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Jayjader

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Jayjader ,

In case the “dim” comment isn’t a joke, as I recall it’s short for “dimension”, as in you are specifying each variable’s dimension in the computer’s memory. Source: some “intro to programming with vb6” book I read like 15 years ago at this point.

Microsoft in damage-control mode, says it will prioritize security over AI (arstechnica.com)

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”...

Jayjader ,

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture

Oh yes, the thing they’re well known for succeeding at.

Jayjader ,

This cannot be tolerated, even under Eisenhower.

I suddenly want to insert this into my everyday life

Jayjader ,

My cynical take: he wants to let the far right win the legislative elections while he still has close to 3 years left in his term.

He thinks this will “show” their electorate that voting far right doesn’t get you what you want.

At the same time, he can take advantage of the media bashing the leftist party has been getting for their vocal opposition to Israel’s actions since October 7 2023, and run them out of Parliament. At least, it’s a gamble he’s willing to make.

He is just as much of a clueless, egotistical liberal as David Cameron was, so your analogy is sadly pretty accurate.

Jayjader ,

He called during his televised speech to get rid of the “ruckus causers”, separately from the far right.

The current largest leftist party had (until last night) close to a third of Parliament, and have a reputation of loudly contesting shit they don’t stand for.

I really don’t think Macron’s intention is to give them a chance at more votes. If anything, he’s hoping this forces leftist voters to move towards the center, seeing as how his own party barely cleared 14% (the largest far right party did over 30, and a smaller splinter party got around 7% on its own).

Jayjader ,

The comment in the 2nd screenshot, talking about the “new electric transfer station in Freetown Ma” along with the accompanying image looks it comes straight from a SCP appendix.

Jayjader ,

According to Our World In Data (which claims to use the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy from 2023 as a data source), that waste is from producing around 70 TWh each year:

https://jlai.lu/pictrs/image/47ed787d-e40e-4170-9b5b-aee119bff43d.png

That only covers around a third of Switzerland’s energy consumption over those years. Furthermore, Switzerland is a small mountainous country with decent access to hydropower (making up around a third of its needs over the same years). They are not necessarily representative of the waste that would accumulate from a more agressive switch from fossil fuels to nuclear across the world (which is what we’re talking about, if I’m not mistaken).

France is about 10 times larger in surface area and according to the same source, consumed/produced over 1,000 TWh of nuclear energy each year:

https://jlai.lu/pictrs/image/98835a1e-ee57-4e72-9673-3abbc8520ac3.png

And officially has still has no place to put the high-energy waste (source - in french), leaving it up to the plant’s owners to deal with it. There is an official project to come up with a “deep” geological storage facility, but no political will seems musterable to make that plan materialize beyond endless promises.

I should mention that I’m not super anti-nuclear, and I would certainly rather we focus on eliminating coal and oil power plants (and ideally natural gas ones as well) before we start dismantling existing nuclear reactors that are still in functioning order.

That being said, there are other problems with nuclear moving forwards besides waste management. The main one that worries me is the use of water for the cooling circuits, pumped from rivers or the sea. Not only do open cooling circuits have adverse affects on their surrounding ecosystems, as the planet gets warmer and the temperature swings during the hotter seasons become more pronounced, the power plants will become less efficient. The water going in will be at a higher temperature than it is today, and thus will absorb less energy from the nuclear reaction itself.

Overall, I don’t trust our current collective responsibility as a species to manage our current forms of nuclear production. Russia sent its own troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to dig trenches in contaminated soil last year, and they allegedly recognized last week that the Zaporizhzhia power plant is now “unsafe to restart” because of the military activity in the region.

The world has not experienced generalized warfare with nuclear power plants dotting the countryside; WW2 ended around a decade before the first nuclear power plants were up and running in the USSR, the UK, and the USA.

Not to mention how few European countries have access to uranium on their own soil/territory. Of course, most of the rare earth metals used in photoelectric panels and windmills aren’t found there either, but as least with “renewables” they are used once to make the machinery, not as literal fuel that is indefinitely consumed to produce power.

