booly

@booly@sh.itjust.works

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

booly ,

Can we talk about how the graphic didn't sort the results in any kind of chronological order? Today, then October 2023, then May 2024 is an insane way to present this data. Go either oldest first or newest first sort order.

booly ,

Well yeah the key is to acquire that passive income before you're born, through your parents, so that you can pursue your dreams as soon as you're old enough to form them.

booly ,

Then there's the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.

Not just the why, but also the what. We didn't observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn't behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.

booly ,

So anybody who says dark matter doesn't exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.

There's dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can "see".

No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It's not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.

General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it's not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.

Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn't enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they're not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).

booly ,

We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we've already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.

The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don't have a unified theory of how it happened.

Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person's explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we'd have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.

booly ,

It’s just that their common scripts were from ABC, CBS, or NBC

That's not true. The actual local news programming was entirely independent from the affiliated broadcast network. National news programming from the national news networks were carried, including more editorial/long form formats (60 minutes, Dateline, Nightline), but that was still independent from what the local stations were covering in their own newsrooms.

booly ,

Try running a line to every neighborhood, with using eniment domain.

Aren't you just describing how roads were built to every home in every community?

booly ,

They're flipping the Pickup Artist concepts on men, so that particular concept long predates app based dating and the FDS community. "High Value" is definitely a specific phrase used in discussing attracting women over 20 years ago.

booly ,

To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.

booly ,

I don't think you understand the type of multiple choice questions involved. Here's a real question:

A father lived with his son, who was an alcoholic. When
drunk, the son often became violent and physically abused
his father. As a result, the father always lived in fear. One
night, the father heard his son on the front stoop making
loud obscene remarks. The father was certain that his son
was drunk and was terrified that he would be physically
beaten again. In his fear, he bolted the front door and took
out a revolver. When the son discovered that the door was
bolted, he kicked it down. As the son burst through the
front door, his father shot him four times in the chest, killing
him. In fact, the son was not under the influence of alcohol
or any drug and did not intend to harm his father.

At trial, the father presented the above facts and asked the
judge to instruct the jury on self-defense.

How should the judge instruct the jury with respect to
self-defense?

(A) Give the self-defense instruction, because it expresses
the defense’s theory of the case.

(B) Give the self-defense instruction, because the evidence is sufficient to raise the defense.

(C) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father
was not in imminent danger from his son.

(D) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father
used excessive force.

Memorizing the book itself doesn't teach how to answer this type of question. It requires actual application of concepts to the new facts being given.

booly ,

Yeah, gotta turn off dark mode for these screenshots.

booly ,

I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.

booly ,

A big chunk of the US military's budget is on very expensive US healthcare. Something like 7% of the military's annual budget is health expenses, and that doesn't even include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides health care to veterans.

booly ,

The article says that they count the annual cyclical changes in the composition of xylem sap that they consume underground, and that manipulating the trees in that way can trick the cicadas into coming out early.

booly ,

I wonder how much the placement of the uppercase L stems from Randall Munroe's own memories of Far Side comics with the "Larson" signature.

booly ,

Can't fix the vulnerability, but can mitigate by preventing other code from exploiting the vulnerability in a useful way.

booly ,

This particular class of vulnerabilities, where modern processors try to predict what operations might come next and perform them before they're actually needed, has been found in basically all modern CPUs/GPUs. Spectre/Meldown, Downfall, Retbleed, etc., are all a class of hardware vulnerabilities that can leak crypographic secrets. Patching them generally slows down performance considerably, because the actual hardware vulnerability can't be fixed directly.

It's not even the first one for the Apple M-series chips. PACMAN was a vulnerability in M1 chips.

Researchers will almost certainly continue to find these, in all major vendors' CPUs.

booly ,

It basically varies from chip to chip, and program to program.

Speculative execution is when a program hits some kind of branch (like an if-then statement) and the CPU just goes ahead and calculates as if it's true, and progresses down that line until it learns "oh wait it was false, just scrub all that work I did so far down this branch." So it really depends on what that specific chip was doing in that moment, for that specific program.

It's a very real performance boost for normal operations, but for cryptographic operations you want every function to perform in exactly the same amount of time, so that something outside that program can't see how long it took and infer secret information.

These timing/side channel attacks generally work like this: imagine you have a program that tests if variable X is a prime number, by testing if every number smaller than X can divide evenly, from 2 on to X. Well, the bigger X is, the longer that particular function will take. So if the function takes a really long time, you've got a pretty good idea of what X is. So if you have a separate program that isn't allowed to read the value of X, but can watch another program operate on X, you might be able to learn bits of information about X.

Patches for these vulnerabilities changes the software to make those programs/function in fixed time, but then you lose all the efficiency gains of being able to finish faster, when you slow the program down to the weakest link, so to speak.

booly ,

these people actually exist

The way it's been explained to me is that so much of the negative interactions in life come from a tiny, tiny number of offenders who manage to be shitty to dozens and dozens of people. So anyone who has to interact with many different people will inevitably encounter that shitty interaction, while most of us normies would never actually behave in that way.

Of the literally thousands of times I've interacted with a server or cashier, I've never yelled at one. But talk to any server or cashier, and they'll all have stories of the customer who yelled at them. In other words, it can be simultaneously true that:

  • Almost all servers and cashiers get yelled at by customers.
  • Very, very, few customers actually yell at servers or cashiers.

In other words, our lived experiences are very different, depending on which side of that interaction we might possibly be on.

When I talk to women in male dominated fields, basically every single one of them has shitty stories about sexist mistreatment. It's basically inevitable, because they are a woman who interacts with literally hundreds or thousands in their field. And even if I interact with hundreds or thousands of women in that same field, just because I don't mistreat any of them doesn't mean that my experienced sample is representative.

booly ,

I agree.

I point out that pretty much everyone in that group experiences it, so even those who aren't in that disadvantaged group should show some empathy towards the experiences of others, that we may never directly encounter ourselves. Part of that empathy, of course, is to provide support and structures for reducing the likelihood that these things happen, and mitigating them when they do happen.

booly ,

The first Paw Patrol movie is about a corrupt and incompetent mayor who accumulates too much power, wrongfully imprisons dogs, and must be stopped, for the good of the public. At least, that's how it's presented at first glance.

But if you peel back the layers, it's really about the elected leader in a two-party system, from the cat party, being overthrown by the dog party (note that all first responders seem to be from the same political party), for daring to put the dogs in obedience school (that is, requiring first responders to actually abide by the rules of their society). Worst part is that the mayor isn't even mayor of the same town - the dogs go to the next city over to overthrow that political leader, akin to some kind of cold war era foreign-orchestrated coup.

booly ,

Remind me of who won that war?

I'm pretty sure the Ukrainians won that one too.

booly ,

Human V Horse race in Wales

When it's hot out, the human wins. When it's cold/cool, humans can't stand a chance against the horses. Similarly, wolves and dogs can easily outrun humans in the cold, but lose to humans when it's hot.

That's because the biggest comparative advantage that humans have is actually thermal management while running, not the act of running itself.

Humans sweat. This means we can actually perform intense exercise even in heat, without overheating as easily as most other animals. Most quadruped mammals pant to cool, and have their breaths tied to their steps while running, so they can't cool themselves efficiently while on the move. Persistence hunting doesn't tire out prey, but actually overheats the prey to where they can't run any further.

Throw in the fact that we can throw, handle weapons while running, climb shit, talk, invent things, etc., and we really have been a deadly species for long before industrialization.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •