shroomies will improve my mood for 2-4 weeks. I’m convinced the only reason they’re still Schedule I is because they work too well.
Psychedelics should absolutely be decriminalized at the very minimum. Anybody that has ever actually taken psychedelics regardless of their stance before dose one can agree with this sentiment.
Honestly, I really think they should be legal for medical purposes and potentially even recreational purposes. Yes, people shouldn’t probably be getting fucked up on acid or mushrooms out in public, but people shouldn’t be on alcohol either. Difference is, I don’t see anyone on psychedelics going and committing crimes while they are high.
My only thing about psychoactive substances is that you should probably still get screened for recreational purposes as they can seriously exacerbate certain mental illnesses if you are not careful, however almost any substance can do this with different disorders.
“People shouldn’t be getting fucked up on acid or mushrooms out in public, but people shouldn’t be on alcohol either.”
I’m on team decriminalization…and I think it’s going to be extra hard in the US because of our car addiction. I have never driven on psychedelics, nor do I ever intend to, but I’m concerned that someone will make a bad judgment call and drive to the convenience store (because that’s the only reasonable way to get places in most of the US) and it could end in tragedy. I see this as an extra hurdle we have to tackle, but it doesn’t change my stance on decriminalization.
We don’t have a lot of police in my area for the amount of people, so I would not count on them to recognize many drunk/drugged drivers. Traffic is largely unpatrolled and I have only been pulled over for anything twice in ~20 years.
I would be fascinated to hear about what driving on psychedelics is like from anyone who is willing to fess up to having done it (or has a story about a “friend”). Sounds like a bad idea, but I’m not an authority on the topic.
It is possible to eat a lethal amount of THC oil but the process of eating it would be so uncomfortable that your stomach would have to be absolutely huge and still be stuffed to the brim.
I don’t see you seeing god on just THC though, that sounds more like psychedelics and a lot of it.
So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Nice – you wouldn’t happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I’m a bit stumped on this point and suspect it’s not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.
Yeah, that’s going to be too hard. I only have two SiPMs (besides the current detector) and they are expensive. I figured I could maybe rely on the gamma from the annihilation energy being a quite different energy than the gammas from the more common electron-capture.
However you raise a good point that that would not be a very good demonstration of positron annihilation at all – just evidence that it’s not the other 2 decay modes (and it would take ages to collect that evidence besides). Ah well. Got plenty of other science I can do instead.
Probably I’ll tackle something easier like checking for radon decay products in petrol.
I mean yeah, in principle I could cram textbooks for a few months (I know EE and SE pretty well, but particle physics only very basic stuff), order parts made at the factories I know, and would probably succeed eventually. More realistically I’d have to hire a university prof as a consultant to save time.
What I am really unable to construct is a powerpoint presentation that justifies that expense and labor to management :P
Especially in a cost-driven market (my company is in Vietnam). Often the parts for these things are export-controlled too, that can be a real pain. I’ve gotten irate phone calls from the US DoD before over fairly innocent parts orders – it’s not super fun. I recall it was some generic diode, I must have stumbled on something with a military application I wasn’t aware of. The compliance paperwork ended up costing me hundreds of dollars for 20$ in parts, too.
Anyway, if it was something I could just tack on to ongoing research projects, I could maybe get away with it as a marketing expense. It’s for a STEM program. It’s hard enough to convince management to take the risk on a nuclear & quantum module as-is! I can mostly get away with it because the locally-manufactured beta-detectors cost like 20$ per classroom.
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that’s another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
I can answer this: my son was born in 1990. We were extremely poor.
We had midwives help us out as best they could, to the tune of about $3200 at the time. The birth got complicated due to a variety of health factors, and both my son and wife almost died (not because of the midwives). Luckily the midwives had a direct line to Georgetown Hospital, and the cesarean was done there. The total hospital bill was $58,000, or $138k in today’s money, although hospital costs have rose much higher vs inflation, so maybe it would be in the $200k range now. She was in the ICU for a week, hospital for another week, our son for about 3 weeks.
My wife job didn’t have health insurance, because it wasn’t required back then. Because she was gone a week, her job fired her for an unexcused absence. Oddly enough, this made her unemployed and Washington DC had some law (or rule or something) that immediately dropped the hospital bills because of her unemployment. In the end, we had to pay $15k to about two dozen practices who individually sued us, which took 7 years to pay off and a lot of court visits and wage garnishments. It financially ruined us, pretty much. Both suffered a lot afterwards because we just couldn’t afford minimal care. It was hellish. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be today. We got evicted from our apartment, and lived in government housing for six years.