I don’t know enough about thorium-based reactors nor molten salt-based reactors to go to bat for them instead, but they seem like a more promising way for nuclear to remain relevant.

A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts....

Jayjader ,

Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.

You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.

Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even “official” ones.

“Basic stuff” is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don’t have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.

Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.

Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.

Jayjader ,

I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.

Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the correction.

Jayjader ,

The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.

The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.

The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody. a screenshot of the first page of stats for lemmy on fedidb.org. The collective stats across all servers is 391,326 total users and 45,189 monthly users. The individual servers shown are (in order): lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, hexbear.net, lemmy.dbzer0.com, feddit.de, lemmygrad.ml, programming.dev, lemmyblahaj.zone, and lemmy.ca. The user and “status” counts approximately follow a pareto distribution. lemmy.world has almost half of the total user count and monthly active user count on its own. The notable outlier is hexbear.net, which has 10% more statuses than lemmy.world made by 10% as many montly active users.

Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.

Jayjader ,

I didn’t necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.

You’re correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.

I don’t think raw upvotes give the full story either. I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.

Jayjader ,

OP, the link is to lemmygrad.ml but you keep citing lemmy.ml in this thread; are you mixing up the 2 without realizing it or do you intend to mean both?

I haven’t seen much of anything on lemmy.ml that reaches grad.ml’s level of what you describe. Then again, I stick mostly to somewhat-niche interest subreddits that receive a decent amount of participation from other federated servers.

In my experience even hexbear users are surprisingly (for the internet) good and decent to others, as long as you can avoid provoking their “the capitalist US empire is the current hegemony that’s killing the planet and ourselves, and we don’t punch down, therefore our vitriol is a uni-directional torrent” mode of operation that others in this thread have mentioned.

Obviously, the classical “cult” approach resembles that as well (love-bomb anyone not explicitly an enemy, close ranks against any potential discrediting of the movement). In my books most of them are ordinary people, from whom (legitimate) despair of the current state of the world has leeched all desire for compromise.

I don’t have a less patronizing way of saying it, but they remind me of someone who, after years of abuse by their partner, finally snaps and gravely injures said partner. In some sense, it’s on the rest of us to not have intervened beforehand, and at the same time their lashing out really doesn’t help things.

Oh, and this probably reads as hippy anar-kiddy logic to them, which is part of why I personally stay away from most of their politics-related communities.

Jayjader ,

either a block or some kind of federation issue, IDK

I think your home instance, sh.itjust.works (whoops, that’s this community’s instance, not your home) (mbin.)grits.dev, defederated from both of them.

My own, jlai.lu, hasn’t, so I see some of their posts crop up in my “All” timeline.

I have interacted with lemmy.ml people a decent amount, so most of what I’m saying in the comments is referencing them

Huh, that’s not what I was expecting. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Usually my experience is that if you have to edit your viewpoints to conform to what someone wants to hear, or else they will attack you, that person’s worth avoiding interacting with.

Not trying to be unkind about it (esp since specifically where hexbear is concerned I have basically no firsthand experience at all interacting with them) but that’s my feeling.

This might be a question of personal tolerance to types of interaction (similarly, not trying to be unkind). I see it as selectively choosing when to engage (and on what to engage with), but I can totally understand if to you that is me editing my viewpoints to conform to what they want to hear. For the record, I don’t often engage at all with grad and hexbear, not even up- or down-votes; I’ll read what they have to say if the post title I come across sufficiently grabs my attention. There are a number of lemmy.ml communities that I do directly interact with regularly, mostly tech-related.

Given how sometimes aggressively apolitical most of the fediverse tech spaces are, there is a part of the discussion that I value around current events that I have had a hard time finding outside of lemmy.ml. The best I’ve found are awful.systems and slrpnk.net (notably the permacomputing community at the latter). The scope of the first is intentionally limited to cathartic deconstruction of bad things, and the second I find lacking too much substance to suffice. There’s raddle.me, but as they’re not federated with the wider 'verse it doesn’t really fit the bill either.

