cygon

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

cygon ,

Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:

  • +0 Hours: Shelling stops on both sides, occasional gunfire erupts in places.
  • +1 Hours: Russians rush supplies to their troops.
  • +3 Hours: Russians violate truce and try to gain as much ground as possible in a surprise attack.

.

Fool me once...

cygon ,

A subgroup of people on the left who believe in communism and mostly hold pro-Russia and pro-China views, while often having a "doomer" mentality in regard to the US.

Unfortunately, that has them made very susceptible to Russian propaganda, to the point where they're now doing the bidding of Russia and helping fascists rise to power.

The mechanisms are similar to MAGA. They've disconnected from classical media and their echo chambers censor posts that highlight positive developments in the US or posts critical of Russia/China. Once inside, their world view collides with the outside and it's hard to get out again. Similarly to Russians and Republicans, they vilify liberals ("liberals are complicit in xy", "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds", "Marx warned liberalism inevitably leads to fascism", etc.).

On here, they're largely the people dissuading US Democratic Party voters from turning out, via "both sides bad" and recently via claim-to-purity (I'm sure you've encountered one of those "genocide joe" posts, which are kinda awkward, since tankies commonly support/deny China's genocide on the Uyghurs and Russia's genocide on Ukrainians).

cygon ,

If you're wondering about the downvotes:

I think @pacrist quoted tankie statements there to show how they're aiding fascists (should have prefixed it with "things tankies say" or so).

cygon ,

I wonder what their idea of the outcome is.

Tankie: "I convinced 20 Democratic Party voters to stay at home (and did the same for 0 Republican Party voters). Wait until Democratic politicians see that more voters favored the far right party. Then they're going to move left and fall on their knees and beg me to forgive them."

(Cue scene: swastika-adorned tanks rolling past the window)

"Stupid liberals, unwilling to fight the fascists like us true leftists." (Watches tanks and twiddles thumbs.) (Fetches keyboard.) "Let's tell everyone online that it's their own fault and they deserve this." (Sudden sound of harsh knocking on front door.)

At best, their actions will "only" cause another grid-locked presidency where progressives can't get their reforms to pass (which will then be used as the reason to abandon the likely last line of non-violent defense against fascists).

cygon ,

Theistic Satanists

These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They'd believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.

Atheistic Satanists

The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their "commandments" are secular compassion, empathy and justice.

Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom ("non serviam" / "I will not serve"), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)

Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?

I've been wondering for a bit why during the time the Democrats controlled the legislature, executive, and judicial branches during Obama's first term in 2008 more wasn't accomplished. Shouldn't that have been the opportunity to make Row V Way law and fix the electoral college? I understand the recession was going on but outside...

cygon ,

I think that is really the core of it.

I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.

I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP's - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party's resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.

Table listing who held the house and the senate during the Obama presidency from 2009 to 2017

cygon ,

Well, meme, not just not voting, but actively using their energy to attack their allies and help fascism spread.

To my disappointment, all I see from the self-appointed "real left" are people stubbornly trying to get US members to stop voting for the Democratic Party. And dunking on liberals ten times before they say one bad thing about reactionaries.

There could be so much good tankies could do, but instead, they aid the fascists. They treat the ongoing genocide as a just a convenient issue to drive a wedge between progressives. When China was committing genocide on the Uyghurs, tankie spaces on Reddit were talking it down and passing around Chinese propaganda memes. The ongoing genocide by Russia in Ukraine seems fine, too, if not even largely met with approval.

I hope some of those pulled into this web and led astray will yet wake up and use their energies for something positive. For example, there are already states that have adopted ranked choice voting, which will let everyone vote, even for a fringe party, without risking a fascist takeover. It will show, black on white, how many progressives there are that would want politicians to move left. If it was to kick off, it is almost guaranteed to topple the current status quo.

cygon ,

Perhaps it's just my subjective experience, but to me it looks pretty much other way around.

Visiting Lemmy from lemmy.world, liberal-bashing seems a bit like a folk sport for leftists in most threads that touch current world politics.

cygon ,

Not seeing it, sorry.

  1. It's pretty normal that main stream reporting looks critically at fringe groups. That can be frustrating, but it's not an attack. Also consider that any time MSM publish anything that could outrage the political fringes, it is cherry picked and makes its run through the fringe communities.
  2. To consider that as liberals attacking the left, I'd have to put on a tin foil hat and buy into the far-right conspiracy theory of "liberal bias in media" or even assume the main stream media and liberals are synonymous.
  3. And if I was taking "MSM" literally, the most-watched news medium in the US happens to be Fox News, which essentially put the idea of blaming and vilifying liberals for all the ills in the world on the map.
cygon ,

Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an "out of memory" situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.

