frezik
@frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Dik Piks 14 hours ago:
Send them a random dick pic back.
- Comment on Dik Piks 16 hours ago:
Or they just think if they see tits it makes them horny so women MUST be the same way?
This one. The problem is that by the time 90% of the hetro cis male population of one generation has figured this out, a new generation of teen hetro cis males are right behind them. A better sex education class would cover this.
- Comment on Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier says criminal “geoengineering and weather modification activities" could have played a role in recent Texas floods 19 hours ago:
If burning oil and coal can be considered weather modification and geoengineering, then yes.
- Comment on Intolerance doesn't discriminate 1 day ago:
Oh, those were cassette tapes of My Book of Bible Stories. Barr had a very grandfatherly voice, so they had him narrate.
- Comment on Intolerance doesn't discriminate 1 day ago:
I presume that you, too, had to go to sleep listening to Barr’s voice on this one.
- Comment on Not great, not terrible 1 day ago:
China has a working prototype today. There weren’t any theoretical issues, someone just needed to put the money down.
Same thing with fusion, really.
- Comment on Not great, not terrible 1 day ago:
It removes the “hope intelligent life evolves fast enough”.
If it was only Uraniam, then you need U-235. That has a half life of about 700M years. Cut in half 2 more times, and there’s almost none left. So if intelligent life took another 1.5B years to develop on Earth (which it easily could have), then that path is cut off.
With Thorium, the sun would probably expand to a red giant first.
- Comment on Not great, not terrible 1 day ago:
Thorium-232 has an extremely long half life (longer than the age of the universe) and it’s reasonably abundant. That’s the isotope useful for the thorium fuel cycle.
So it’s not quite that bad for threading this needle. The fuel cycle is a little more complicated than uranium–it’s not fertile as it is–and that could slow down R&D of a new nuclear program by getting stuck at some step.
- Comment on the universe about to have a little minty b 2 days ago:
At least it’s a testable hypothesis. That’s way farther than most pseudoscience does.
- Comment on Work as a waiter 2 days ago:
Like a public sector job in Wisconsin would have a union.
- Comment on Anon's grandpa does his own research 2 days ago:
This is what happens when old men don’t take up model railroading.
- Comment on Every time 3 days ago:
We had a real union before. If there was a natural disaster in California or Texas or Florida or New York, we all pitched in to help. That’s what federal taxes that go to FEMA do.
That’s breaking down. No matter why it’s happened or who is responsible, this is a bad sign.
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 5 days ago:
The loopholes on the farm bill are so big that I don’t know why we’re debating legalization at this point.
To meet the 2018 farm bill requirements, your thing needs to have <0.3% delta-9 THC by weight. This opened up the delta-8 market–less potent but you can just add more of it–but that was only the start of exploring the new legal territory this opened up.
10mg of THC delta-9 is considered a good sized dose in edible products. A standard can of soda is about 225 grams. So do the math: 0.01g / 225g = 0.004%. Close to two orders of magnitude under the farm bill limit, and a lot of THC seltzers come in bigger cans than that. You can sell that in every state that hasn’t specifically banned it otherwise.
It gets even better. To get 10mg of THC delta-9, a gummy only needs to be about 3g to make the 0.3% limit. Not that big at all.
That mostly leaves smoking/vaping as the only methods that don’t have an easy loophole.
Just legalize it already. This is stupid.
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 5 days ago:
Speculating here, but taxes are one reason.
Almost all the rules about what counts as wine, beer, whiskey, etc. comes from some country making definitions for tax purposes.
- Comment on stock market 6 days ago:
And the most important advice is to leave the money the fuck alone.
I got lucky in that I started having enough money to invest after the 2008 crash. Those years had crazy good gains. The real test comes when the market crashes 30% in a few days. Can you stick to the plan? That happened in 2020 when lockdowns started, and if you stuck to the plan, you still did very, very well that year.
- Comment on stock market 6 days ago:
They aren’t worth the money they’re being paid. It’s really not hard to do the most long time proven plan, which is to balance a portfolio between higher risk things like an SP500 index, and lower risk things like bonds. You weight it towards the index when you’re young to get high average returns, then back it off into lower risk as you get older to lock it in.