I don’t have the energy or know-how to be the change I wish to see, but if there was an instance outside of these three (.ml,grad,hexbear) that provided a place for the construction of good things (admittedly, following my personal definition of good) in place of the bad, I could see myself blocking them after one too many full-on tankie posts cropping up in my feed.

Actually, now that I think about it, mostly what I get from the hexbear and grad posts are a less-substantive form of the catharsis that awful.systems provides but on a broader range of topics. It is, sadly a coin toss on whether that catharsis will be ruined by everything you so rightly are put off by.

I had this really disorienting experience […], and everything I found from that point on was hostile counterfactual condescending insanity.

My experience lines up with yours, except for me not even attempting to prod at all.

The part that I don’t get about that is the support for some of the actors that are primary engines of death and destruction in the current state of the world.

That’s not lack of compromise, that’s just being wrong and proud of it.

I think there’s being wrong and proud of it, and there’s being so scared and whip-lashed by the obvious contradictions of the West’s purported values and it’s geopolitical impact on the rest of the world over the past few centuries that you lose any sense of truth. That’s maybe me being a bit melodramatic. On the other hand, I see it as akin to how a person’s drowning “reflex” is to pull whoever comes close down with them - to the point that lifeguards need specific training (and a flotation device if I’m not mistaken) to be able to save a drowning person without endangering themselves as well.

They read more to me though like a person fleeing abuse from one partner, and then self-destructively choosing a partner that’s 10 times worse (or maybe more accurately starting a pen-pal relationship with a convict who if they got out and interacted with them would literally do 10 times worse or kill them.)

That’s probably closer to the mark. It doesn’t help that the former partner has friends all over the world that are very dismissive of any allegations. When I talk about the onus on us to intervene, I mean it more in the sense that we should be finding people that we can train and employ to be internet lifeguards.

On one hand, I don’t think they deserve to be written off as heavily as what I often see expressed in the rest of the fediverse. You don’t solve someone’s trust issues by ragging on their poor follow-up choices. On the other hand, this is online social media, not an irl group of friends and acquaintances. I don’t exactly expect any specific person to do the work to reach them via these spaces.

Thanks in any case for trying to productively engage with me on this. This exact conversation is tiring on the best of days.

Jayjader ,

I came across raddle.me a few months ago and spent a few nights trawling it without finding anything questionable - though I might just be too ignorant of parts of history to pick up where they fail. It’s very anarchist-flavored so while that might not be your preferred brand of communism I think it avoids descending into “deranged”. In any case, their faq/about page should give you a better idea than whatever I could write here.

Jayjader ,

I don’t think so, no.

Jayjader ,

That’s the proposal to GMO our companion animals like dogs and cats so that they can serve as Geiger-counter + canary-in-the-coal-mine for future humans, right? I don’t remember ever hearing a rendition of it!

Private Equity–Backed Firm Bowlero Is Ruining Bowling (jacobin.com)

For the most part, Bowlero doesn’t build its own centers. Instead, it purchases existing ones and makes them over in the Bowlero style: dim lights, loud music, expensive cocktails. At Bowleros, bowling isn’t bowling. It’s “upscale entertainment.”...

Jayjader ,

Let’s start a private equity corp called “Millennials”. Perfect camouflage!

Jayjader ,

It weirds me out that most of the arguments for nostr I come across are around how “you can’t loose your identity, it’s just a private/public keypair!”. Maybe I just don’t get banned enough to understand the perspective, but to me the real problem is the content/discussions being lost, not usernames for some corner of the web.

I really don’t care about loosing my identity on a social media website; I’ve found it healthier to view social media accounts on the same level as my customer account at my isp and power utility. When I change ISPs, the old account is closed down and I start up a new one at the other ISP. What’s important to me is the service getting delivered, not that it remembers that I’m the same person from however many years ago. It’s still the same me here in my body, interacting with the web. I know what I need from it, it doesn’t always need to remember who I am (and sometimes I’d rather it forgot or never knew in the first place).

My final point is a bit of a troll, but also kinda serious: how decentralized is it when your identity is “centralized” in your key pair? Loose your keys or loose your password to the key, and your identity is similarly effectively gone. Even worse in this case, no-one can restore it for you. Which is why I don’t tie my identity that much to any online service, especially ones I don’t host. The only thing that truly preserves my identity is the flesh-and-blood body that I inhabit (and even that isn’t fail-proof).

I’ve interacted with GPG signing circles before. So many people are losing access to their keys. So many more are considering some of their keys as compromised. In either case they’re regularly generating wholly new keys, essentially rebooting their “identity” from scratch. When they do so, they always rely on flesh-and-blood interactions to have their new identity verified and trusted by others.

Maybe it’s a question of which circles we’re involved in; mine are already regularly hopping accounts, without being forced to by bans or server outages. I’m used to interpreting the tone & content to recognize “people”, and ignoring usernames. On top of that so many people regularly change their display names on social media for vanity and expression purposes that I can’t reliably use them anyways for recognizing accounts.

Jayjader ,

You may also interact with countless bots without ever knowing, because creating fake identities is free.

Maybe. Bots don’t seem currently capable of holding a conversation beyond surface level remarks. I think I tend to engage with thought-provoking stuff.

On the off chance that I reply to a bot, it is as much for my reply to be read by other humans viewing the conversation. So I don’t understand how interacting with countless bots is supposed to be such a big downside.

Plus, I don’t see how public/private key pairs prevents endless “fake” identity creation/proliferation. It’s not like you need a government-issued ID to generate them (which, to be clear, still wouldn’t be great -just got other reasons).

Fair, some people value their identity.

To be clear, I’m talking about online identities. In which case, I would argue that if you value it so much you should not delegate it to some third party network. My IRL identity is incredibly valuable to me, which is why I don’t tie it up with any online communications services, especially ones I have no control over.

For average people nothing changes, the app can hold their key for them and even offer email recovery.

…so then the app can post on my behalf without me knowing? And it’ll be signed as if I had done it myself. I don’t understand preferring this if you’re not also self hosting.

That’s something having signatures and a web of trust solves.

But as I wrote in my previous message regarding gpg signing circles (a web of trust), that doesn’t “solve” things. It just introduces more layers and steps to try and compensate for an inherently impossible ideal. Unless I’m misunderstanding your point here?

Besides, you fail to see another problem: Whichever centralized, federated site you use can manipulate anything you read and publish.

I just take that for granted on the internet. It’s true that key-signing messages should make that effectively impossible for all but the largest third parties (FAANG & nation-states). But you still need to verify keys/identities through some out-of-band mechanism, otherwise aren’t you blindly trusting the decentralized network to be providing you with the “true” keys and post, as made by the human author?

Anyway, if you don’t see a need for tools like nostr you don’t need them.

Maybe I’m not expressing myself properly; I don’t see how nostr (and tools like it) effectively address that/those needs.

Sort of like how there was (arguably still is) a need for cash that governments can’t just annul or reverse transactions of, yet bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies I’m aware of fail on that front by effectively allowing state actors (who have state resources) to participate in the mining network and execute 51% attacks.

Jayjader ,

Maybe nowadays, with Elon’s imbecility so publicly visible.

I’ve run Arch for close to 10 years, and was pretty jazzed by Musk in the early days of his presiding over Tesla and Space X. Then again, I was barely an adult at the time, and I hadn’t yet come across the first reports of terrible working conditions and his overall shittyness as a manager/exec.

Jayjader ,

I really appreciate Linus trying to tone down the nastiness in his replies over the years, but I’d be willing to let almost anything slide if it means getting a proper, old-school Torvalds tear-down of Musk.

Jayjader ,

This seems right up my alley, as a fan of the Micromachines games and RTS in general.

I’ll try to give it a go when I regain a decent internet landline.

Critics of Putin and his allies targeted inside the EU with Israeli-made Pegasus spyware (www.theguardian.com)

At least seven journalists and activists who have been vocal critics of the Kremlin and its allies have been targeted inside the EU by a state using Pegasus, the hacking spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group, according to a new report by security researchers....

