solrize
@solrize@lemmy.ml
- Comment on 3 days ago:
I had an Acer as a work laptop some years back. It was fine, though I didn’t use it that heavily, so maybe issues would have come up if I did. Also, maybe there are worse now.
For personal use I’ve generally bought Thinkpads and pounded the crap out of them. I’m currently thinking of getting a Lenovo Yoga if they go on special Black Friday again, but I have trepidations.
- Comment on When "AI" content becomes indistinguishable from human-made content, is there, philosophically speaking, any meaningful differences between the two? 3 days ago:
It’s up to you. There’s a traditional wooden drinking cup called a kuksa that is popular with outdoors types. It’s carved from a solid block of wood. You can buy them, but it’s more “bushcrafty” if you make one yourself. Further, you’re supposed to use only hand tools, no power tools. OTOH, one that you order online was probably milled by a machine. It’s hard to tell them apart though.
Is there a philosophical difference? Up to you.
- Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone? 6 days ago:
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physical mail has gotten way more expensive, now 78 cents for a regular letter and $5 for a small package. So it adds up. I probably send a dozen emails a day while sending out maybe 3 envelopes per month, usually stuff like bill payments or business docs, rather than personal letters.
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they collect all the metadata now, i.e. photographs of the front and back of the envelope. I try not to write return addresses on envelopes but sometimes it’s necessary and sometimes I forgot to omit it. They do get delivered without the return address, though I don’t have enough samples to say the reliability is any different.
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- Comment on Federal Judge, Warning of ‘Existential Threat’ to Democracy, Resigns 1 week ago:
stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law”
Wait, isn’t that exactly what they want? And can’t you do a lot more as a federal judge than as a rando? The saying used to be “don’t mess with federal judges–they can lock you in a room and throw away the room!”.
- Comment on Do air purifiers really reduce dust much? 1 week ago:
They help, and they can take out airborne pathogens. Look up “Corsi-Rosenthal box” if you want to DIY a very powerful and cheap but noisy one.
- Comment on Which community for showing my apps? 1 week ago:
Depends on the app? Maybe say more about what the apps do.
- Comment on Hegseth Is Purging Military Leaders With Little Explanation | The moves to fire or sideline generals and admirals are without precedent in recent decades and have rattled the top brass. 1 week ago:
Bill Kristol (conservative commentator I think) also questioned it on tweeter:
x.com/BillKristol/status/1983909906664059280
Purges of senior military officers.
If this were happening elsewhere, we’d understand right away what was happening.
It’s hard to grasp that it’s happening here. But it is…
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 week ago:
There’s no legal requirement for state or city elections to synchronize with federal ones, but they tend to do it anyway because elections are expensive to run, so they like to combine them. It’s not always, just a lot of the time.
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 week ago:
Not in 1900 or 2100…
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 1 week ago:
For the most part they are held every two years in November, in even numbered years. Next year is the so-called midterms, which will elect among other things the entire House of Representatives and 1/3 of the Senate. Every 4 years (2024, 2028, etc.) is the presidential election. For the Senate and Representatives, in practice, most of the incumbents get re-elected without much difficulty, but some seats will be in play.
In odd numbered years like 2025, there are a few elections like Mamdani’s and a couple of stage governorships, but there are far fewer seats in play than in even numbered years.
There are also occasionally special elections that can be anytime, i.e. in months other than November. Also, there are primary elections (not deciding who gets an office, but rather, who gets to be a party’s nominee for that office) that are held some months before the November (“general”) election.
Finally there are various kinds of local elections that are not entirely synchronized with the ones for federal offices.
- Comment on Are you friends with any AI bots? 1 week ago:
Not that I know of, but these days I guess there is no way to tell.
- Comment on Is the damsel in distress trope just independent? 2 weeks ago:
No the real world operates by physics which is consistent, but above that are artificial constructs like damsels in distress, that are inconsistent. There’s no world in which those things all work as advertised. We just get by anyway.
- Comment on If "James Bond" is a codename, would a hypothetical female operative filling the same role receive the same codename? 2 weeks ago:
In one story I read, all holders of the 007 designation were automatically called Bond, but idr if their first name became James. It definitely included women either way.
- Comment on Is the damsel in distress trope just independent? 2 weeks ago:
Really no, any logic in the real world that has anything to say about damsels in distress is going to be inconsistent, just like the real world is. Therefore it proves everything and has no indepdendent statements. Also, it will have second-order quantifiers so it won’t have that kind of proof theory. If you treat damsels in distress problems as something like knight-knave puzzles from logic, then sure, you can treat them mathematically. But that’s not so interesting.