The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.

This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn't even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)

cygon ,

It's a battery factory that was built there despite environmental concerns.

I think the main things that attracted the ire of environmentalists are:

  • When the building permits were still being negotiated, Tesla just started clearing land illegally
  • A battery factory requires lots of water, this one was built in a region already low on groundwater
  • There have been several instances of spilled chemicals
  • The sewage coming out of the factory has been contaminated (phosphorus and nitrogen) beyond allowed thresholds for two years
  • The local water supply company is reportedly near its limit, but Tesla wants to expand the battery factory and clear additional land

.

But the situation is a bit muddy. Early protests around 2021..2022 often had a share of far right wingnuts trying to recruit people. That's lessened, though. This specific protest was definitely swelled in numbers by the factory expansion and land clearing plans, but is also part of a planned day of protests by the "Disrupt Tesla" group. They have a web presence here: https://disrupt-now.org/en/.

Trump told oil executives and lobbyists that he would undo Biden’s climate policies ( www.carbonbrief.org )

Donald Trump offered to weaken climate regulations in exchange for a $1bn contribution from oil company bosses to support his return to the White House later this year. During a dinner for senior oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, Trump “vowed to immediately reverse dozens of president [Joe] Biden’s...

cygon , (edited )

Do you know what we get to see of this "actual left" around here?

Not organizers trying to set up a demonstration in Washington. Not people linking to websites explaining how to mail your governor or the white house with suggested text passages. Not activists recruiting stunt performers to make some artistic display that will get reported in the press. Not people trying to aid the resistance within Israel itself.

All we see is people trying to dissuade the non-fascists from voting.

Fascist Russia's genocidal war on Ukraine is completely masked out. In online spaces held by Marxist-Leninists, aka tankies, fascist Russia is even elevated to be the good guy, with mods deleting dissent. During China's genocide of the Uyghurs, tankies posted Chinese propaganda memes trying to keep their communities supportive of China.

German anti-fascists had a name for such people. Collaborators.

These "don't vote" posts always do the same shtick, too, attacking and blaming liberals (hint: Marx actually admired liberalism), while claiming some true, real, actual left is much better (how? are they all John Rambo? Do we have to wait until the shooting starts?). It just doesn't look very organic, it looks like talking points constantly injected into tankie spaces by Russian propagandists.

cygon , (edited )

I don't know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell's "Animal Farm."

Context: "Animal Farm" is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: "all animals are equal" and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding "...but some animals are more equal than others" to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are "more equal."

How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals

I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying "woke", "critical race theory", ""grooming"", and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....

cygon , (edited )

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I've read that people used to say things like "I'm not rich enough to vote Republican" or children shouting "last one in the house is a dirty Republican"). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick's "2010: The Year we Make Contact" (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Political map of the US in 1964

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a "hate object" worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of "proof" online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the "hate object" over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, ...)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for "anti-conservative t-shirts" (if it's too tiny, try it yourself - they're all anti-liberal):

Search result on DuckDuckGo for anti-conservative t-shirts, all results showing anti-liberal t-shirts

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there's no tomorrow. They're installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

Russia threatens Britain with retaliation if involvement in Ukraine war deepens ( www.pbs.org )

Russia on Monday threatened to strike British military facilities and said it would hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons amid sharply rising tensions over comments by senior Western officials about possibly deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine....

cygon ,

So true. By this point, Russia is already using everything it can, short of an actual, hot war with the west. And their military is stretched to the limit already without that.

I think this sabre rattling is still useful to them as a one-two-tactic:

  1. Public threat from Russia, mentioning but not directly threatening nukes (the "push" side)
  2. Russia-aligned media in the west publish articles saying "Putin's threat should be taken seriously," Russia-aligned western politicians smearing their opponents as "irresponsible war mongers", followed by pushing for existing sanctions to be lifted, etc. (the "pull" side via stooges/crooked politicians)
cygon ,

That would give me some hope, but I've also seen indications towards the opposite.

I watched some recent talks between Chinese officials and what I think it was a German delegation seeking to convince China to exert more pressure on Russia. The Chinese politicians sounded exactly like Russia-indoctrinated tankies, talking point for talking point. When asked about a specific German politician In an interview with a journalist, one Chinese official spewed forth a shower of insults (all the favorites, from "unhinged" to "deranged", "delusional" and "hysterical", just one after another, at least that's what the translation said).