Jayjader ,

Right?

“Protecting vulnerable individuals” - they must mean Putin and Bibbi, not actual victims of political intimidation, sabotage, etc.

Jayjader ,

Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don’t know if anything has changed since, as I don’t self host masto and have been spending more and more of my “fedi-time” here in lemmy.

Not surprised that someone who “led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years” ended up back on mastodon.social, but that’s probably neither here nor there…

Jayjader ,

I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a “fediverse browser” is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.

However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it’s own sitting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we’re originally trying to avoid.

I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr’s approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the “content” tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else’s server or your own.

Jayjader , (edited )

Still, I think the only way that would result in change is if the hack specifically went after someone powerful like the mayor or one of the richest business owners in town.

Jayjader ,

Armchair geopolitics explanation: it’s a culture/societal difference between a thousand year old monarchy and a federalist state that lost 2 world wars on their own land. Not to mention the federalist state had a “communist” power structure in control of about half of their lands for half a century while the other half birthed a regional free trade juggernaut. Meanwhile, the monarchy has a landed elite class/aristocracy that persists to this day.

What I’m getting at is that the wealth in the UK could be much more heavily tied up in individual fortunes and estates than the wealth in Germany. That kind of wealth seems easier to “protect” by offshoring (and/or the UK has evolved to prefer/rely on it).

In contrast, I expect the wealth in Germany to be more tied up in corporations, stocks, etc. This in turn would lend itself to corporate forms of tax evasion that can happen domestically.

Jayjader ,

Ooh, good point.

Jayjader ,

It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.

Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.

Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.

That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.

You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.

God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.

To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.

Jayjader ,

Same (except the Arab part), this post was highly confusing at first 😅

Jayjader ,

Art might not be about thinking while you are experiencing it, but it most definitely is about thinking about the experience afterwards, as much as experiencing it in the first place.

Not to mention that books are often art.

Jayjader ,

Late to this thread, but this is disturbingly similar to the media-bashing a French-Palestinian politician has received recently.

She tweeted something along the lines of “time for an uprising” before attending a conference. The following week+ of interviews with her party colleagues were filled with “did you know uprising in Arabic is intifada?! Why is your colleague calling for violence?!?!?!”

Her name is Rima Hassan if you’re interested.

Jayjader ,

“the Nukhba terrorists” is wild

Unless I’m misunderstanding, that’s a bit like calling current-day IDF members “the Shoa terrorists”

Jayjader ,

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they’ve finally accepted that you can’t make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google’s captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

Jayjader ,

Kinda disappointing.

The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?

Jayjader ,

For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.

Jayjader ,

I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

… unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?

Jayjader ,

I was expecting more to this “analysis” than a graph plot too dense to read. Not much else to say, given the brevity of the article.

Jayjader ,

Especially the argument for timezones is “I can just Google what time it is in <timezone>”…

You can always Google “what time is it at <location>”

Jayjader ,

As long as i can prompt-engineer my way into twice the salary for half the hours, that might still be worth it!

"Digital sovereignty": German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein ditches Microsoft for Linux and Open Source alternatives (blog.documentfoundation.org)

Schleswig-Holstein, the northern German federal state, will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government...

Jayjader ,

There was a good (albeit short) conference at FOSDEM2020 that gave an overview of a bunch of different “prior work” with regards to government using open source: archive.fosdem.org/2020/…/municipal_government/

With regards to other comments about Munich, the speaker touches on that case starting at 7 minutes into the conf, and highlights how it differs/differed from other, more successful, cases.

Jayjader ,

In case you’re unaware, the “deep inhale” is because that phrasing is historically tied to the WINE project, as per their website (winehq.org):

Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”)

And at this point it’s like a 10-year old meme (if not 20) to bring it up when someone may seem unaware of the distinction between emulation and what Wine does.

It is a bit tired of a reference, and I imagine somewhat off-putting of a response to receive when you don’t know the reference yourself. The acronym is in the spirit of the GNU one (“GNU’s Not Unix”), and as the other commenters have explained the fact that wine does something different than emulation is very relevant when you get into the nitty-gritty details, so it has extra sticking power in terms of memes in linux/foss communities.

Im looking for a book about a girl with a magic eye on an air ship to catch magic only she can see

The book starts out with a girl with magic eye on a flying ship to catch magic sand only she can see. She has no memory of how she grew up. At the start of the journey a man destroys the ship, but safes her. During the book(s) it is reveled that the man and she herself are basically here to destroy humanity because humanity...

Jayjader ,

I would describe it less as “smiting god”, and more as “indirectly rescuing god from the control of the church”. Though even that is a bit simplistic.

The “she destroys magic to save humanity” bit does thematically feel very close to the ending of His Dark Materials.

Jayjader ,

Disclaimer: not a physicist, and I never went beyond the equivalent to a BA in physics in my formal education (after that I “fell” into comp sci, which funnily enough I find was a great pepper for wrapping my head around quantum mechanics).

So space and time per se might be continuous, but the energy levels of the various fields that inhabit spacetime are not.

And since, to the best of our current understanding, everything “inside” the universe is made up of those different fields, including our eyes and any instrument we might use to measure, there is a limit below which we just can’t “see” more detail - be it in terms of size, mass, energy, spin, electrical potential, etc.

This limit varies depending on the physical quantity you are considering, and are collectively called Planck units.

Note that this is a hand wavy explanation I’m giving that attempts to give you a feeling for what the implications of quantum mechanics are like. The wikipédia article I linked in the previous paragraph gives a more precise definition, notably that the Planck “scale” for a physical quantity (mass, length, charge, etc) is the scale at which you cannot reasonably ignore the effects of quantum gravity. Sadly (for the purpose of providing you with a good explanation) we still don’t know exactly how to take quantum gravity into account. So the Planck scale is effectively the “minimum size limit” beyond which you kinda have to throw your existing understanding of physics out of the window.

This is why I began this comment with “space and time might be continuous per se”; we just don’t conclusively know yet what “really” goes on as you keep on considering smaller and smaller subdivisions.

Jayjader ,

If I remember my series analysis math classes correctly: technically, summing a decreasing trend up to infinity will give you a finite value if and only if the trend decreases faster than the function/curve x -> 1/x.

Jayjader ,

So, for starters, any exponentiation “greater than 1” is a valid candidate, in the sense that 1/(n^2), 1/(n^3), etc will all give a finite sum over infinite values of n.

From that, inverting the exponentiation “rule” gives us the “simple” examples you are looking for: 1/(√n), 1/(√(√n)), etc.

Knowing that √n = n^(1/2), and so that 1/√n can be written as 1/(n^(1/2)), might help make these examples more obvious.

Jayjader ,

From 1/√3 to 1/√4 is less of a decrease than from 1/3 to 1/4, just as from 1/3 to 1/4 is less of a decrease than from 1/(3²) to 1/(4²).

The curve here is not mapping 1/4 -> 1/√4, but rather 4 -> 1/√4 (and 3 -> 1/√3, and so on).

Jayjader ,

The description given for Pinker’s The Blank Slate made me sceptical at best, so I went hunting for critiques and found this www.jstor.org/stable/27759451

Sadly it’s pay-walled beyond a preview of the first page.

For a suggestion of my own, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It’s a fun romp through the history of the English language with numerous tangents focusing on this or that quirk, written for those who have never formally studied English or linguistics.

As someone who was always more of a “STEM” person, this book completely upended my relationship to language. I used to think there was “one way” of expressing any given idea, and our job as humans, as it were, is to simply learn all the words and their meanings so as to be as precise as possible when expressing ideas. Nowadays I very much trend to see it the other way around: our use of language shapes the language itself, and our changing needs in terms of which ideas we want to express is what makes language evolve over time.

To put it succinctly, this book helped me view language as a tool that we should alter to suit our needs, not some pre-ordained scripture that we need to memorize and adjust ourselves to.

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