Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
doesn’t even matter. what matters is the meta data. if the data from the list say you like science videos with emphasis on electrical engineering, star wars podcasts and mmorpg let’s plays - does that data go away apon history deletion. what about meta-meta data. if the meta data puts you on group X that receive content Y, does that go away apon history deletion. and what kind of integration does that get with the rest of the google knowledge about you…
Some of Harvard University’s most prominent political alumni are criticizing the school for not condemning a student-led statement that blamed Israel for the surprise Hamas attack over the weekend....
Was thinking about how sometimes a therapist can give bad advice, and if you’re not thinking about the situation clearly, how would you know? Clearly the solution is to see a bunch of them concurrently, like a therapist RAID setup
That sounds like a useful bit of procedural knowledge, not advice.
I bet she presented is some way like “Well, if you’re interested there are some methods that are known to work …” and then waited for you to decide that it would be good to learn those.
At least that’s how my therapists have presented such things. I’ve learned methods from them, but I haven’t heard them say “I think you should do X”.
If a person comes and asks for advice, you say things like “I mean you gotta take care of X, so that means you’re gonna have to Y. If I were you I’d start with Z and then …”
That’s what I mean by advice. Making decisions for them. Educating on a procedure is just making sure information is available.
I replied elsewhere but YES! Telemetry is notorious for causing devs to hyperfocus on shit features due to their high usage. Just because a user is clicking X over Y doesn’t mean Y sucks and X is better. Maybe Y is in their periphery, or camouflaged by the background artwork or worded badly. But hey, since X gets a lot of clicks, it must be good, right?
There’s no big authority on how you’re supposed to feel, especially on Lemmy. But there ARE usually rules on what kind of comments you can make, regardless of which “side” of a conflict you’re speaking about.
As for public sentiment, it really comes down to if you’re speaking in good faith or not. These are complex issues with many aspects to talk about, and discussion can be very productive, if you’re speaking in good faith.
As for my personal opinion: You don’t need to pick a side. It’s possible to have a pragmatic view of the issue rather than picking one side or the other.
Edit:
On the last point, I’m seeing a lot of comments (especially on other platforms) along the lines of “I supported X until today, but the actions today make me support Y”. It’s weird that I’m seeing it so often, but it’s a weird statement to begin with.
‘It’s a cult’: Inside effective accelerationism, the pro-AI movement taking over Silicon Valley — They have “e/acc” on their X handles and sun god memes in their social feeds::“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, Y Combinator president Garry Tan and Notion co-founder Chris Prucha looked up at the cartoon of a shirtless...
It’s a common shortcut in at least some parts of the US to say “I paid for X and got Y for free” … everybody knows it really wasn’t “for free”. It’s just easier than “and got Y for no additional charge”, “and they didn’t charge me anything extra for Y”, etc.
“Variable” refers to the label, i.e. a box that can contain anything (like *ptr is a pointer to [something we dont know anything about])
Immutable describes the contents, i.e. the stuff in the box cant change. (like int* ptr describes that the pointer points to an int)
Rust makes it very obvious that there’s a difference between constants and immutable variables, mainly because constants must be compile time constants.
What do you call it when a variable cant change after its definition, but isnt guaranteed to be the same on each function call? (E.g. x is an array that’s passed in, and we’re just checking if element y exists)
It’s not a constant, the contents of that label are “changing”, but the label’s contents cant be modified inside the scope of that function. So it’s a variable, but immutable.
There are several ways of approaching that particular question. And none are simple, actually.
First, just to frame why 0/0 is so weird, consider 1/0. Asking “what’s 1/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by 0 equals 1?” There’s no answer because any number multiplied by zero is zero and no number multiplied by zero is one.
So now on to 0/0. “What’s 0/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by zero gives zero?” And the answer is “all of them.” 1 times 0 equals 0, so 1 is an answer. But also 2 times 0 is 0. And so is pi. And 8,675,309.
So, you could say that 0/0 doesn’t have a single answer, but rather an infinite number of answers. That’s one way to deal with 0/0.
Another way is with “limits”. They’re a concept usually first introduced in calculus. Speaking a bit vaguely (though it’s definitely worth learning about if you’re curious, and it seems you are), limits are about dealing with “holes” in equasions.
Consider the equasion y=x/x. With only one exception, x/x is always 1, right? (5/5=1, 1,000,000,000/1,000,000,000=1, 0.00001/0.00001=1, etc.) But of course 0/0 is a weird situation for the reasons above.
So limits were invented (by Isaac Newton and a guy named Leibniz) to ask the question “if we got x really close to zero but not exactly zero and kept getting closer and closer to zero, what number would we approach?” And the answer is 1. (The way we say that is “the limit as x approaches zero of x divided by x is one.”)
Sometimes there’s still weirdness, though. If we look at y=x/|x| (where “|x|” means “the absolute value of x” which basically means to remove any negative sign – so if x is -3, |x| is positive 3) when x is positive, x/|x| is positive 1. When x is negative, x/|x| is negative 1. When x is 0, x/|x| still simplifies to 0/0, so it’s still helpful to our original problem. But when we approach x=0 from the negative side, we get “the limit as x approaches 0 from the negative side of x/|x| is -1” and “the limit as x approaches 0 from the positive side is (positive) 1”. So what gives?
Well, the way mathematicians deal with that is just to acknowledge that math is complex and always keep in mind that limits can differ depending which direction you approach them from. They’ll generally consider for their particular application whether approaching from the left or right is more useful. (Or maybe it’s beneficial to keep track of how the equasion works out for both answers.)
I’m sure there are other ways of dealing with 0/0 that I’m not directly aware of and haven’t mentioned here.
So, to wrap up, there are some questions in mathematics (like “what’s 0/0?”) that don’t have a single simple answer. Mathematicians have come up with lots of clever ways to deal with a lot of these cases and which one helps you solve one particular problem may be different than which one helps you solve a different problem. And sometimes “there’s no right answer” is more helpful than using clever tricks. Sometimes the problem can also be restated or the solution worked out in a different way specifically to avoid running into a 0/0.
It’s definitely unfortunate that they don’t teach some of the weirdness of mathematics in school. But something I haven’t even mentioned yet is that all of what I’ve said above assumes a particular “formal system.” And the rules can be quite vastly different if you just tweak a rule here or there. There’s not technically a reason why you couldn’t work in a system which was just like Peano Arithmetic (conventional integer arithmetic) except that 0/0 was by definition (“axiomatically” – kindof “because I said so”) 1. (Or 42, or -10,000, or whatever.) That could have some weird implications for your formal system as a whole (and those implications might render that whole formal system in practice useless, maybe), or maybe not. Who knows! (Probably someone does, but I don’t.) (Edit: looks like howrar knows and it does indeed kindof fuck up the whole formal system. Good to know!)
One spot where mathematicians have just invented new axioms to deal with weirdness is for square roots of negative numbers. The square root of 1 is 1 (or -1), but there’s no number you can multiply by itself to get -1.
…right?
Well, mathematicians just invented something and called it “i” (which stands for “imagionary”) and said “this ‘i’ thing is a thing that exists in our formal system and it’s the answer to ‘what’s the square root of negative one’ just because we say so and let’s see if this lets us solve problems we couldn’t solve before.” And it totally did. The invention(/discovery?) of imagionary numbers was a huge step forwards in mathematics with applications in lots of practical fields. Physics comes to mind in particular.
Indeterminate forms come from limits. It’s not the question you asked, and I think this answer was a little off the mark because of it. For the sake of shared knowledge, I will explain anyways:
When looking at a limit, it’s important to note that you aren’t working with zero (or infinity, or any number you are studying the limit of), what you are working with are numbers approaching the limit. For example, for (x+1)/(x), the expression has no equivalent value at x=0, as 1/0 does not exist. We can see why if we use the limit as x approaches zero. The numerator will approach 1, and the denominator approaches 0. The numerator has little impact on the value of the expression, but the denominator… dominates the value, for the pun. And, while we can’t evaluate at 0, we can put really small numbers in there and see what happens- and what happens is the expression becomes incredibly large. I’m sure that if you don’t see where this is going, you can go to Desmos or some other graphing calculator and try it for yourself.
As far as the indeterminate form- 0/0 is always undefined, at least in most mathematics. However, if you were to look at equations :
y = x/x
y= x^2^/x
y= x/x^2^
you’ll see the curves behaving differently around x=0. The first makes 0/0 look like 1, the second makes 0/0 look like 0, and the last will make 0/0 look like infinity*. Once again, note, however: 0/0 does not exist, and there is discontinuity on all of these curves at x=0.