I really hope what I've seen there is just an outlier.

cygon ,

Just some thoughts:

  • Current LLMs (chat AIs) are "frozen brains." (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI's input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the "context") and the AI's output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the "context" and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.

  • Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the "context" and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.

  • If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI's ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.

.

I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we'd likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).

cygon ,

I think you're mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That's possible because Wine doesn't do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine's reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):
Processes running after launching a Windows executable via Wine

Also, some advice from WineHQ:
WineHQ warning never to run Wine as root

cygon ,

What would be missing from VS Code or VS Codium that an IDE needs?

I'm an ex Visual Studio user, now writing all my code in VS Codium. I organize my project tree in VS Codium, I build from it and, like a Visual Studio user, I press F5 to debug, set breakpoints and inspect variables.

And that's just the default install using the vanilla C/C++ extension it ships with, not some complicated setup that takes any time to get working.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1c163b35-510b-4720-b511-7653dbfab2c0.png

cygon ,

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

  • Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
  • Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
  • Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
  • Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

cygon ,

My observation:

They position themselves similar to classic revolutionaries - they claim to be the counterpoint to the “establishment” or to the “out-of-touch elites.”

That’s pretty tempting for people who don’t like the direction the world is heading in. Most don’t see or don’t want to see that the AfD is chock full of the exact people who rule them from the top down, police their opinions and take away their personal liberties.

What’s tragic is that, historically, a left wing group would normally find itself in the position the AfD is holding now. Yet here we are, after 50 years of slowly shifting rightwards until the social contract began breaking, with a party that offers a harsh jump further right as the revolutionary cure.

cygon ,

elitist, college liberalism ideas

liberals are becoming way more rude, aggressive. Elitist,

young privileged, college liberals who look down on everyone

That smells an awful lot like ring wing indoctrination 101:

  1. Restating several times to drive home the claim that liberals are elitist, aloof, rude, "looking down on everyone"
  2. Claiming “they” are being aggressive and nasty against super polite people only a little bit to the right
  3. Therefore joining the far right is a well-deserved act at getting back at these nasty liberals

.

You wrote two and a half paragraphs that are essentially just liberal bashing. My experience is that liberals are the people who don’t judge you for personal choices, who reach out a hand even if you’re worlds apart.

cygon ,

Yep. Push and pull.

Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.

cygon ,

Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)

The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into “window-looking jobs,” employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.

cygon ,

They had a serious investigation going, but that was during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister (BoJo = the Trump-impersonator with the silly hair), so it was pretty handicapped and when the investigation stopped, well:

Johnson’s government refused to release the report to the public before the general election in December 2019.

By June 2020, the report had still not been released, and the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been convened, the longest gap since the committee’s creation in 1994.

(from Wikipedia)

cygon ,

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

cygon ,

So… this AI company gets gaming teens to “donate” their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?

And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?

Sounds completely ethical to me /s.

cygon ,

I read his manifesto and substack. He had his own brand of crazy, mixing Russian misinformation and personal delusions half-and-half.

His gist is “climate change and resource scarcity will destroy society, the elites know it and created cryptocurrency to collapse global finance, which will fix things while making them untouchable rulers.”

cygon ,

If you were alive (and online) during the 90s, you may remember the banter between Microsoft and General Motors:

From https://crysa.fzu.cz/ondra/documents/cars_like_windows.html (the only online copy I could find)

Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

[…]

  1. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car error” warning light.
  2. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
  3. The airbag system would ask “Are You Sure?” before going off.
  4. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.

30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.

cygon OP ,

I’m already using Git, thus my experience with Gitea. I am well versed with svndumpfilter and git-svn to extract and migrate individual Subversion repositories to Git.

I’m not only hosting code, but I have several projects involving large binary files with binary changes. Git’s delta compression algorithm for binary files is so-so. Git LFS is just outsourcing the problem. Even cloning with –depth 1 --single-branch gives me abysmal performance compared to Subversion.

So I’m still looking for a nice WebUI to make my life with the Subversion repositories I have easier.

cygon OP ,

I’m already using Git for source code related versioning, but some use cases involving large binary files with partial updates aren’t well covered by Git (I’ve gone into some detail in my reply to @vvv).

There’s also the lack of svn:externals in Git. Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository as far as I’m aware.

cygon OP ,

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).

cygon OP ,

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

cygon ,

After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.

It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).

cygon ,

Anyone remember the Foxconn building deal during the Trump presidency? It was supposed to prop Republicans up in the mid-terms of 2018.

The GOP offered a $2.85 billion subsidy so Foxconn would build an LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Apparently the subsidy was in the form of tax credits. Trump calls Foxconn “8th wonder of the world” despite its cost.