“A Random Walk Down Wall Street” goes into how this strategy has been proven out over decades when so many others have failed. You technically can beat the SP500 (and be sure to include transaction costs), but only by taking on even higher risk.
The best investment advice for most people is really, really boring.
- Comment on Anon does some online shopping 1 week ago:
The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.
The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it’s now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.
Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.
There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.
The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.
Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros–rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape–would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn’t happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
How many people is that going to employ?
Remember, this thread started by saying “smart people” got sidetracked into IT rather than building rockets. There are a lot of problems with that claim, but at the very least, it has to assume that these less important items would be able to employ lots and lots of programmers.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
Maybe if they could get in-orbit refueling to work on the Falcon? IIRC, Starship would require that for trips out of LEO, anyway. Nobody has done it before with a crewed rocket, and there’s been some criticism that Starship’s plan relies on this thing that hasn’t been proven.
The Lunar Gateway is supposed to have a final assembled mass of 63 metric tons. May or may not be able to make that work at all with Falcon.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
Incidentally, that mission was one of those surprising successes. The drone they sent was really barebones so it could tag along on another mission. Nobody expected it to work all that well. It ended up working incredibly well and got used far beyond its planned mission until its rotor blades broke.
Now the team gets to build a real one.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
Forget the moon. We’re all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
The Falcon series would be very limited for a moon mission. The Saturn V could get 47 metric tons into a trans lunar injection. Falcon 9 can get about 27 metric tons into GTO–not even to TLI (which isn’t even listed in public information I could find, though one random Reddit post claims 3 metric tons). The Apollo lander was 17 metric tons, and it could take two people and a rover for a little tour on the surface. We can maybe shave some of that weight off with a new design, but probably not by half or anything really significant like that.
If we want to go back to the moon, it should be for more than taking pictures and picking up some rocks. You may not even be able to do that with a Falcon rocket.
NASA doesn’t exactly rely on Starship for this, though. SLS does technically exist. It’s just expensive, took far too long to build, and should probably be written off. Bezos might have something coming up, but who knows. Still relying on another space billionaire either way.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
No, they would not. The kind of software development done in aerospace is very, very different from the commercial industry at large. Writing 20 lines per week might be considered a breakneck pace because of all the formal verification that needs to be done on every single line.
- Comment on we are creators 1 week ago:
They followed the money. The US Congress saddled NASA with a mandate for a Shuttle without funding it properly. The Russians never even developed crewed rockets that could do anything interesting beyond LEO. Everyone else wasn’t doing much until the last decade or so.
There have long been plenty of smart people at NASA, and they’re wasted on poor funding and management. It has nothing to do with IT.
- Comment on Breaking: Netflix has made another minor change for their subscribers. 1 week ago:
So what you’re saying is, Happy Gilmore 2 will not save streaming?
- Comment on This is the dumbest idea ever 1 week ago:
Forklift certs last for 3 years, but the test isn’t much. You take a quiz (can be all done online), and then someone at your workplace who is a certified instructor gives you some pointers.
I wouldn’t base car licensing around that. It’s almost nothing.
- Comment on Anon has been bullied 1 week ago:
What would be the alternative?
The energy used by a window AC unit would be easily offset by a single 300W solar panel (even on hot days, they don’t run 100% of the time). They tend to be needed most on sunny days, so that’s not a problem for solar.
- Comment on Biomimicry 2 weeks ago:
Evolution: I’m winning it.
- Comment on Randy Pitchford asks fans if they'd swallow future Borderlands exclusivity deals, almost 10,000 people say just put your damn games on Steam 2 weeks ago:
Darek Smart will always be the GOAT of… whatever this thing is called.
- Comment on Ahem, well well 2 weeks ago:
When it’s a truly great question, there won’t be an answer. It’ll be at the fringes of knowledge of any expert.
I was at a panel with Joel Robinson once, and I asked how he’d compare getting started in public access stations vs doing YouTube today. He said it was a great question, but didn’t have much of an answer. He’s srlf-admittedly an old man who didn’t have to start from scatch on YouTube.
