ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on To whom it may concern 1 week ago:
“these days”? I take it you weren’t paying attention during the whole “explorative credit” thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they’ve been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?
Have they ever been better than “kinda bad” at best?
Anyway, I didn’t specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.
- Comment on What's the point in getting married? 1 week ago:
It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.
There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passivelyThey also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?
If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.
When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)
- Comment on To whom it may concern 1 week ago:
But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn’t point out that they’re inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.
- Comment on I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket? 2 weeks ago:
Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?
- Comment on I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket? 2 weeks ago:
To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Proposed_political_status_for_…
Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)
- Comment on I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket? 2 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Territorial_changes_of_the_Peo…
en.wikipedia.org/…/Military_occupations_by_the_So…
en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_territorial_acqu…
Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.
- Comment on I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket? 2 weeks ago:
They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.
After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
Aligning with them was often a more safe move. - Comment on Anon diversifies fetishes 3 weeks ago:
I mean, who doesn’t like a nice cache?
- Comment on ain't your buddy, pal! 4 weeks ago:
Hypothesis: you can go to the Great lakes region and just make random noises and people will be like "hey, what’s up?”.
- Comment on Anon predicts the future of driving 5 weeks ago:
So buy a car without those things, or don’t use them. It’s not like you can’t drive my car without those things, and every one of them, barring the camera for obvious reasons, is controlled by a physical button. Better yet just don’t drive. If more people took public transportation we’d be better off.
I don’t particularly want to drive. When I do, I’d prefer to have climate control, not need to crank a window, and for the car to be able to tell me someone is going to clip me when I’m backing up. No matter how small the support bars are, the driver will never have as good a view as the radar sensor mounted on the side of the rear bumper.
Backup cams aren’t a solution to a design that limits visibility, they’re a solution to “most people won’t turn their heads when backing up”. People like their necks more than they like their neighbors kids.
It’s one thing to say that you want a no-frills car, and another entirely to say that car design peaked 30 years ago, and even further than that if you want a car that isn’t impacted by electronic component failure.
- Comment on Anon predicts the future of driving 5 weeks ago:
Not every car is a piece of shit. Mine has a touch screen for configuring parameters I honestly don’t think you need a dedicated button for, like “lane drift alert volume” and those can only be done when the car is parked.
Everything else either has a button as well even if they had to dig deep into the plausible locations to get there, like “press the button on the end of the turn signal to disable lane centering while adaptive cruise enabled”, or it only allows voice communication while in motion, like the typing based commands for navigation.I think the only time I’ve wanted to use a setting that didn’t have a button was when I was on a stretch of freeway in traffic where I didn’t feel keen on pulling over if I could avoid it, and I got gunk on one of the radar sensors. Since it couldn’t get a coherent reading it refused to turn on cruise control since it was set to adaptive. I had to drive without cruise control for a while until I pulled into a gas station and was able to clean the gunk. The setting to disable adaptive cruise control was touchscreen only, and locked out when the vehicle was moving.
- Comment on How exactly are people lighting Teslas on fire? 1 month ago:
It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.
The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.
As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.
- Comment on Anon is waiting for Japan 1 month ago:
It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.
There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.
A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.
- Comment on Anon is waiting for Japan 1 month ago:
Please let’s try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word “AI”.
Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it’s just mimicking it.
People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it’s relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it’s easy to apply.There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don’t look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.”
What I’m saying is that if they can set “$0.50 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone, they can also set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.
That’s you. That’s what we’re talking about: why they can’t “set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5”.
You were told it’s because of the unions contract that they can’t cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
You then replied about how that wouldn’t work because everyone left the union so they don’t have bargaining power.
And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don’t have a good contract, but that’s aside from the point of “a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim”.I’m treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can’t cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn’t stop that, in which case they can.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.
Literally the first reply I sent you.
If you don’t know the basics of labor law and how companies are ostensibly prohibited from preventing organization, you really don’t have a lot of room to get upset when people think you don’t know stuff.
That… is literally the thing being discussed here.
No, it’s a nonsequitur you brought up out of nowhere. You asked why the company doesn’t just pay the union less, and when people told you replied assuming that everyone knew that all the workers left the union.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
And you won’t, or can’t, respond to my point. It doesn’t matter that it’s a nonsequitur, you’re still obligated to respond to it premptively, you fool.
Yes, if everyone leaves the union it doesn’t have power. Fucking duh. It doesn’t work that way because it’s illegal to pay people to not be in the union, since it infringes on people’s rights to collective bargaining. Which I politely said in my first reply to you when I just thought you were ignorant, rather than obstinate and rude as well.
You just started randomly attacking me for no reason
Crystal more. You’re the one who kicked off being angry when you found out I thought you were just genuinely ignorant, as opposed to properly stupid.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
You also didn’t take into account every person in the state being in the Union, and the company only employing union workers, and the one non-union person, the CEO, was so afraid of loosing business at his company that only makes pro-union T-shirts that he wept openly at the thought of not capitulating to the unions every demand.
Clearly a bird has eaten most of your frontal cortex and you’ve confused the concept of negotiations with women’s freestyle swimming.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
At this point I’m fairly certain you’re just trolling, since you asked a dumb question, responded to answers with nonsense scenarios and indignation, and then responded to clarification as though your scenario were a given.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it’s not a negotiation, and “why wouldn’t the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut” is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn’t know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn’t know how bargaining worked.
Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.
Okay.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
The workplace is deducting the union dues from union workers checks automatically.
Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don’t just lower union pay outside of negotiations.
There’s no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you’re weirdly smug about it.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 month ago:
They can’t cut union rates since they have a contract. So they can, within reason, pay non union workers more but not lower the pay of union workers. One of the benefits of being in the union is that they can’t just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.
There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.
- Comment on Is 33 cents a small amount of money? 1 month ago:
The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.
It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.
- Comment on Is 33 cents a small amount of money? 1 month ago:
I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?
I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain) - Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd 1 month ago:
Eh, usually less than you would expect. We’re really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it’s been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.
We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn’t get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.
It’s how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we’re intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don’t and look at them.
- Comment on TSLA gonna rebound. Proof: 1 month ago:
First it goes into free fall, then it slows its drop, but the ticket starts going backwards in time.
- Comment on Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years? 2 months ago:
So, the size of the key doesn’t directly relate to the size of the cipher, which also doesn’t directly relate to security. AES is 128 bit , can have 128, 192, or 256 but keys and is currently not known to have any workable weaknesses.
Largely a cipher isn’t weak if guessing the key is the only weakness, since every cipher is vulnerable to brute force. It’s weak if you can figure out the message without needing the key.
- Comment on Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years? 2 months ago:
That’s no longer a one time pad. That’s closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.
- Comment on Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years? 2 months ago:
You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.
Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.
To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.
There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.
It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)
What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.
- Comment on Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 2 months ago:
I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.