According to The Verge:

The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.

As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.

This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅

cygon ,

A point I really think deserves awareness as well:

6. Personal responsibility: It StARts wITh yOu!

Another trick to fend off regulation. Companies rail against regulation, saying that the options are already out there and that now it’s the consumer’s choice, i.e. as an individual, spend extra time when shopping to find greener products, pay more and try to get others to do the same.

You are now disadvantaged (higher costs, more effort, time spent evangelizing) and tiring yourself out, seeing no progress around you. Others may even perceive your advocacy for less convenient life choices as droning and obnoxious, which is a view gladly pushed behind the scenes by the industry trying to resist regulation.

See Coca Cola’s “Anti-Litterbug” gambit (they funded “keep the environment clean” campaigns to resist bottle deposits), or how Prius drivers (an early electric hybrid vehicle) were depicted as holier-than-thou types, a cult, arrogant and elitist (I believe this even found its way into a few South Park episodes).

If, instead, regulators brought the hammer down from the beginning - like they did with Asbestos and CFC - products meeting the new guidelines would automatically become mainstream and cheap. Of course, it would also cut into the profits of established brands and potentially even shake up their power structures (as niche brands already meeting the new guidelines might make gains while big companies struggle to adapt their large production/supply structures).

cygon , (edited )

I wasn’t trying to throw shade on the subgroup that does act in the face of climate change, it’s just my impression that they’re intentionally guided down paths where they fight their fellow citizens and burn themselves out instead of achieving something.

  • For example (depending on the distance of your workplace), biking is certainly less convenient in that it takes more free time out of your day, requires you to bother with rain clothes, proper winter clothes, a place to store your bike while you work (which is surprisingly harder than parking a honking car) and more.
  • Buying sustainable meat or eggs means they’re more expensive and in noodles, pizza or cheese, it becomes either impossible or reduces your choice to one or two products which will usually be marketed as super premium. Meat industry spokesmen: “we’re just giving people what they want, if they want sustainable, they need to vote with their wallets.”
  • Avoiding plastic packaging also carries extra effort. You need to locate a store that offers bring-your-own-container beans, rice, oats and so on, which is nigh impossible in some places and requires visiting an additional market with a price premium in others.

.

I’m not trying to make a case for “oh, I can’t do it because it inconveniences me, someone else fix it please,” I’m observing that those of us that do care enough are (and have been for decades) too few to reach critical mass. For example, we won’t fix the micro plastics in our oceans and food chain problem by calling for “personal responsibility” and sputtering on in that mode for the next 30 to 50 years (like it happened with fossil fuels).

Or, similarly, the entire recycling system is largely busywork for eco conscious people, considering that, still, >90% of trash ends up in landfills, burned or dumped. That is the point where I believe regulation with teeth needs to be established and where instead calling for “personal responsibility” is merely a diversion to tire out people willing to act while everything stays the same.

cygon , (edited )

Reading that formed an interesting question in my (also non-physicist) mind:

If we can, at most, take advantage of relativity to slow down our own time frame, then time could just be our way to describe the pace of how space changes around us following simple causality.

But if, on the other hand, it is possible to move backwards through time, wouldn’t the universe have to necessarily exist not only as a giant block of eternally changing 3D space, but as a giant block of 4D spacetime one could move around in? And would that mean predetermined past and future, or would that 4D block of spacetime change, too, advancing through meta-time, continually changing future and past of the universe?

ScienceClic has a cool video, stipulating that we live in 4D spacetime and are bound to always move forward at light speed. If we stand still in 3D space, we move forwards in time at light speed. If we accelerate in 3D space, we change out motion vector from only pointing forwards in time to pointing slightly sideways (up to completely sideways, i.e. time stops, if we were able to move at light speed). But there may be now way to do a 180 involving the time axis like we could do involving the other 3 axes.

cygon ,

There’s a hard sci-fi novel (1970s or 1980s) called “Tau Zero” that features this idea.

Book summary (spoils all of it)A colony ship with a Bussard Ramjet on each end (debunked theoretical spaceship drive that uses interstellar hydrogen for propulsion, i.e. the faster you go, the more medium you hit and the harder you accelerate) suffers an accident that destroys the deceleration engine. They keep accelerating because they need the engine’s magnetic field to protect them from interstellar dust. First they try reach the void between galaxies to safely repair the ship, when the interstellar medium is still too “dense,” they go for the void between galaxy clusters, then superclusters, then they just stay on the throttle until the big crunch, at which point, in the nothingness after the universe collapsed in on itself, they can finally fix their ship and begin decelerating into the bounce-back big bang of the forming next universe and colonize a planet.

cygon ,

His human rights should absolutely be respected, but I think the world will be a worse place with this guy running around.

