sbeak
@sbeak@sopuli.xyz
Hi, I’m sbird! I like programming and am interested in Physics. I also have a hobby of photography.
- Comment on Happy birds 17 hours ago:
Depends on the species of penguin. There are some big ones as well as little guys! Also that penguin might be on the younger side, given that it seems pretty curious about the world.
I’m not a marine biologist though, so treat this with a grain of saltm
- Comment on I use Ubuntu btw. 18 hours ago:
I want some of what you’re smoking.
Is the pun intended?
see: Smoked seafood, smoked salmon
- Comment on To cosmic shreds, I say! 1 day ago:
Yeah, CP violation is a big focus when it comes to the research of baryogenesis, the theoretical process that produced the baryon asymmetry! Her experiment established that parity symmetry (P) can be broken through weak interactions, and later experiments showed that the combined CP symmetry (charge conjugation + parity) can also be broken, again through weak force shenanigans.
CP violation is one of the three Sakharov conditions (which were proposed by and named after Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov) of dynamic baryogenesis, as it would mean that matter and antimatter can behave differently in certain processes. If they behaved identically, no asymmetry would be produced and they would both annihilate. However, there was one extra baryon for every million antibaryons (we know this through measurements of the CMB and the quantities of light elements produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis), and this slight difference allowed matter to dominate the universe.
- Comment on To cosmic shreds, I say! 2 days ago:
There is, afaik, no explanation why there is more matter than anti matter, so maybe we just don’t see it
Like, dark side of the universe or something ;-)
This is the baryon asymmetry problem, and indeed, one of the proposed solutions is an “anti-universe” that flows backwards in time. The theory goes that all the antimatter travelled backwards in time while matter travelled forward from the Big Bang, creating a mirror anti-universe. However, there has been experimental evidence against this theory, as antiparticles seem to move forward in time, just like their matter counterparts.
There are a bunch more theories on how matter dominated the universe, like electroweak baryogenesis and leptopgenesis! Those are a bit more complicated though and are difficult to explain in an internet comment.
- Comment on Why do mosques feel so trippy? 3 days ago:
Just like most other religious buildings and structures, the designs are very ornate and elaborate. You will see that the building style is different depending on where it was built, when it was built, the materials available at the time, etc. The architectural style may also reflect the governing authority at the time and their own influences.
- Comment on Is coding possible on smart phones ? 4 days ago:
You can, attaching a Linux phone to an external monitor gives you a standard Linux desktop. Like Samsung DeX mode on steroids, since you can run desktop apps easily!
- Comment on What is the difference between http and HTTPS ? 4 days ago:
Just to add to the definitions that others have already mentioned, simply because a website is using an HTTPS connection does not mean that it’s necessarily a trustworthy website. The website you are accessing could be compromised, so don’t take the green lock / whatever your browser uses as the HTTPS indicator as a guarantee for security!
Another fun fact, although HTTP(S) is used for serving HTML webpages, there are other protocols for different use cases. For example, FTP is used for file sharing, and SMTP is for email. You might have also heard of the Tor network, which is used when anonymity is important (see journalists, activists, etc.)
- Comment on Is there music I haven't heard because I only speak English? 6 days ago:
I tend to enjoy a lot of (mostly Euro) rock and punk music, so here are some of my favourites:
- Opca Opasnost, Film (Croatian)
- Ska-P (Spanish)
- Nova Koma (Latvian)
- Metro Luminal, Vennaskond (Estonian)
- Asta Kask, Bjornarna (Swedish)
- Kino, Bi-2, Nautilus Pompilius, Gromyka (Russian)
- Die Artze, Die Toten Hosen (German)
- Ornato Violeta (Portuguese)
- Indochine, Luke, Starshooter, Telephone (French)
- Jufkamental (Bosnian)
- the pillows, Melt-Banana, Otoboke Beaver (Japanese)
- Myslovitz, Republika, Kult (Polish)
- BTR (Bulgarian)
- Generacion Suicida (based in LA, sings in Spanish)
- Comment on Is there music I haven't heard because I only speak English? 6 days ago:
I like every single music genre pretty much equally, don’t prefer if a man or woman is singing, doesn’t appear to be any sort of rhyme or reason other than the beat
That’s fair, I like the beats of music too
Am I missing out on anything from other countries?
Yes, definitely! Although American and British music is plentiful, there’s also lots of great music from other places too of any kind of genre.
Personally, all the Croatian music I’ve heard are bangers, and in general, a lot of the Balkan music is great.
I don’t care if they sing about killing babies
I feel like you should probably care if somebody actively pushes for the killing of babies. Just my opinion though.
- Comment on average physics student vs POTUS 47 6 days ago:
At this point you can’t really tell whether something is satire or a quote from the orange president.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 10 comments
- Comment on How far back into the human/mammal family tree does one think we would have to go to find a genetic relative that doesn't give a whit about how good their hair looks ? 1 week ago:
I would imagine that, after multicellular life capable of sexual reproduction developed, there was an incentive for creatures of all kinds to develop techniques to attract mates. And before eyes became a thing, I would imagine that things like scents were (and still are for many species!) important for attracting mates. It definitely goes far beyond mammals, the development of visual, olfactory, and other sensual features for attracting mates is important for all kinds of species that sexually reproduce.
But looks aren’t just for showing off to mates. They might also serve other purposes, like warding off predators or protecting itself from the environment. For instance, our eyelashes were developed to protect our delicate eyes from sand, dust, and other small particles.
Our looks are also how we identify others. For social creatures like us humans, prominent features like our eyes, hair, and ears are used to figure out who you are interacting with. This isn’t unique to humans and isn’t exclusive of visual features either. Dogs can distinguish between trusted individuals and strangers using a combination of sight and scent. Whales have strong sense of family and can identify others through, among other ways, their calls. Dolphins are similar with a pattern of chirps to identify their friends and family.
But if you really want to be pedantic, you could argue that the “look” can be defined as the physical (outer) shape of an organism, in which case the shapes of the receptors, cell membrane, etc. of unicellular microorganisms can be the different “looks” that have developed for different purposes. This would include viruses too, which are only partly alive, which might mean that this idea of “developing looks” could extend before life itself existed!
I didn’t do Biology in school so don’t quote me on any of this!
- Comment on Sniff sniff 1 week ago:
do you mean comprised?
“Compromised” means that some system has been taken over by unwanted other actors. For instance, if there was a mole during an internal meeting between activists and that mole secretly reported it to the police, that meeting would be considered “compromised”. You might also hear the word in cybersecurity, where your account, server, etc. is “compromised”, as it is being accessed by malicious users.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I’m part of the autistic spectrum (diagnosed as Asperger’s, but apparently that term has possible roots in Nazism and “racial superiority”, yikes!), and I found that going outside and taking a walk outside always helped me calm down. I remember whenever I got upset as a child and overreacted, the teacher would take me for a walk around the school, and I always felt better afterwards. I also liked eating my favourite snack to calm down, though that might just be because I like snacks.
Just my two cents. I don’t experience too many of the negative “symptoms” of autism anymore nowadays, but I hope you (or somebody else) finds this helpful!
- Comment on Good cloud alternatives for Google Docs? 1 week ago:
The various public Etherpad instances are good. There are some that don’t require login (good for sharing public notes, bad for private documents), and some that do (better for private documents, gives you user access controls i.e. who can modify or read the notes)
Framapad is one that needs a login, but there are plenty of other Etherpad instances.
Alternatively, I heard lots of people like Nextcloud Notes (you can use a public instance or use a VPS)
- Comment on 1 week ago:
A protocol is simply a set of standards that two parties agree to. They can be between people (like Alice and Bob using an agreed cipher to encrypt mail) or involve computers (in which case you have the HTTP for delivering websites, IP for connecting devices to the internet, IMAP for email services, etc.). You might have also heard of spies, government officials, etc. in movies and TV shows talk about “following protocol” or “breaking protocol”. Technically, you could create your own protocol for anything, but you would first need to find another party to agree to it (whether that’s additional devices or people you know).
One protocol you are using right now is ActivityPub! This “federates” the various different Lemmy, Mastodon, Piefed, etc. instances to form an interconnected social network that is greater than the sum of its parts!
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
The internet is full of diverse opinions, and you tend to go towards communities that fit your morals, ideas, etc. On big tech social media platforms, this is done through algorithms that track your activity, while on the Fediverse, content is more curated (so still a sort of bubble, but one that you choose for yourself I guess). Additionally, negative opinions are more likely to gain traction online, whether they are valid or not. People are more likely to share polarising views online rather than those experienced by everyone.