So, yeah. Don’t have a baby in America unless you can guarantee it will be healthy and you have a lot of money. Most of my friends don’t have kids, they simply can’t afford it and look at it like the previous generation looked at concepts like summer homes and yachts. Nice luxuries, but way out of affordabilty.
It doesn’t help that many of the governing bodies are deliberately sabotaging it as much as possible in order to push voters into that direction. Doug Ford is one of the most notorious in this respect, but there are plenty of others too
1990 was around the time of Hillary-care and Romney-care, so the politicians knew that they were going to have to fix it sooner or later by that point.
for more on this subject, and in the spirit of looking on the bright side of s bad situation, see /c/childfree and childfree.cc. Includes talk, and memes, about some of the benefits, of not having children, including but not limited to finances. (also advice and directories about related options for medical things, where thise are wanted or needed).
That’s the ridiculous thing. Americans would rather pay a few dollars less in taxes than let people have free healthcare. And it ends up costing them far more than they would have paid in taxes.
I’m Canadian and I gladly pay more taxes than you so that I and my friends get free healthcare when we need it.
Here’s the thing. I worked in America for the better part of a decade and I had to submit two tax forms, one to each country. You end up paying the greater of the two and using it to offset the other.
What I know is this: every year, every year, I paid an extra 1% to America. No matter how my (binational) tax guys worked it, my obligation to America was always higher.
The year after I came home I still had to submit taxes (January layoff scares so I moved back) and it was still higher for America despite sitting in a different country (it’s a factor) and using different services. It didn’t matter.
In Canada I pay 1% lower income tax and enjoy healthcare access. While they’ve done away with the regional premiums, I was even okay paying that; as my yearly outlay, proudly at the top bracket, was still less than copays while in America. I would gladly pay the same premium to ensure equal access to dental and optical care for me and especially people who can’t drop (now) c$1000 on some specs or way more on a dental crown.
It’s not that I’m a good guy, but I pay taxes for schools because I don’t want to live around dumb people. I do and will pay taxes so we can take people who aren’t healthy and skilled and contributing income tax and make them so they are. Poverty should be no excuse for not being employable.
Why didn’t you have taxpayer paid (State) insurance if you were extremely poor and expecting? Is it because of the lost job and timing? If you are poor and have a family then you can spend a day at the welfare office and get public insurance.
Because we made too much (over minimum wage, dual income household). I was making $13k as a sales manager, my wife was making $8k as an assistant manager, and minimum wage was $3.35/hr or just under $7k/year back then. After taxes, we made about $1200/mo, and our rent was $650 for a single bedroom apartment. No car, we took the bus, barely had enough for food and utilities.
But we were considered way too over the “poverty line,” which was I think less than $6k/year then. We had been using birth control but when they say some form of birth control is 99% effective, the DO mean 1% failed. I have no regrets our son was born, because it turned out we couldn’t have kids later when we tried. And then later my wife died when he was 22, so if we had kids later, I would have been a widow with younger kids.
I feel awful he grew up poor with us until he was about 10, though.
Oof, yeah that’s rough. The poverty line is really low. I can relate about wishing you weren’t poor when your kid was a kid, we had the same experience. We would have been able to give him a lot more had he been born a decade later, but he still had a loving home, which is more than a lot of kids get.
I’m really sorry to hear about your wife. I can’t even imagine.
Browsers are highly complex pieces of software. I had the opportunity to talk about browser engines with a hardware engineer for the chrome browser at GDC a year ago. Browser engines have to have more security than your operating system, while also interpreting DNS calls, rendering html/css, and interpreting JavaScript.
A basic html renderer would be small, like maybe a couple megabytes. But it would have absolutely no security. On the Internet.
I am aware of the complexity of a modern browser. Still, 80+ megabytes for a simple browser like Focus seems excessive. Especially when the Bromite-based /e/OS browser can provide more functionality for an eighth of the size
When it comes to software, complexity usually means one of 2 things: time complexity or space complexity. They have an inverse relationship, so if you want something fast you need more memory, and vice versa. In regards to browsers, that means either waiting forever to execute each op or using large amounts of storage/memory.
Caching is separate. Honestly, I don’t know how to explain it to you without giving you a college level explanation of time complexity.
Think about the most basic way to sort a list of arbitrary size; comparing the first item to the second item, swapping if the second item is smaller, and then repeating until no more swaps occur. This has a time complexity of O(n^2), so on a list of n size, it would be extremely cheap on memory (O(1)) but will take a very long time if n is large.
There’s another sorting algorithm called quicksort that is much faster (how it works isn’t very important atm), with a time complexity of O(nlog n). This is far faster than the other method of sorting, but it comes at the cost of needing a lot more memory to execute the algorithm, O(log n) of space.