As a messenger, his organization turned a blind eye on one side (WikiLeaks refused to publish Russian government documents: Report, WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign) and instead collaborated with them, to the degree of forging messages and using leaks to distract from equally newsworthy dirty laundry.

I’d compare him to a cop who selectively polices crime gang A but ignores crime gang B. And whose phone number is found with members of crime gang B, together with evidence that they could call the cop at any time (and did so) to appear inside crime gang A’s territory. Yes, technically, the cop has apprehended more criminals than either of us ever will and we could give him a medal for his work (and crime gang B is certainly motivated to help that along to get this cop more entrenched and promoted).

cygon ,

I’m genuinely curious, is that how it works? If you refinance, the new loan loses the “student loan” earmark and you’re no longer eligible? Or did you consolidate two/multiple loans and the student loan was one of them?

It sounds a bit unfair in the former case because in my mind it’s still the student loan debt, just with (hopefully) better conditions.

But I agree, it’s good that at least some headway has been made. I miss the “investment into the future” perspective we had from before the news became so gloomy :)

cygon ,

Also literally from the article I posted:

“We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services,” the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”

Neither of our quotes really adds anything to the discussion.

A nebulous policy to reject “anything WL can’t verify” or “has been published elsewhere” or “is likely to be considered insignificant” or is “diversionary (to WL’s election interference)” is a carte blanche for Assange to turn down anything that he doesn’t like.

What I have seen concrete evidence for is that Assange wanted Trump to win (In Leaked Chats, WikiLeaks Discusses Preference for GOP Over Clinton, Russia, Trolling, and Feminists They Don’t Like <- contains verified excepts from leaked internal WikiLeaks chats). And for strongly pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory (hinting in multiple interviews that Seth Rich was behind the DNC leaks and even posting a $20000 reward for the murder case).

I won’t even ask for concrete evidence that the FBI has framed Assange, because in the big picture, it doesn’t change who he is or what he does. To me, it’s been sufficiently proven that he takes sides (that’s an ‘F’ for integrity, report the story, don’t be part of the story), that he collaborated in anti-democratic GOP activities and that his promotes views that align with the gunk spread by “Russia Today” or “Sputnik.” Whether that’s because he a Russian asset or because he’s had a false awakening into the conspirational world view Russian information warfare uses to twist people, who knows. I’ll withhold judgment on that one, but I also won’t expect him to do anything good for the world.

cygon , (edited )

Months of careful work by the Obama administration for that deal, and bit by bit, Iran had started to become more moderate, too. It allowed international observers and IAEA inspectors to check things out from up close in addition to spy satellites and intelligence agencies.

And then Mr. Orange guy comes along and tears it up for the sole reason that he wanted to look “tough.”

Except that unilaterally ripping apart your contract and demanding that the other side gives you more concessions, well, apparently it works out exactly like one might expect it to. Truly “the Art of the Deal”, real “master negotiator” stuff.

Can someone demystify computer Ports for me? Please? Blocking, unblocking, opening, allowing, VPNs and their effect, what ports are and what they do, step by step, when you have to interact with them?

It’s the one thing when I’m configuring things that makes me wince because I know it will give me the business, and I know it shouldn’t, but it does, every time. I have no real idea what I’m doing, what it is, how it works, so of course I’m blindly following instructions like a monkey at a typewriter....

cygon , (edited )

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

cygon ,

That’s how the Earth got destroyed in “The Forge of God.” :)

Plot (spoils about 50% of the book)A hostile alien probe discovers Earth, builds/grows three wildly different alien races, has them crash one each in the world’s three largest superpowers (one claiming to bring knowledge, one warning of an impending attack, one claiming to seek conquest), while robot ships plant explosives along the Mariana trench, but the primary attack is two singularities, circling earth in a decaying orbit, by the time anyone even begins to theorize about the cause of the anomalous gravity measurements across the world, both are already circling deep under Earth’s crust.

cygon ,

I am a Gentoo user and most of that is already a reality on Gentoo systems. Get the stage3 tarball set up, slap your /etc/portage/make.conf and /var/lib/portage/world files in there and build.

Obviously, depending on whether it should be a blank system with the same apps installed or a clone of a previous system, configuration in /etc and one’s home directory may need to be copied, too.

cygon ,

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • tech
  • kbinEarth
  • testing
  • interstellar
  • wanderlust
  • All magazines
    •