SkyNTP

@SkyNTP@lemmy.ml

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SkyNTP ,

It depends on the law really. There is no one rule.

For example, owning lockpicks is in many places not illegal, but owning lockpicks with the intent of bypassing a lock is.

Some laws are very specific about the severity or testability of a crime where as others are not. In that case a judge has to interpret the criteria for legal tests, either from previous case law or by building new case law.

In any case, being charged for something or not is a completely separate issue. Things are no less illegal just because the state has no resource or will to execute the law.

Also, being charged does not mean you broke the law either. Nor does judgment determine it (although it's a very strong hint) since a latter appeal could acquit you of chargers.

The determination of guilt is in the facts of what happened. And that's the whole point of the legal system. Being charged, getting judgement, appealing. It's all a process to determine guilt or not. It is not itself the mechanism of guilt.

The idea of a "guilty conscience" enshrines this idea in expression.

SkyNTP ,

The absolute rate didn't go down, but the proportional rate did. Because our energy consumption has increased.

It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct in absolute terms. In fact there's more of everything today. But that doesn't mean we are living in the age of piracy (the naval kind). And it shouldn't mean the current deployment of renewables is making no progress.

SkyNTP ,

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

https://opensource.org/osd/

Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.

SkyNTP ,

To add to what has already been said about it taking a large effort, the follow up question is then, why don't governments fund all this effort publicly through taxes, like what is done with roads, scientific research, education, healthcare?

Well the short answer is that high-performance computing specifically is a strategic resource. Publicly funding roads only benefits the country doing the funding, so that is an easy decision to make. Meanwhile, much of the publicly funded scientific research has minimal to no strategic value (or may only be of value in states capable of that investment in the first place), so this is also an easy decision to make. But giving away technological investments in strategic ressources to rival states is a pretty bad move.

SkyNTP , (edited )

I'm not sure about that. For one the trend towards conservative manifests itself way before death rates are a significant factor. Plus, none of that explains women who live longer.

No, it's much simpler. Traditionally older people skew conservative because... well they simply want to conserve the past. It's just straight up inertia. Nothing complicated about it.

Here's the thing though: Republicans are not conservative. They do not want status quo. They are regressive. They want to completely reform the system from the ground up in their own vision. They have realized that the status quo is leaving them behind, and the only way for the system to work for them is to take it back by force, with new oppressive policies. Authoritarianism. Discrimination.

Anyway, support for regressive policies are not explained by inertia, for it is an opposite force. Which explains why this is no longer a generational divide. I think other factors are just minor details by comparison. The fact that these regressive policies discriminate against women, for example, is the new divide.

SkyNTP ,

Because gaps in data are a thing? I dunno, it doesn't really seem to change the story or the outcome. Your concerns seem overblown.

SkyNTP ,

Propaganda and cultural isolationism is a hell of a drug. I blame their leaders, and victimhood dialed all the way up. Everyday Israelis are victims themselves of manipulation.

SkyNTP ,

I read the article hoping the author would describe the solution to the described "ugliness".

It never came.

Conclusion? This is just one long angry rant, by one bitter individual.

For ugliness cannot exist without contrasting beauty. Just like darkness does not exist without light.

SkyNTP ,

This article is in the mania phase of the classic economic bubble chart: lots of grandiose visionary statements ("a new paradigm!") with very little in the way of substantiated argument grounded in reality.

I think the main problem is the author is extrapolating their personal experience as though it was a universal experience. I can say for a fact that that is not a universal experience. I personally do not share some of these experiences. Especially the part about summarizing.

SkyNTP ,

We should strive for a wide range of test cases. Real testing is done when the software is tested against a wide range of user inputs. Code coverage is no indicator of response to cases.

Unit tests are a fantastic way of implementing test cases. I am of the opinion that most bug PRs should start with a unit test, if nothing else, a persistent reminder that: hey BTW, your user is going to input this garbage, so any logic you implement ALSO has to be resilient against that garbage.