*Edit: or negative infinity, I forgot that this limit doesn’t exist. Even though the limit doesn’t exist, it is still a useful example.
California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday....
Just a crazy idea, but just throw a strawberry 🍓 on the package near the flavor name. Boom, solved!
I’m sorry, but “how do you convey a food is strawberry flavored?” is a terrible excuse. Pictures and words like we’ve done for all recorded history. The idea that X taste has to be Y color is an unnecessary human invention. You should be driven more by the content of your food, than how “pretty” it is. Dressing up junk to make it palatable shouldn’t be the end goal.
reading the bible is a horrible experience. there’s paragraphs where the same story is being told in two different ways, things are repeated all the time. there’s entire chapters that just go “x is the son of y is the son of z is the son of a who’s the son of b and the son of c”.
there’s entire chapters that just go “x is the son of y is the son of z is the son of a who’s the son of b and the son of c”.
I can’t speak to how relevant this is to history in most parts of the world, but interestingly in places like ancient Ireland, genealogy was an important part of identity. Among the questions a stranger would be asked would be who his father is, what his clan is and what his profession is. Obviously today we value different aspects of identity, but historically at least in some places (and at the point I’m mentioning in history, Ireland was Christian) bloodline was part of how people knew you; it’s a fascinating look into historical mindsets.
Large businesses in California will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Saturday — the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation....
The way companies do it is a lot of napkin math. I worked next to a team that built a service to help other companies figure this out (I provided the sample code and docs they share with customers for onboarding). You plug in some basic info, as an example this building used X kilowatt hours of electricity that the power company says is 10% coal and 90% hydro, which, based on a lookup table that means Y tons of CO2 emissions per hour, add X*Y to your total and move onto the next building. It’s not an exact science measuring actual emissions, more looking for ballpark numbers trying to get rough estimates based on what sustainability consortiums agree is the emission rates for certain things/activities/events. It doesn’t matter if your X is slightly more efficient than your neighbors X, because your maintenance guy is better, both will get the “X” rate for emissions based on the agreed upon value for the thing being measured. The idea is to capture as many things/activities/events as possible to get an estimate of emissions, not a measurement.
I don’t use vscode, I was just explaining that my requirements for using an open source product for my personal uses are independent of who wrote the code. I’m never going to say “I won’t use X source code just because Y wrote it”, that’s just silly. If I have the code, and it does what I would want it to do if I wrote it myself, and it doesn’t do anything I don’t want it to do, then I don’t care where it came from.
Here, fixed it for you so the analogies to the apple example are not completely wrong:
“Cars should have more seatbelts!” “Yet you buy from brand X who refuses to provide belts and lobbies against belts, you could buy Y instead!”
“We should improve our society. (Said by a rich provileged person)” “Yet you don’t push back against horrible practices, just talk a bit and otherwise enjoy your privilege.”
The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.
This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn’t trigger any of your protective responses.
And that’s why you should never view an advertisement.
If you can just get together and decide “OK, now rule X has been changed to rule Y”; how is anyone supposed to take any of it seriously? It is literally made up as it suits them.
Companies don’t purchase specific user data they purchase datasets.
Like reddit will says “we have x amount of user and here is what data we collect on them” you can access this data for $Y"
So and then those companies use that data to show you personalised ads or whatever and do a fuck ton, like and obscene amount of data analysis on it and your habits to see if it was worth the cost and will renovate with reddit the price to access their data.
So one individual user going weird won’t do anything. But if you made a ton of bots and made them act weird you might be able to make the dataset worth less. But honestly probably not that much as they have tools to filter bots and stuff.
Reminds me of those Sovereign citizen videos on Youtube. People are sitting in their cars feeling all high and mighty filming the cops saying they can’t arrest them for X or Y reason then the cops just bust their windows and pull them out whilst they’re still screaming their bullshit. I’m not the biggest fan of the police but I do find those videos satisfying.
Entangled electrons are entangled in all directions. If you measure one along any direction, you can completely predict the measurement of its pair in the same direction.
