solrize
@solrize@lemmy.ml
- Comment on should I go back to my old job now that several people, some of them more knowledgeable than me have told me they don't understand my decision to quit it? 6 hours ago:
Just be honest about why you quit and what you’re getting out of it, and that the pay at the new job is almost the same. Say you can think about going back if they offer you a big pay increase and other stress relief.
- Comment on How to deploy a satellite and what are the costs? 1 day ago:
Start by joining amsat.org I guess.
- Comment on Once a Gamble in the Desert, Electric Grid Batteries Are Everywhere 2 days ago:
Even with the gift code but now blocks reader mode and tells you to turn it off. Bah. Article is ok though.
- Comment on Could there be additional forces at super low energies? Could a new fundamental force be discovered anytime soon? + other questions relating to forces 5 days ago:
Currently known forces splitting at low energies, and hidden 5th force: nobody knows. Physics is an observational science and right now there aren’t any observations that require such observations, but never say never.
Star wars force: come on, it’s fiction.
Gravity incompatible with QM: basically, quantum field theories are developed by starting with classical field theories (say electromagnetism) and doing some mathematical transformations called “canonical quantization” and “second quantization” (these have wikipedia articles). In the 1920s through mid-1940s this worked well for electromagnetism, and made good predictions except it broke down at very small scales, giving “infinity” as the answer to calculations that should have been finite. In the late 1940s a scheme called renormalization was developed, that allowed cancelling out the infinities and getting very precise answers. That was called quantum electrodynamics (QED). Later this was extended to the strong and weak nuclear forces, giving the standard model (SM). That was harder, but same basic idea.
The trouble with gravity is that when you perform quantization and then renormalization, the infinities still don’t go away. That’s what the incompatibility means. There are a lot of proposals like string theory to quantize gravity, but it’s all very speculative.
As for detecting gravity waves but not gravitons, it’s similar to the situation with visible light. As far back as the 1700s(?) it was possible to combine light beams and see interference patterns, thus confirming the existence of light waves. Light “particles” (photons) are much harder to detect and I think this was first done convincingly by Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion around 1900 (before relativity).
Disclaimer: I’m no expert and I haven’t made any progress in understanding this stuff beyond the handwaving level that you see above.
- Comment on What does it mean when someone says they're a "targeted individual"? 1 week ago:
It means they look like this:
- Comment on Is there a word for when someone is not capable of, or doesn't try to understand verbal communication in a language, they are fluent in similar to functionally illiterate but for speech? 1 week ago:
You mean the person can read and write, but is bad at voice communication? Maybe a hearing problem?
- Comment on Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Plans to Resign in January 2 weeks ago:
“I believe in term limits and do not think Congress should be a lifelong career or an assisted living facility.” Woah lol, shots fired.
- Comment on Can we have a healthy life only with fruits or fruits and plants combined alone, and if not why? 2 weeks ago:
Being vegan takes a bit of nutritional awareness but it’s not that difficult. You might want some vitamin supplements as people have said. Note that fruit isn’t that much different from candy in terms of the sugar hit. I’m not vegan myself in terms of intentionally sticking to such a diet, but often my eating patterns end up going that way anyway, and it works out ok, at least for a while.
- Comment on Trump Berates One Reporter and Tells Another,‘Quiet Piggy’ 2 weeks ago:
Do you mean moi? Oooh! He noticed me!
- Comment on 3 weeks 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 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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. 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks ago:
Not in 1900 or 2100…
- Comment on when are the upcoming political elections held in america? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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? 4 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? 5 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? 5 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. 5 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? 5 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? 5 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? 5 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? 5 weeks ago:
Too many big password breaches also occurred to me.
- Comment on What taxes are on a can of NOS in California? 5 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? 5 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:
