DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 2 days ago:
schroedinger’s cat is an intentionally absurd metaphor from when QM dorks were still arguing about spooky action at a distance.
Both the cat, the box, the vial of poison, and the cesium atom itself are all observers as far as a real QM wavefunction would care. But as i understand it, getting any utility out of the idea of real collapsing wave-functions requires treating at least the atom as if it wasn’t, and once we start including atomic scale things we might as well just include everything up to and including the cat.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 days ago:
While I certainly don’t want to argue about the wisdom of preventive measures towards petty crime or dangerous outcomes, i think it’s worth knowing that even trivially surpassed barriers can alter what recompense or punishment can be provided from a court of law.
For example: There was a big copyright infringement case against an AI company recently, which ended in a settlement of a few thousand dollars per registered work so infringed. Authors whose work wasn’t registered were not eligible for the same amount, because the law limits how much they can recover if a work’s copyright wasn’t registered.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 days ago:
Mass produced items are not all the same. They are merely similar, and can have whatever variations the bulk manufacturing process requires or allows.
Not every car made on the same assembly line on the same day had the same options, and near every cake baked in a mass bakery will have a distinct internal structure.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 days ago:
The utility of a lock is that it’s a clear permission barrier. If you don’t have the key and bypass the lock, it’s clear at least to you that you aren’t using a key. Which can be the difference between ordinary trespass and burglary.
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 3 days ago:
“it can’t be hidden variables because they’re not as even as this math says they should be!” really just seems to be the whole QM field agreeing to stop arguing about spooky action at a distance.
The distinction between wave-functions as real things that collapse at superluminal speed and the same as mere mathematical placeholders for deterministic local effects which occur without subjective time seems to be a semantic and philosophical one, similar to the “multiple realities” explanation of quantum uncertainty or the “11 dimensions” explanation for why gravity is weaker.
As a practical matter, the only thing that students and non-physicts should remember is that wavefunction collapse allows superluminal coordination but not superluminal communication.
- Comment on "Luke, I am your *second* father" 6 days ago:
If nobody else, Obi-Wan. Although the exchange at the Lars household over dinner suggests that Owen and Beru didn’t exactly hide his father’s name from him. Since “Anakin” doesn’t appear at all in the script until after the twist, it’s likely that there wasn’t a firm name for him until ROTJ.
imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back.htm… imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-Return-of-the-Jedi.html
Luke definitely knew he had a father, though. And had an idea of who he was from the aunt and uncle who raised him, Obi-Wan, and even the rebel pilots.
- Comment on PSA 1 week ago:
The first smell test for any survey is how would they possibly control for the non-response rate?
Putting out a billboard to ask something like “what’s kind of makeup should a cracked egg try first” will get a bunch of recommendations and advertisment copy. But it wouldn’t tell you much about how many males wearing makeup are trans, enby, drag, or just wearing a costume. And noting at all about how many trans girls even try makeup at all.
“Tell me your responses about how much HRT sucks” would, similarly, get you a dataset that’s highly distorted.
- Comment on Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion? 2 weeks ago:
No matter how complex or inefficient the orphan grinding machine, if you buy something second-hand and the person you bought it from buys a replacement with your proceeds, you are contributing to that sale and thereby funding the orphan grinding machine.
- Comment on Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN 2 weeks ago:
While I don’t buy a lot of PC games, I did pick up Stellaris on GOG.
The weird second-class status I get when it comes to betas and mods is enough for anyone to scream. Especially since if I wanted to move to steam, I’d have to re-buy every add-on I want to play.
Add-on lock-in really is a thing. Even if it may be as much a lazy publisher as it is a greedy storefront.
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like "analog" stuff is more "tangible"? 3 weeks ago:
OneDrive is absurdly easy to not use. I feel confident saying that if you can’t figure out how to save an MS word file to a non-onedrive folder you should definitely leave it on. A single backup on a cloud service with a local cache is better than a single backup on one physical drive that will eventually fail.
If it’s important, you want at least three backups in two different formats with one physically removed from the others. A copy you save to a thumb stick, a copy you save to OneDrive, and one you print out. (Or, conversely, the physical copy you bought, one electronic copy local, and one copy of that electronic version saved to iCloud or what have you.)