If you scale this simple process to a multithreaded piece of software executing thousands of algorithms per second, like a browser, the size of n scales to the rest of the app. Browsers are generally written in C++, which requires memory to be preallocated. The size of the app includes this memory requirement, as well as the executable.
I understand, my confusion was caused by the misleading app size shown in App Info. It’s actually like 70MB so my question is dumb. I’m sorry for wasting your time
it’s not dumb, and you didn’t waste my time! I love teaching computer science to people. Honestly, this was kinda fun. I haven’t consciously thought about these concepts in about 6 years, so it was a good refresher for me too lol
One time I had a database migration running on a database of about 50gb. After eight hours it was still going.
My client had the suggestion to try bumping up the memory on the server. So (in digital ocean) I scaled a server from 8gb memory to 64gb, and ran the same migration. It took about twenty seconds. Then just scaled the server back down.
It’s kinda amazing just how significant efficiency differences can be between strategies. In most realms a 10% improvement is huge. In software a 1000000000% improvement can result from choosing a new strategy.
Don’t forget developmental complexity. The real limited resource is developer brain power which is the primary (and legit) reason for most failures to optimize algorithms.
Sometimes the most optimized solution requires a developer with enormous working memory, who can write code nobody else on the team can follow.
I worked on an app as a subcontractor once and this guy had functions generating functions to generate functions. It worked, and it was parsimonious in a way. Like he was optimizing for the bundle size and it was pretty impressive, but I simply couldn’t get anything done because the way it was structured required me to hold like 12 chunks of info in my 7-chunk working memory.
I eventually got some progress but only after I had transferred a significant amount of the code into my long-term memory. (As an autistic my working memory was shit growing up so I learned to use my long term procedural memory as a stand-in for short term memory. Problem is it’s a brittle strategy, doesn’t respond to changes well, and is highly sensitive to what kinds of patterns are used).
Kinda. The other person was right about JS basically getting compiled. Webassembly is like an intermediary language that executes at a similar speed to flash, because it’s more directly translatable to the runtime. Webassembly isn’t supposed to fill the gaps left by flash, but I think it’s a great option to get similar web apps
My dad’s Toyota Avalon has a touch screen for the infotainment center, and the climate controls are a touch-sensitive panel rather than mechanical switches. Which means if you go to wipe dust off the dashboard, you fuck up the air conditioner settings. I don’t know what’s worse, all the touch controls, or all the chrome on the dashboard scientifically aligned to glint sunlight into your eyes.
scientifically aligned to glint sunlight into your eyes.
Speaking of, the trend of absolutely blinding headlights should be outlawed. It’s especially bad for those of us who drive tiny sedans and live in the US, where seemingly every other car on the road is a lifted F350 with the headlights pointed straight at eye/side mirror/rearview mirror level. There have been more than a few times where a car coming towards me or sitting on the other side of an intersection at a red light has blinded me to the point where I literally can’t see anything else. Recently at a stop sign, I couldn’t tell if the truck across from me was about to go or not, and I was needing to turn left. They are SO fucking dangerous. And yet, cops will pu people over for having shit hanging from the rearview mirror, or for a big enough crack in a windshield?? We have our priorities so fucked up.
Also that type of reflective tint on back windows that makes the sun go straight into your eyes when driving behind someone who has it. Wtf is that and why. I had no idea that regular window tint needed to be “improved” / re-engineered.
Also on stoves. “Oh, you wanna turn off a burner? Sorry, your fingers are too wet. Also, I hope you remembered to read the 300 page manual because we’ve never even heard of intuitive controls”
The controls on my stove are those weird flat buttons you’d see on a lot of late 90’s appliances? Like they don’t “press” at all but they do respond to pressure so I could preheat my oven with the end of a spoon or something. Those are superior to capacitive touch controls.
I think most people (including myself) prefer a minimal desktop by default, and then proceed to install only the software they need. Nevertheless, it always surprises me when I log in to a system that doesn’t have vim.
For almost all users, especially beginners, nano is just simpler faster and better. A lot of distributions are bundling it, and I am finding indeed systems without vim at all.
Ok i think i overeacted. I couldn’t figure out how to exit it, so i assumed it was like vim. Needed to exit Termux manually (which i hate) but the ctrl+s & q is easy. Will consider it another option to remember like moving from cat to bat
I’m surprised there aren’t more distros that come packaged with it. If someone’s used a graphical text editor in the past decade, then they know how to use micro. The only distro I know of that has it by default is Garuda.
