chonglibloodsport

@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Np fam⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
They’re kinda screwed if they don’t. Universities compete for students. Schools that can’t attract loads of students end up shutting down programs, laying off staff, shrinking, and even closing completely.

Students are applying to a lot of different schools these days. Reach schools and safe schools. There’s all kinds of advice about what schools a student should apply to based on their skills and interests.

Ultimately, once a student gets offers from their applied schools, the final choice can come down to many non-academic factors. How nice is the school’s campus landscaping? How’s student life? How many extracurricular programs are there? How good are the school’s sports teams and facilities?

Education advocates often say none of that stuff should matter, yet if the choice is up to the student it absolutely does matter.

The university I went to is one of the top in my country for the programs I was interested in. It’s long had a reputation for having an ugly, minimalist campus without much to do. The rigour of its academic programs and competitive student body has been reflected in numerous cases of students taking their own lives.

Since I started there (now since graduated but visit often), the school has spent a ton on landscaping and beautifying, constructing beautiful new buildings and renovating old ones. The school now has new gyms, rock climbing walls, and a new food court / study area with lots of tall windows looking onto a green space. There’s also a brand new building for student housing being built as we speak.

And here’s the thing. All the new buildings and programs have new administrative staff. There are more staff than ever running open houses and prospective student tour programs and summer camps for kids. The school is open year round yet through all of these additions and upgrades, enrolment hasn’t increased very much.

And that’s the bottom line. Schools have to spend loads of money just to tread water. Many other schools are losing students outright despite all their spending on upgrades and new staff. These are publicly funded schools, by the way, not private schools.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i just wanna live⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Centipedes are scary because they have so many legs and they scurry very fast with incredible agility. In general I think we feel a revulsion to small critters with that kind of speed and agility. But if they’re too small (fly sized or smaller) then it’s more annoyance than revulsion.

The many legs thing is a real mystery though! I think it might be some kind of proxy for venomous critters, as spiders and centipedes have more legs than insects and also tend to be more venomous (apart from some Hymenopterans).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
If you’re visiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.

I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do news articles and such call the governments of countries/groups of countries after the capital?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Physicists vs Normal People⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Not to mention the driver’s hands and feet!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Save the Bees, Murder the Wasps"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Do you mean you cemented over the weep holes in the brick around your house? Those gaps in the brick mortar are necessary for proper drainage. Brick is porous so it will absorb water and then accumulate behind the bricks unless the weep holes are there to allow the water to drain.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All things have a right to grow. The blossom is brother to the weed.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
They’re cave-dwelling spiders. They still need a way to find new caves to inhabit. If they’re already settled in your house then they may not survive because you’ve interrupted their lifecycle. But new spiders are wandering in all the time. Those ones may have better luck finding a new house to move into (or coming right back into your house) because they haven’t been established yet.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Square Enix will be revisiting Chrono Trigger in several projects in 2025 to mark game's 30th anniversary⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Which tells you that all creative energy has long since departed the company.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨to the moon 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
As many as you can fit on the ship!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it seem like many Americans have an arrogant personality trait?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

buried deep in the American zeitgeist

I think you mean American psyche. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the times. It usually refers to the present way of thinking or the way things were at one time.

The American psyche is much more of a timeless thing, stretching all the way back to the attitudes and beliefs of the founding fathers when they drafted the Declaration of Independence. Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Robert Frost’s poems, John Steinbeck’s books, the games of baseball and (gridiron) football. These are just some of the cultural artifacts said to be part of the American psyche.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨to the moon 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
We just need to send Elon to Mars and then we’ll be happy here on Earth.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A funny thing in Iran is how they repackage old PlayStation consoles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Oh I agree! I loved that startup sound! Compared to the SNES I was used to it sounded sooo next gen!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
But that doesn’t explain why some people are way more susceptible to being stuck in a cult than others.

Personally I think it’s genetic. It’s some kind of brain feature that leads to people having beliefs that are extremely hard to change. I say this is a feature, not a defect, because you only have to go back a few hundred years to find a society where not having the right belief system can quickly lead to ostracization and death.

It’s a survival tool that has suddenly found itself in the modern informational environment and it can’t cope. See it in action and it’s incredibly tragic.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Skyblivion, the fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, nears completion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Without the gargantuan 3-dimensional death maze dungeons it’s not really going to appeal to the hardcore Daggerfall fans.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Psychology⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Pure psychology research definitely has its methodological and rigour issues that cast doubt on all its findings. However I think working psychologists in industry have validated psychological methods (A/B testing) and theories (dark patterns) for making profit at the expense of users’ privacy, mental health, time, and attention.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month).⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Not a woman but I just turned 41 recently. Here’s the secret to life from here on out:

While your body keeps changing (slowly) your mind really doesn’t. So you’re going to feel the same as you always did! This is pretty cool!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah I don’t like banging my head into a wall either. What I mean by enjoying getting lost is being in a dangerous area where I don’t know how to get back to safety. It’s a mini adventure within an adventure to figure out how to escape without dying.

One game I play, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, has a built in mechanism to create situations like that: shafts you can fall down that put you into an unexplored level that’s deeper and more difficult than the one you were on. It’s pretty effective at creating these mini adventures though fans of the game complain about them all the time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Does it have an auto-map feature? That’s the biggest difference for me. I enjoy the newer MVs but the auto-map feature makes it impossible (for me) to get lost. I’m used to games without any kind of auto-map.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why We Love to Get Lost in Games: The Enduring Appeal of Metroidvanias⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Getting lost is definitely a love it or hate it kind of thing. I love getting lost in games. I wish more games had it as a feature. It’s extremely rare these days. Most games hold your hand like a toddler at Disneyland.

It’s okay to hate getting lost. There are loads and loads of games out there for you. I just cross my fingers for a few more games for me!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Dune 3', With Timothee Chalamet & Zendaya, Aims To Shoot This Summer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Director wasn’t sure if he even wanted to continue with it. The end of the 2nd film is caught up to the end of the first book. So now we will be entering book 2 territory. The story gets quite weird from here on out.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hurry it along chucklenuts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Another reason to prefer self-checkout. People in line get fanned out across multiple machines.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.

The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!

So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.

Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.

All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.

And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.

The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.

Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.

There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing. Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.

Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.

So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.

That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.

By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.

The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
No, a kilogram of bell peppers is about 3-4 peppers. These things are massive! 5.30€ is about $7.80 Canadian. A bit cheaper but not much.

I don’t know if you have a lot of greenhouses in Europe. Here in Canada we have some but nowhere near enough to feed the country. We import a lot of vegetables from California and Mexico. Can’t always grow locally when there’s a metre of snow on the ground and the air is -10C or colder for 6 months.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doordash deserves it's fate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Fresh vegetables are way more expensive than that where I live. A package of lettuce (good for 3 days) costs $4. A package of bell peppers (3 peppers) costs $8-10.

Allocating $1.50 (CAD, about equal to 1€) to vegetables might get me a head of lettuce and a bit of carrot and onion. Enough to make a basic garden salad. Nowhere near enough to make something nice like a rich vegetable soup!