- Comment on How long would it take a black Hole to fully absorb a person from event horizon to center of the earth style? 3 weeks ago:
Not a physicist – they know the math.
Just a sci-fi enthusiast who got really annoyed by a trilogy that didn’t understand what the “delta” in “delta-v” meant and so the space ships spent a lot of time getting to a very high orbital speed before each fight.
- Comment on How long would it take a black Hole to fully absorb a person from event horizon to center of the earth style? 3 weeks ago:
Time dilation is your subjective acceleration veering into more “time” than “space”.
If you somehow were in a flat universe with parallel velocity to an object several light-years away, and somehow managed to accelerate towards it at 1 g, you’d impact at the time on your watch that pure Newtonian physics says you would.
The subjective clocks of the place you’re hitting would measure your travel time as a lot longer, however. But it wouldnt be infinite at all – a relatively small multiple of “several” years, in fact.
(Before the relativistic impact recused both you and them to an energetic plasma, that is.)
- Comment on Can someone please ELI5 the legal issue with genericized trademarks? 3 weeks ago:
A trademark is a distinct way to refer to a business. The whole set of legal rights and privileges that this weird form of intellectual property gets are to make sure that when somebody talks about " dome guys tacos" they’re definitely talking about my tacos and not yours or some other persons.
If I let dumb guys tacos become a generic term that I don’t say hey, that’s not talking about my tacos anymore. Don’t do that then I’ve let my trademark become generic. This is unlikely to happen to actual tacos but if I had come up with a brand new pseudo taco dish and I called it the DCT, and then every Mexican restaurant in the country copied it and also called it the DCT, then the idea has become genericized and I can’t. Then at the end of it start trying to collect money from other people for calling the thing I invented and failed to produce by the name that has been attached to it.
This is of course entirely apart from the menu of how to create a DCT, we should be covered by copyright, or the specific set of instructions on how to create a DCT, which hypothetically I could get a patent on. (Although I don’t think they award patents for food.)
- Comment on In the sub 'nonpolitical_comics' there is no underscore between non and political. 4 weeks ago:
Most things someone sees as infuriating will have an explanation that makes sense. This does not make them non-infuriating.
Like beauty, infuriation is in the eye of the inflamed.
- Comment on I’m not saying that I agree with right- or center-wing views, and I do condemn transphobia. However, do you think there should be a distinction between critiquing beliefs held by transgender people, and engaging in transphobia? 5 weeks ago:
Your analogy is more telling than you think it is, and argues rather strongly against the idea that right wing transphobia has worthwhile points.
Yes, the (non) existence of God Almighty is both philosophically and scientifically unfalsifiable. But we don’t as societies use this to assert that every last person who proclaims a faith is telling an intentional lie about belonging to a religion
Gender is not like whether or not God exists, but is instead like what church you attend.
- Comment on Why do Interstate highways exits post the nearby jail/prison/detention center? 5 weeks ago:
Yes, because you despite not being OP proclaimed that warning off hitchhikers was the “right answer”
- Comment on Why do Interstate highways exits post the nearby jail/prison/detention center? 1 month ago:
Not a bot, just a guy whose been on the internet for years. Which means that, yes, I presume some people are ignorant of facts. (And that others are fucking stupid.)
@OP posted about “exit signs”, which is not what your sign shows. Which is why I described the ones I did.
Why did you assume that the black-on-white public safety signs like what you posted were what they meant by “exit sign”?
- Comment on Why do Interstate highways exits post the nearby jail/prison/detention center? 1 month ago:
Road signs are like zip codes : they aren’t assigned based on desirability but volume of need.
While more Americans visit a library or courthouse than visit a prison, such places are almost always highly local. If you or your loved ones are sent to prison, it’s probably going to be somewhere you aren’t familiar with.
And don’t discount that a lot of prisons were built as "job providers* in rural communities, so there are a considerable amount of employees that have to locate the place.