In other words, measuring one along X and its pair at Y is equivalent to measuring one along X and then measuring the same one again at Y (accounting for the sign shift in the pair, of course).
Hmm interesting. I may have been mistaken about the electrons only being entangled in a single direction. I thought that if you prepared a pair of electrons in state 1/sqrt(2) (|z+z-> + |z-z+>) and then measured it in y there would be no correlation, but based on: …stackexchange.com/…/intuition-for-results-of-a-m… …stackexchange.com/…/what-is-the-quantum-state-of…
if I had done the 90° rotation properly, the math works out such that the electrons would still be entangled in the new y+ basis! There is no way to only entangle them in z alone - if they are entangled in z they are also entangled in x and y. My math skills were 20 years rusty, sorry!
I still think my original proposition, that in the DCQEE under Copenhagen, an observation that collapses one photon, collapses the other photon to a sub-superposition, can be salvaged. In the second stackexchange link we are reminded that for a single electron, the superposition state 1/sqrt(2) (|y+> - |y->) is the same as |z+> state! They describe the same wavefunction psi, expressed in different basis: (y+,y-) vs. (z+,z-). When we take a single electron in superposition 1/sqrt(2) (|z+> + |z->) and measure it in z, and it collapses to, say, z+, we know that it is a pure state in z basis, but expressed in y basis it is now a superposition of 1/sqrt(2) (|y+> - |y->)! Indeed if we measure it now in y, we will get 50% y+ and 50% y-.
So in DCQEE when you collapse the first photon into a single position on the screen, the twin photon does collapse, but its basis is not expressed in terms of single positions! It’s some weird agglomeration of them. If you were to take that “pure” state and express it in terms of position basis, you would get a superposition of, say, 80% path A and 20% path B.
Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish (infosec.pub)
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
Lawrence Summers, Ted Cruz criticize Harvard for student statement blaming Israel (www.politico.com)
Some of Harvard University’s most prominent political alumni are criticizing the school for not condemning a student-led statement that blamed Israel for the surprise Hamas attack over the weekend....
Was thinking about how sometimes a therapist can give bad advice, and if you're not thinking about the situation clearly, how would you know? Clearly...
Was thinking about how sometimes a therapist can give bad advice, and if you’re not thinking about the situation clearly, how would you know? Clearly the solution is to see a bunch of them concurrently, like a therapist RAID setup
POV) You use Windows 11 and set up Pihole for the first time. (sh.itjust.works)
This is AFTER debloating all the MS bs as much as I can....
Microsoft published a guide on how to install Linux. (programming.dev)
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‘It’s a cult’: Inside effective accelerationism, the pro-AI movement taking over Silicon Valley — They have “e/acc” on their X handles and sun god memes in their social feeds (www.theinformation.com)
‘It’s a cult’: Inside effective accelerationism, the pro-AI movement taking over Silicon Valley — They have “e/acc” on their X handles and sun god memes in their social feeds::“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, Y Combinator president Garry Tan and Notion co-founder Chris Prucha looked up at the cartoon of a shirtless...
After decades of climate deception, Shell uses Fortnite to court demographic most concerned about climate change (www.mediamatters.org)
After decades of climate deception, Shell uses Fortnite to court demographic most concerned about climate change::undefined
The temptation is always there (lemmy.world)
Is zero divisible by zero?
Seems like it should and the result should be one. Does mathematics agree with me on that?
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Newsom signs bill to make California first state in nation to ban "toxic" food additives (www.latimes.com)
California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday....
What is a popular book that everyone buys but nobody reads?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs law requiring big businesses to disclose emissions (apnews.com)
Large businesses in California will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Saturday — the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation....
Most of us hate Microsoft, and yet many of us use VSCode
I get that it’s open source provided you use codium not code but I still find that interesting
YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it (mashable.com)
YouTube isn’t happy you’re using ad blockers — and it’s doing something about it::undefined
Massive Changes Could Be Coming From the Vatican. Conservative US Catholics Are Mad as Hell. (www.motherjones.com)
Is it possible to make my data worthless?
Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?
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Man says police officer had no right to pull him over because she’s on OnlyFans (www.independent.co.uk)
cross-posted from: feddit.uk/post/3045623...
Does physics ever get vague?
As in, are there some parts of physics that aren’t as clear-cut as they usually are? If so, what are they?