xmunk
@xmunk@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on So the flurry of flying embers that were blowing around in California, is that commonly how fire spreads? 20 hours ago:
Embers are generally the spread method for fires but the winds in CA right now are extremely strong.
One curious thing to note though is that the heat of fires tends to create convection currents that locally increase wind - in this case that effect is just supplementing strong standing winds.
- Comment on I'm OOTL: Why is TikTok being banned? 22 hours ago:
Corporations don’t have residency in specific countries. They are subject to the laws of all the countries they do business in. It is quite fair to be more concerned about China than other jurisdictions but… don’t underestimate the greed of corporations. Meta itself has been specifically entangled in election interference before via Cambridge Analytica.
- Comment on I'm OOTL: Why is TikTok being banned? 22 hours ago:
Because Facebook can’t compete fairly so they’re using regulatory capture to kill it.
Technically the Chinese government could also use it to spy on Americans and that’s a problem because they’d be taking Er Jerbs - 'Muricans should spy on 'Muricans.
- Comment on If trump never won the electoral college in 2016, would he have been able to have another chance at becoming president (aka: 2020, 2024 elections)? 23 hours ago:
I noticed that I typoed ineligible to iligible so that might be the source of confusion but… that’s what I was trying to say.
Regardless of how Trump got into office once he’s served two terms he’s done.
- Comment on If trump never won the electoral college in 2016, would he have been able to have another chance at becoming president (aka: 2020, 2024 elections)? 1 day ago:
No - assuming we’re going by the laws. The method of Trump’s election is irrelevant it only matters how many terms he’s served.
A good example of this is Rutherford B Hayes - it’s unclear if he ever won an election through normal means but the house decided he’d be president so he served a term.
If it’s revealed that Trump never technically won in 2016 (which is highly probable given the close margin and election shenanigans) he’d still be illegible (by current laws) to serve again.
Of course the Supreme Court is a bunch of asshats so who even know what laws are.
- Comment on How can I search lemmy for answers similar to how in 2019 you could google search "[problem] + reddit"? 1 day ago:
The biggest impediment to using lemmy as a less shitty SO/Reddit is that there simply isn’t the volume of answers here. Eventually there may be - and I’d argue that the quality of answer is generally better here - but currently there are a lot of questions that simply haven’t been asked.
The meme about googling site:Reddit comes out of how deeply shitty Google has let their search engine become. In an ideal world you’d just search on Google and get decent quality responses instead of needing to domain bind your results.
Maybe it’d be helpful to try a quality search engine like Kagi?
- Comment on If a child went into a coma and woke up as an adult what would happen ? 2 days ago:
They’d be awake.
I think your question needs more context as to what you’re curious about.
- Comment on If a criminal says a cop planted drugs or whatever on them why don't they ask for a finger print test? And vice versa a cop could also request it to clear up everything? 3 days ago:
Fingerprints aren’t a magical marker that remains visible on a surface for a set period of time. If you handle an object thoroughly and then hand it to your buddy there’s a good chance that only your buddy’s fingerprints will be detectable (and it’s also pretty likely that no ones’ would be clear enough for a match).
- Comment on If a criminal says a cop planted drugs or whatever on them why don't they ask for a finger print test? And vice versa a cop could also request it to clear up everything? 3 days ago:
A cop that planted evidence on you would then, usually, find that evidence to announce that you had it.
That finding action would likely excuse any fingerprints on the evidence unless they were extremely careless and left a fingerprint inside the baggie.
- Comment on Lubricate first pls 6 days ago:
Yea, I’ve always had a wicked hahd time understanding them.
- Comment on Please explain this to me. Are consumers that dumb?!? 1 week ago:
But what about my Lactose Free Oat Queen soft serve!
- Comment on Are Asian Americans in the US more likely or less likely to get harassed by law enforcement compared to other racial groups? 1 week ago:
My friend is Thai and she gets harassed by law enforcement all the time because racist fucks assume she’s Mexican. There was also a famous case a while back where an Indian American living in Texas was also targeted because some racist fucks thought they were Mexican.
Racism is awful in all forms and usually perpetrated by dumb as rocks assholes who are happy to target anyone who isn’t white.
- Comment on Can I pay someone to add a specific feature to an open source app? 1 week ago:
20 bucks is definitely not the amount you’d likely need to offer. Though if you’re talking to current project maintainers you might be able to contribute that towards a feature bounty.
Picking a random dev off the street and asking them to contribute to a code base they’ve never seen before is going to be a multi-day ask at minimum and, if you’re looking to actually attract someone with money that’ll be a few hundred dollars minimum.
There are usually kofis or similar for projects you can contribute to and you can always create or upvote a ticket to create the feature.
- Comment on How can I use an LLM to generate a 10k word long coherent story? 2 weeks ago:
LLM generations of that length tend to go off the rails - I think generating it in chunks where you can try and guide the model back onto the rails it probably a more sane technique.
There are several open source llms to lean on - but for long generations you’ll need a lot of memory if you’re running it locally.
- Comment on Are there any uncensored LLM available publicly? 2 weeks ago:
Not certain if it’s still active but koboldai seems to be a community sourced tool that doesn’t have built-in limitations because it’s a non-commercial site.
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 2 weeks ago:
Ah, I guess I’ll need to tell my teenage friend who never made it to adulthood after feeling trapped and ruined when an older man started an online relationship that isolated her from her family to… fucking grow a pair or something?