You will also note that in the real world, there is fewer “tech-savvy” people. Most people don’t know about the unethical nature of LLMs and how they are problematic to copyright. The majority of people don’t have a strongly negative opinion on LLMs nor do they usually have a strong positive opinion on it. They see it as something that can make paragraphs using only a few words and “art” with a single prompt. They think it’s neat, but certainly not the saviour to humanity many business execs think it is.
But I would like to highlight that, in real life, there are a lot of people who hate LLMs, text-to-image models, etc. Most artists don’t like that these models are being trained on their creations without their consent or any sort of compensation. Doctors and others in the medical industry don’t like that people are turning to LLMs for health advice (that is usually wrong and/or harmful), particularly when it concerns mental health. Software maintainers hate that “vibe coders” are submitting unreviewed LLM-generated code, taking up the time that could be better spent fixing bugs or developing new features. And I’m sure that there are businesspeople who are worried that the “AI bubble” will pop any moment once investors realise that they are losing money, crashing the economy and bankrupting a lot of people.
It’s not that everybody online hates LLMs and, in the real world, people feel the opposite. That wouldn’t really make sense. It’s more that polarising opinions are amplified on the Internet. See the “AI bros” online for some strongly positive opinions, they are quite ridiculous I think, they somehow treat LLMs to a higher degree than most business execs. And on the Internet, there is a higher proportion of tech-savvy individuals who know the ethical, legal, and moral risks of LLMs.
I highlight that they are LLMs, not AI. To say that they are “AI” would mean that they have intelligence. In my opinion, since these models do not actually understand the prompt given. I believe that intelligence requires being able to understand a problem and figure out a solution. There are plenty of intelligent beings on this planet, us humans, corvids, octopi, certain species of whale, etc. But LLMs are not one of them.
- Comment on Ada Lovelace 1 week ago:
Yes, because of hormone shenanigans, in some physical tasks, men tend to do slightly better than women. But as you said, these differences do not mean that men are inherently “better” than women. Additionally, the discussion was around mathematics and reasoning skills, in which there isn’t too much of a difference between men and women.
That does not mean that one or the other is better in general, it means women and men complement each other.
This reads like you believe that “women are dependent on men” and that you are against same-sex relationships. I hope that’s not your intention.
- Comment on Any examples of spoonerisms insults 1 week ago:
Not really an insult, but I’ve heard the phrase “how the turns have tabled” as a version of “how the tables have turned”.
- Comment on Ada Lovelace 1 week ago:
No, the point is that there isn’t, and experiments that do show a slight difference are probably due to experimental error, biases, sampling differences, etc.
Simply being either a man or woman does not make you better than another.
- Comment on If internet means wires, then how come my mobile phone gets connected to the internet ? I'm roaming everywhere with it inside my pocket. 1 week ago:
The cables under the sea are used to connect the networks across seas and oceans, allowing people on both sides to communicate with one another. A normal wireless connection can’t work at these distances without the use of a very large (and expensive) receiver, so undersea cables are used to do so. Disruptions of these cables (by both natural and human actors) have caused concern for a lot of people as they are critical for communication across the world.
- Comment on If internet means wires, then how come my mobile phone gets connected to the internet ? I'm roaming everywhere with it inside my pocket. 1 week ago:
In a nutshell, the “Internet” is actually a mix of fibre optic cables, copper wires, wireless networks, and satellites that all intercommunicate with each other using the Internet Protocol (IP). These different parts are used for different purposes.
Wireless is used for mobile devices, home networks, etc., while wired connections are common when speed is of utmost importance, so things like enterprise networks, servers, that sort of thing uses wires and cables. Fibre optic cables uses light to transmit data while copper wires use the flow of electrons (electricity) to do so, the former is faster but more expensive while the latter is more affordable. Finally, satellites are used when neither is available, and typically used when you are somewhere remote, or when normal connection methods are disrupted. In Ukraine, soldiers use satellites to communicate due to the disruption of mobile networks from the war.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
A lot of people have already mentioned that they are too large and expensive for consumer devices. They also need to be cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (using liquid helium) for the superconductors, which adds additional bulk and power draw.
These quantum computers would also require a different architecture that isn’t supported by the majority of software and OSs, since they work very differently to standard non-quantum chips. Think how RISC-V isn’t very well supported too well right now, and it’s much worse than that since the logic gates needed for computation, storage, etc. need to be rewritten entirely due to the use of qubits over bits! Aside for some very specific research bits, there is nearly nothing that can currently run on a quantum computer.
As of right now, even the largest quantum computers only has a few hundreds, maybe a few thousand, qubits, which isn’t enough processing power for running a regular desktop OS and consumer applications, even if everything was magically ported to quantum land. Not only that, major hurdle right now is reducing environmental interference from affecting the qubits, meaning there are currently high error rates, i.e. the qubits do not behave.
- Comment on How were maps created back in the day? 2 weeks ago:
A lot of others have already mentioned the use of trigonometry. I would like to add that, often times, the position of the Sun, stars, etc. were used for navigation. I would imagine their positions would be useful to judge large distances. And many times, map makers asked those living in the area about regions they themselves have not explored in great detail. Lots of maps are also an amalgamation of many other maps, so although it is unlikely one person explored vast swaths of forest by themselves, it is more likely that different parts of it came from different people, including locals.
p.s. Eratosthenes, an ancient Greek polymath from 200 BCE ish (!!), measured the circumference of the Earth to a remarkable accuracy simply by using shadows of a vertical rod cast by the Sun. It’s kind of insane how people were able to do all this without the assistance of modern technology.
- Comment on There are basically 4 types of files : text, image, audio and audio visual, right ? 2 weeks ago:
Oh, and you also have files like .zip or .tar(.gz), which are used to store a compressed version of some amount of digital files. And they can different in compression techniques, how data is arranged, etc.
- Comment on There are basically 4 types of files : text, image, audio and audio visual, right ? 2 weeks ago:
Not just those. Files are just a method of storing digital data, so it’s not just those four. You can have files storing databases, software (think exe, AppImage, deb, rpm, etc.), design files, projects, code (.py, .js, .ts, etc.) and more!
And file extensions are a method of telling different programs how to handle different files, since the data is formatted a bit differently. For instance, a “.txt” file is stored in plain text, while an executable file is compiled code that needs to be run.
For your example, I would like to note that you are comparing a plain text file type to a rich text file type. Plain text file types, like .txt, .md (Markdown), and the different code files (like .json, .py, .rs, etc.), can be viewed and edited with a simple Notepad-style text editor. The data is stored, as the name suggests, in plain text. In comparison, rich text file types, like .odt and .docx, encode additional data like fonts, styles, images, animations, etc., and require a rich text processor (like LibreOffice, MS Office, etc.) to read them. You can’t view them through a notepad-style application, for example.
And for images, video, and audio, you have it take into account compression, codecs, that sort of thing. You might have heard that a PNG can store transparent images and is a lossless format while a JPEG cannot and is a lossy format. “Lossless” means that, after compression, no data has been removed (or “lost”), while “lossy” means that some data is removed after compression. For audio, MP3s are lossy while WAV files are lossless. You might have also heard of “raw” photos and “raw” videos, those mean that the data is directly from the camera in its original quality.
For most file types, you can’t just change the extension to convert them, as the data stored is arranged differently! This is why renaming a .txt file into a .odt will not be a valid rich text document, for example.
- Comment on What does non-gui mean ? 2 weeks ago:
Huh, I didn’t know that. Pretty interesting! I wonder how many acronyms have multiple different long forms…
- Comment on Nope 2 weeks ago:
I think it’s to do with the combined gravity of the “strings” of galaxies, stars, etc. being far stronger than nearly nothing.
- Comment on Cuba Libre 🇨🇺 2 weeks ago:
The post suggests that it has been approved in Cuba and Argentina. I believe you would need to wait for certification by the relevant medical authority in your country.
- Comment on Cuba Libre 🇨🇺 2 weeks ago:
It’s important in case the drug that is being tested has unintended side effects, not having a control group means you have no idea if bad things are caused by the drug or by some other external factor (like medical history of the patients, environment…)
The control group probably isn’t given placebo drugs, that probably wouldn’t fly in most countries. Haven’t looked into these specific trials and I’m not a medical professional!