hperrin
@hperrin@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Over 250 CEOs sign open letter supporting K-12 AI and computer science education 8 hours ago:
Why the fuck would anyone listen to what a CEO has to say about education? Or, really anything for that matter?
- Comment on Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable 4 days ago:
By design, it’s supposed to be barely profitable, so it makes sense it would cross that boundary once in a while. Then some miners stop, the difficulty is adjusted automatically, and it becomes profitable again. It’s actually a pretty interesting strategy.
Basically the difficulty depends on how many miners there are on the network. More miners = more difficult. Fewer miners = less difficult. The “difficulty” is just how “lucky” you have to be to hit a successful hash on a block. The block’s hash is based on the previous block + all the transactions you include in your block + a random number you add. If the hash ends in a certain number of zeroes, you have a successful block you can add to the chain, and you’re rewarded with some brand new coin in your wallet (you include that in the transactions in your block).
The amount of new coin constantly goes down as the chain gets longer, until it hits zero and mining doesn’t create new coin. Then, you would charge a fee for including someone’s transaction (a lot of miners already charge a fee). The more zeroes required at the end of the hash, the “harder” it is to mine. The network automatically adjusts how many zeroes are required to keep new blocks being added at a roughly constant rate.
So, fewer miners would mean blocks are being added too slowly at the current difficulty, and the network adjusts to make it easier to hit a successful hash.
- Comment on A completely useful compulsion I have. 5 days ago:
This isn’t a useless compulsion. It makes the carton easier to handle and less likely to tear and drop.
- Comment on Linux help and actual pros and cons 1 week ago:
Yes. It’s really good at that actually. The browser can be cumbersome, but it’s not too bad for just basic browsing with a controller. I wouldn’t want to write an article on it, though. xD
- Comment on Linux help and actual pros and cons 1 week ago:
If you’re going to dual boot, the latest version of Fedora makes that really easy to set up. Linux Mint is also a really good choice. For the love of god, avoid Ubuntu like the plague. It is not user friendly anymore. If you ever have to look up a guide on how to set up Flatpak, you’re in the wrong distro. Flatpaks should be front and center in the software center.
Btw, you don’t download installers from the internet like you do with Windows. You install software from the software app. On Gnome, it’s called Software, and on KDE, it’s called Discover. Fedora offers both Gnome and KDE. Since you’re new to Linux, I’d recommend KDE. It’s similar to the Windows layout.
Then Mint uses Cinnamon. It’s similar to a Windows layout. I don’t know what the software app is called. Cinnamon is really user friendly and familiar. You’d like it.
Since Linux is free and easy to installed, you can try out all three and see which one you like. If you’re dual booting, that might be a bad idea, so instead, try them out using VirtualBox in Windows.
- Comment on Smh being fired for police work 1 week ago:
Too many.
- Comment on Smh being fired for police work 1 week ago:
Good to know it’s not just US cops who are pieces of shit.
- Comment on I LOVE POTATO SALAD 1 week ago:
“Too late. Potato salad with mayo or without?”
(Source: Google Translate)
- Comment on Neutronium would like a word. 1 week ago:
Imagine shipping this tiny little box and it weighs 60 pounds. Poor mailman.
- Comment on What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight 2 weeks ago:
GIVE IT TO ME I WILL TAKE IT
- Comment on Favorite B-Movies? 2 weeks ago:
I really like Miami Connection. It’s so cheesy, but in an endearing way.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
That’s really cool!
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
Oh, I love skeleton watches! Beautiful!
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
The style, yeah, but this is a modern one.
- Comment on In the not too distant past this was a thing 2 weeks ago:
A photo of my current watch as I’m wearing it right now.
- Comment on Anyone remember Courage? 3 weeks ago:
You’re not perfect.
- Comment on Do it 3 weeks ago:
No I will not do that, because the last song I heard was Kids by MGMT.
- Comment on My ravioli bowl won't unstick. Took about an hour of prying, and still I couldn't unstick the plate. 3 weeks ago:
Hot air cooled, contracted, and created partial vacuum is my guess. Make it hot again and it will unstick, I bet.
- Comment on Switch 2 Tutorial Game Welcome Tour Costs $10, Nintendo Explains Why It's Not a Free Console Pack-In - IGN 3 weeks ago:
I was on the fence about Switch 2, leaning toward not getting one. This just solidified that position. No way I’m paying for something that charges for the instruction manual.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 4 weeks ago:
New GPUs don’t work on Linux? Where did you get that idea from?
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 4 weeks ago:
I got ahead of the game a little bit by switching to Linux in 2008.
- Comment on How do you answer the question "What's new with you?" when nothing happens in your life? 4 weeks ago:
I can’t remember the last time nothing has been going on in my life. It sounds wonderful.
- Comment on How does one snap their fingers? 4 weeks ago:
Put your fingers together like so:
Then push your thumb to the right while pressing your middle finger down hard. Let your thumb slide out, releasing your middle finger, which will snap against your hand like this:
Your middle finger hitting your hand is what makes the snapping noise, so the harder your press your middle finger down, the louder the snap will be.
- Comment on Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives 4 weeks ago:
Oh, yeah, that even predates email!
- Comment on Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives 4 weeks ago:
Arguably, the first federated social media is email from 1981. A more “social networking” type system is IRC from 1988.
- Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg? 4 weeks ago:
Maybe if you examine the hex codes, but what if it’s paint? And what do you call that color in the middle? Is it green? Or red? Or neither? Something in between? What if the lighting conditions mess with it?
Species aren’t measured digitally, so the metaphor isn’t perfect, but I hope you can see what I mean by it. My bigger point is that speciation happens on a population level, not an individual level. Parents don’t have children of a different species. Populations evolve into different species.
- Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg? 4 weeks ago:
Ok, let me put it another way. Green and red are clearly different colors, right? But if you make a gradient where the green smoothly transitions to the red, there isn’t one single point where it changes from “green” to “red”. This doesn’t mean that the two colors on the ends aren’t completely different colors, it means that when you look at every pixel, they’re almost exactly the same color as the pixel next to them.
Different species exist. Speciation is a thing. I’m not claiming otherwise. But creatures don’t birth a species other than their own. It takes many many many generations over eons of time for a population to speciate. Speciation is something that happens to populations, not individuals.
- Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg? 4 weeks ago:
Just because it’s a saying doesn’t mean it’s true for everything. Every child is the same species as its parent.
- Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg? 4 weeks ago:
And what I’m telling you is that there was no first chicken, just like there was no first Spanish speaker. Species don’t evolve that way.
- Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg? 4 weeks ago:
No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.
Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 10,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 20,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 10kya, it could breed with the chicken from 20kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?
Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.