SkyNTP ,

It's important to not look down on them as inferior beings. For they are not. We virtually all share the same DNA. Of course there are psychopaths out there and they truly are a different breed, but that is not a significant factor at a nation state, ethnic, or theological level.

Rather, they are the victims of manipulation, fear, propaganda, psychological warfare. We probably are too.

The only sane people left are the ones with empathy, those who have remembered that listening, understanding, and compromising is the only path to peace and prosperity.

Those who seek revenge and blind justice, especially in the guise of "self defence" will destroy us all.

SkyNTP ,

If only. 2004 was better.

Discussion on 'Missing women on Lemmy and decentralised networks'

I saw this post from !twoxchromosomes, and I wanted to share it here to get more discussion because it is important. I'm hoping that this post won't crowd out any voices, and while I've tried to keep this post productive and inclusive, please call out any concerns and use the post if you prefer :)...

SkyNTP ,

Just a thought, communities dedicated to one particular gender are often not inclusive by design, especially if you actively try to funnel people of a certain gender to certain communities. And therefore they, historically, have tended to devolve into echo chambers, and then subsequently into toxic spaces, with little room for nuanced discussion nor hosting a broad range of opinions. That's not to say all communities are like this and most don't start out like that either. There is value to have these communities if they themselves promote inclusion. But putting people of a particular gender into a gender-specific community is not at all the solution to "Too few women on Lemmy".

I'd rather see the focus on making the general communities be welcoming to everyone equally.

SkyNTP ,

The reason we shrink heating devices down but not cooling devices is a combined consequence of economics and the laws of thermodynamics.

First an analogy: Making a boat that moves downstream a river is easy. Take any buoyant material like a log or a branch and drop it in water. Presto, you've got a mode of transportation of any size. Want to go upstream? Now you need motors to fight the current. Putting a motor on a large piece of wood, (a boat) is economically viable. Putting one on thousands of sticks? Ain't nobody got time for that.

As a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, the the universe naturally converts all potential energy (fuel, electricity) into heat. The universe will do this basically on its own, over time, constantly. This is called entropy.

Doing the reverse, taking heat and putting it back into potential energy, i.e. cooling, is difficult. You basically have to pay a price to the universe in some other way, kind of like how a motorboat has to push more water downstream than the current would have naturally moved on it's own. This is what heat pumps (AC, fridge) do. Heat pumps put some of that heat back into potential energy, in exchange for also releasing potential energy into heat... The trick here is to do these two things in different places. The fridge's motor converts some electrical energy into heat in exchange for being able to move some of the heat in the fridge outside of the fridge. The consequence of this is that the room the fridge is in is now hotter. Mostly because you took the heat in the fridge and moved it into the room, but also because the fridge's motor also added some MORE heat to the room in the process in order to fight entropy. So to actually make this useful, you need to insulate what you are cooling (or it will just get warm again, warmer than it was before, because you added heat to the room), and you also want to dispose of the heat in the room. So you pump that out into the atmosphere...

Anyway, long story short, you need insulation, refrigerant, motors, heat changers, lots of power to fight the universe's tendency to spread heat everywhere. Technically you could miniaturize these things, but they become less efficient as you shrink them down, to the point where things smaller than a fridge are just not practical to make compared to the benefit you get from having them.

Making small heating devices is easy. You don't need to fight the universe. You just need an apparatus that will "go with the flow".

SkyNTP ,

Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about "what dangers?" Implying there were none...

Is it not enough to gesture broadly?

SkyNTP ,

I have noticed that the quality of results on Google and DDG and others have been declining steadily over the last few years, and I think this is mostly a result of click farms generally getting better at gaming the system. Genuinely quality content is just being drowned out by crap.

ChatGPT doesn't really address this. I also don't see ChatGPT as a genuine replacement yet because 1) hallucination is still too big of a problem and 2) the value add of using natural language for queries doesn't seem all that beneficial to me. Sorta like, how IF you are already used to a terminal, it will be faster or just as fast as a GUI for many things.

The only real value I have seen from ChatGPT, is for complex boilerplate generation that is very easy to verify. ChatGPT is fantastic for generating regex, for example. Or poems, if you prefer.

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