Healthy mature people can exist online in a positive manner. Not everyone is an adult and not every adult is mature. The internet can be a dangerous place and it’s unhelpful to try and dismiss that.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 2 weeks ago:
Everything we imagine looks like humans. God looks like a human in nearly all portrayals - our consciences look like humans. Even death is an ᴀɴᴛʜʀᴏᴘᴏᴍᴏʀᴘʜɪᴄ ᴘᴇʀꜱᴏɴɪꜰɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ.
Aliens are just a projection of our fear of the unknown.
- Comment on What are the current most common symptoms of Covid? I was told about two years ago that a fever is no longer even really a symptom. Yet when I look it up on the CDC website, it shows fever is a sympto 2 weeks ago:
Dunno. The answer to your actual question is probably just “get an antigen test” though.
- Comment on Communism 3 weeks ago:
Oh yeah- that’s kind of the issue. I was more highlighting him for his deep ethical figure. Lenin was a complicated man and, if he had the time he may have turned into a pure dictator, but he really never got a chance. The October Revolution led directly into the Civil War and Lenin had a stroke midway through that. By the time the dust settled Lenin was already significantly impaired and on his last legs. It sucks because (while he wasn’t the nicest) he was a pretty cool dude and a true believer in the cause.
After his death everything immediately went to shit - with the death of Armand only Trotsky had the cloud to claim leadership and he was extremely militant. People romanticize him (understandably because the other option was a right turd) and if he had become Chairman the whole “ruler for life” thing probably wouldn’t have happened, but, Trotsky saw the only acceptable path forward as continual and total war to convert nations into soviet councils until nothing else remained. This would have meant a lot of suffering and inevitable collapse.
So instead of Trotsky some dickweed of a clerk said "Nuh, uh, with his last breath Lenin said I should be
Emperor, KingChairman? Nah, let’s call it “General Secretary” and be all humble… and that’s how we got the unpolished turd that was Stalin. - Comment on Communism 3 weeks ago:
Most attempts at communism so far have been from single party governments. Those trend quite quickly into authoritarianism regardless of the intent (you might get lucky with a long lived strong man with a deep ethical drive - aka Lenin) but chances are your single party will be coopted by an asshole.
Every time we’ve tried a communist government at a large scale we’ve really horribly failed but it has worked at smaller scales. It may be impossible beyond a limit like Dunbar’s number but I think it’s worth trying a few more times (especially if we can get the US to stop trying to constantly sabatoge it).
- Comment on How do I PS5? 3 weeks ago:
Console ignorant person here with a question, does this mean that in a classic setup where Alice, Bob, and Charlie all have separate profiles on the machine so they can get that sweet achievement chasing high then one of them must essentially be the master account used for managing what games everyone can play or, alternatively, random games are on random accounts and you need to cycle through them if you want to find the right one to reinstall from?
- Comment on What happens to an unidentified orphan ? 3 weeks ago:
It really depends, if they get lucky they might end up being raised in a country that has an easy path to citizenship for people who pass through the education system and learn the local language (for more niche languages this is especially true).
Anyways, there is a significant number of people who end up stateless and life is really fucking hard. You have no passport and to cross any border you need to manually apply for a visa with absolutely no guarantee of being able to return. Imagine if you went to Cancun for spring break and the US just said “No” when you tried to go home - all your shit is (pretty much) lost to you except what you have on your back and Mexico will eventually kick you out into a country with weaker border control. It absolutely fucking sucks and, while I appreciate that my life has been made significantly easier by being born in the US I think it’s unethical that birth location has such a strong effect on our lives.
So, usually, those folks just become stateless and get lost in the cracks of bureaucracy. If you’re not a citizen, and especially if you have an illegal status (that would be likely for such an orphan) you won’t have access to healthcare or social services, you’d risk deportation if you’re ever (even wrongfully) arrested. You’re playing the world’s most depressing game of roulette until you get noticed and lose everything.
It’s for reasons like this that the anti-immigration crowd really fucking pisses me off.
- Comment on Hypothetically, if some mysterious force started to jam every radio frequency, how would modern day society adapt to this? 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, the dedicated cables for international market coordination and HFC would be unaffected except in the most dire situation.
- Comment on What happened to techbros from the 90s to now? 3 weeks ago:
Nothing happened to them. Those guys are still exactly the same.
The difference is that there’s a ton of money in that sector now so a bunch of greedy assholes moved in and now look like they’re the folks actually doing tech stuff.
Oh also, there’s always been a fair amount of legitimately crazy among tech people (we’re strange folk) and those voices get more amplification due to the idiots at the top.
- Comment on Can I preserve this binder clip? 4 weeks ago:
Alternatively, there’s always Shellac - it’s kind of a lost artform now but it’s a really awesome material to use.
- Comment on What's the point of the "Airport Security" (aka: TSA) in the USA? Does the "Airport Security" ever actually scare away potential terrorists? 4 weeks ago:
Millimeter wave machines are just plain worse than metal detectors - pur airport security has gone down because of the TSA.
It does absolutely nothing.
- Comment on Is it worth investing if I can only contribute $50 a month? 4 weeks ago:
It’s worth saving - investing (I assume you mean in the stock market/index/mutual fund) probably wouldn’t yield very significant growth but it is worth saving what you can.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Gaslighting?
- Comment on Personally I like eggshell white. 4 weeks ago:
You you know know you you know know
- Comment on At least 1440p is good for heating my house 4 weeks ago:
It is jargon, but it is an assemblage of logical statements… kind of a shit joke though.