(If you want to be depressed about the American prison industrial complex, look up the statewide budgets for the departments of incarceration and contrast them with highway construction or education )
- Comment on Why do Interstate highways exits post the nearby jail/prison/detention center? 1 month ago:
The typically white-on-green signs shown near US interstate exits are navigational aids, not public safety messages.
If the local prison is on the exit, it’s just the single most notable landmark.
- Comment on What are some cool infections? 1 month ago:
Honestly, WoT balefire scarring would be epic as fuck. You had a foot replaced when you were young by a wizard,.and in the future the jerk gets balefire’d so hard that his entire lifespan back to when you got your foot replaced is undone.
The charactes’s foot appears as a ghostly flicking outline, like the false light if you stare at something too bright for too long. It can make a few marks, but is not solid enough to support the character.
This could just be a clever detail, or it could be a setup for an epic campaign.
- Comment on What unique thing bothers you about politics in general? 1 month ago:
This is a consequence of America wanting to pretend that the rest of the government has to be funded in accordance with the constitutional guard against a standing army.
The only thing that Congress does that has a constituonal time limit is fund the army.
- Comment on Windows copying Mac feature, but only in certain apps 1 month ago:
Not to question anybody shitting on windows ME, but keyboard-only navigation is a core windows feature, since it’s a consequence of accessibility
No extra software needed; installing the power toys just makes it easier and a little more discoverable.
- Comment on Windows copying Mac feature, but only in certain apps 1 month ago:
I wonder if this is a holdover from when you could navigate windows completely without a mouse using only the keyboard and shortcuts.
You can absolutely still do that now. At worst, you install power toys and use the accessibility option to move the mouse with arrow keys.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Why should abelsim be given latitude that we wouldn’t extend to racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism?
My opinion is that embarrassed bigotry in private is still bigotry. It’s good that those with such feelings recognize the harm that they bring (or at least the public shaming that they can suffer), but it makes for a simpler life to just excise such hatreds whenever you can.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 2 months ago:
The same folks sending “the left are subhuman!” to the right aren’t also sending “the right are Nazis!” to the left. That would be a duplicate signal and inefficient.
Instead, they’re sending “both sides suck” to the middle.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 2 months ago:
Because right-wing propaganda is “become Nazis, the left are all sub-humans” and the left wing propaganda is “what the fuck, the right are all Nazis!?”
It’s hard to spot propaganda when it’s just the truth spoken loudly.
- Comment on Is there a mechanism in the USA to undo presidential pardons years later if political corruption has been proven as motivation to give these pardons? 2 months ago:
Go read the actual text of the US Constitution . The answer is a quirky technical “well, theoretically yes but practically no.”
constitution.congress.gov/browse/…/clause-1/
The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
That last emphasized line means that if the US Congress were to impeach and remove a president for bribery or a criminal conspiracy, they could also negate any pardons given to POTUS’s collaborators.
Of course, since no US President has ever been removed from office by congress’s impeachment power, and it’s uncertain if a post-term impeachment and conviction would itself pass the inevitable SCOTUS appeal, this is even less likely than the US Congress awarding a no-majoroty electoral collage vote to the other major party.
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 2 months ago:
I’m glad you took it in the spirit it was intended. (Slightly chiding, but well-meaning.)
I think it can be really hard to not pass on our bad habits to our kids. Mine have a room just as messy as mine ever was, and they’re at least as bad at doing their homework as I ever was.
Good job so far!
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 2 months ago:
But neither wants to eat them.
Respectfully, if neither of your children have a vegetable* dish they will eat as a snack you haven’t exposed them to a wide enough array of vegetables and vegetables preparation methods.
Don’t be afraid to add salt, roast instead of boil, or just experiment with things you haven’t tried.
(*: And “vegetable” here is strictly in a culinary context, excluding grains and near-grains like potatoes and including savory sead-bearing plant-parts like cucumbers. But if they don’t even like a form of potato or a grain, you may have a eating disorder on your hand…)
- Comment on How much money's out there? 2 months ago:
Value for resources is also highly subjective.
If I have zero water and $50, but you have 50 waters and $0, I would value one of your waters more than one of my dollars and you would value one of my dollars more than one of your waters. And so we would trade, and both be happier for it.