You’ve never used a minimal Linux distro for cloud servers then. Some don’t ship any text editors. Others ship only nano. Part of the reason why I think learn vim because vi(m) is everywhere argument is retarded. It’s factually incorrect.
I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, vim is amazing and all that, but I think nano is easier for new users to grok out of the box, making it a better choice most of the time. What it lacks in features it makes up for in transparency.
100% agree about the minimal set of desktop apps, though. That drives me crazy.
It’s pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.
Now, if we’re talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity…that’s pretty much impossible.
Don’t just count the actual journey time either - you have to factor in any extra time needed to get ready, parking, getting to or from the train and bus station, and any delays or traffic. If google maps tells you your commute takes 30 mins, it’s taking you 45 at least.
I’m pretty good on commute time. It was a 5-10 minute drive or a 25-30 minute walk. I’ve stuck there for years because working for any of their competitors are in the area and I’d have to go straight to an hour each way minimum.
I wouldn’t mind going back in part time, if the hybrid office environment itself wasn’t so hostile to actually working, with sterile hot desks and everyone having loud overlapping conversations in their respective virtual meetings.
With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).
Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)
As someone who regularly games on a Deck and occasionally uses Nobara on a desktop, it definitely shows, yeah. Incredible how far we’ve come in that regard.
I do still stick with Windows on desktop 90% of the time because unfortunately it seems some of the more advanced NVIDIA features I use very often like DLDSR are unlikely to ever make their way to the Linux drivers, but that’s a petty me problem.
I definitely agree that for the vast majority of users it’s a pretty good experience nowadays unless one can’t make do without the handful of games with unsupported anticheat and such.
Do most newer fighting games work on Linux? I usually play multiplayer games and the anti cheats usually don’t work on Linux, but I’m not sure how modern fighting games are set up.
I play Strive, SF6 and BBCF fine on my desktop linux PC. Had some technical problems with sf6 when I had a Nvidia gpu, but it wasn’t related to anti cheat. Works great with AMD.
My father, who taught computer science for the US Army, later became a government contractor, and for whom Unix systems were bread and butter, is now retired and farts around on a Mac reading political blogspam all day.
My mother, having never had any interest or real education in computing in her entire life, now uses Linux Mint to take care of important shit and keep the family organized.
I’m not sure of the answer, but generally not everything has to have an evolutionary benefit. As long as it isn’t detrimental to a species reproducing, it will continue to exist in the population.
Also what's the definition of "passing?" The dinos we are talking about are extinct, they didn't "pass" for long. A+ creatures things like alligators, ants, and crabs. On average a given species survives around a million years before going extinct. How long do you have to exist before you're considered a successful species?
I don’t think science really categorizes species based on how successful they were. “Passing” in this sense refers to the individuals in the species who were able to reproduce, not the population as a whole. Most dinosaurs “passed” until ecological conditions killed them off, they didn’t die because they failed to adapt. A lot of the species that survived mass extinction events were just lucky, rather than having some ideal set of characteristics that allowed them to survive.
I agree that most species surviving mass extinction events were just lucky, but I think that also says something special about the ones that survived MULTIPLE events (ants), or those that effectively re evolved into existence after extinction events (crabs)
I think that's been narrowed down to about 2 million years. But that got cut short by a mass extinction event, so it's hard to say how long they would have lasted otherwise.
100+ million years qualifies as right in the middle of “for long” in my book. The fact that an asteroid or comet of biblical proportions wiped them out has nothing to do with evolutionary effectiveness. Most of the animals that did survive either A) lived in water or B) lived underground.
Inner doors should swing inward because in case of a fire or other emergency, you don't want to be trapped inside by something blocking the door that you cannot deal with. Even in something were preventing it from swinging open (like a rope or whatever), in theory the person could still get out because the door hinge would be located on their side and they could simply remove it.
Also because the hinge would have to be on the outside if swinging outward and thus not be securable. As the hung pins could be removed and door opened while locked.
In large building some code requires exterior doors to swing out as pressure build on a fire could jam the door closed. Also some exits require push bar which is swing out.
The in swing though makes sense for more smaller buildings and internal doors. Not wacking people and not getting blocked in seems the better method.
A lot of people (like myself) need to step out of their comfort zones if we want Lemmy to get more conversations going. Yesterday I made a game thread in the community for my favourite NFL team; I was the only one who commented. But I’m going to try and make one for the game next week.
Thanks for the advice, there’s definitely a lot more people on the NFL community but the Steelers are generally not viewed well by the NFL fans at large haha.
Not only are they small, they keep appearing in feeds and people downvote them because they don’t want to see sporting content instead of just blocking the community.
kbin.life
Top