There is an excellent book you might like, " Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse" by Torkel Franzén, that discusses various forms fo what you’re trying to do, and explains why it doesn’t make much sense in the end. It’s available from the usual places including pdf’s on the internet. Book review: www.ams.org/journals/…/rev-raatikainen.pdf
- Comment on Trump’s Team Offers to Keep Some Ballroom Donors Incognito | Many corporate interests that have donated to the president’s pet project have business before his administration. 2 weeks ago:
How is it even legal? I know people can donate money to the government but it’s done by writing an unconditional check to the US Treasury. You don’t get to tell them how to spend it.
- Comment on Is the damsel in distress trope just independent? 2 weeks ago:
Real life is not math. To get more pointy headed about it, math has been described as the one place where classical logic actually works. In other contexts, you can’t really chain inferences more than one or two deep, can’t really use the law of excluded middle. The blue-eyed islanders’ problem can only be seen as a clever math puzzle rather than a question about a hypothetical reality, etc.
For those who don’t understand the above: you’re not missing much, so don’t worry.
- Comment on Is the damsel in distress trope just independent? 2 weeks ago:
OP is making sort of a math joke. Independent (always in relation to a given set of axioms) means that you can’t prove the truth or falsehood of the statement from just those axioms. Particularly, there are alternate universes A and B, both consistent with the axioms, where the statement is true in A but false in B.
Here, the two universes are “women who like the trope” and “women who think the trope is sexist”. The two universes both existing means there is no definite truth of the matter, and “independent” evokes that indefiniteness.
Overall, a lame joke imho, but whatever. Sorry, OP.
- Comment on What's the name of the early-mid 2000's song that sounds like Beyonce, starts with a "dun...dun... dun DUN!" guitar part, and the singer makes this "dabudabudabu" sound? 2 weeks ago:
That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 2 weeks ago:
Too many big password breaches also occurred to me.
- Comment on What taxes are on a can of NOS in California? 2 weeks ago:
www.drinknos.com/en-us/products/original/
Had to look that stuff up. Yuck, stay away!
- Comment on How are computer chips designed? 2 weeks ago:
See my edit above where I fixed the book title, which I had originally mis-remembered. It looks like the book is on archive.org:
- Comment on How are computer chips designed? 2 weeks ago:
Doesn’t sound easy to find that way. It wasn’t a popular-type computer book. You might be better off looking online.
- Comment on How are computer chips designed? 2 weeks ago:
You might start with the now quite old but groundbreaking book “Introduction to VLSI design” by Mead and Conway. It shows the chip layouts for basic switches, gates, and stuff like that, and design tools for building circuits up from those. Now imagine decades of improvements to the design tools. For the past few decades chip designs have looked like software programs, except highly parallel. The two main languages (“HDL’s”) are Verilog (looks like C) and VHDL (looks like Ada). You say what circuits you want and how they should be connected, and the compiler and layout software figure out how to place thst stuff on the chip. You can drop “macros” for very complex subsystems into your design, such as communication ports or even microprocessor cores, without having to worry about the insides of the macro blocks. There is a significant FOSS ecosystem of such macros too: see opencores.org for some of what’s available. It’s sort of like Github but for hardware.
- Comment on I'd like to control my air-purifier with one of those power-socket-timer-switch thingies – Is there a way to "auto-press" those non-mechanical buttons? 2 weeks ago:
How would you switch it? What’s an example of something capacitive? This hadn’t occurred to me. I do know there are supposedly capacitive styli for phones, but they don’t work very well.
- Comment on I'd like to control my air-purifier with one of those power-socket-timer-switch thingies – Is there a way to "auto-press" those non-mechanical buttons? 2 weeks ago:
It doesn’t look that way. us.switch-bot.com/pages/switchbot-bot
- Comment on I'd like to control my air-purifier with one of those power-socket-timer-switch thingies – Is there a way to "auto-press" those non-mechanical buttons? 2 weeks ago:
Oh man switchbot is scary, a lot of awful looking IOT stuff though with one wall switch flipping peripheral. I think I’d just rip into the air filter with a soldering iron. Also better check whether the buttons are capacitive.
- Comment on I'd like to control my air-purifier with one of those power-socket-timer-switch thingies – Is there a way to "auto-press" those non-mechanical buttons? 2 weeks ago:
As everyone says, what happens if you just turn on the power at whatever time?
- Comment on What will the next age of innovative art culture create? 3 weeks ago:
AI slop I’m afraid.
- Comment on What are some good uses the new ballroom can have after the Trump regime is over? 3 weeks ago:
Impeachment ceremonies?
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It’s just called makeup. Almost all public “faces” such as actors and politicians wear it. There’s actually an Oscar category for best makeup and hairstyle or something like that. An extreme example, Mr. Spock’s makeup on the original Star Trek took something like 2 hours to put on each day. Leonard Nimoy wrote about it in his autobiography “I am Spock”.