Infrapink
@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
Hi, I'm Infrapink! I used to be @infrapink, but that instance is down. I'm also @infrapink and @infrapink
- Comment on When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them? 4 days ago:
A few thought he was serious. Most understood he was making fun of them. Some thought he was making fun if how liberals and lefties view the right.
- Comment on Why does Australia tend to ban or censor video games? 4 days ago:
Australia was historically a smaller market that is physically far away from America and ( and had fewer trade links with Japan). Australian TVs were PAL while America and Japan used NTSC, which added a whole other layer of complexity. This meant that PAL production lines were geared towards the European market, with Australia getting the excess. Those copies then had to be shipped across the Pacific Ocean, which is expensive. Combine a smaller, lower-priority market with longer, more complex shipping, and manufacturers charged more to make a profit. This set a standard price for Australia which persists even today.
- Comment on Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening? 6 days ago:
Others have answered the questions about getting arrested. Here's a specific answer about Miranda rights.
Miranda rights are not read to you when you are pulled over on suspicion of breaking the law. They are read to you when you are being formally interrogated. Ask "Am I being detained?" or "Am I being interrogated?" If they say "no", keep quiet. If they say "yes", that's when they are required to read you your rights, at which point you say "I want to speak to my lawyer".
- Comment on Nintendo Responds To Tariff Refunds Lawsuit, Tells Customers They "Got What They Bargained For" 1 week ago:
You are consistent and I respect that.
- Comment on Is a black hole spherical? How come it looks different each way you view it like on it's side or up and down? 1 week ago:
Mu.
This answer is based on watching a bunch of PBS Spacetime videos. I am not remotely an astrophysicist.
When you delve into black holes, the concept of "sphere" eventually becomes ambiguous. A black hole is an infinitely-dense region of spacetime, called a singularity, which has only three properties: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.
What most people think of as a black hole is a region bounded by the event horizon. The event horizon isn't an actual thing, it's a mathematically-defined radius around the singularity. You would no more notice crossing the event horizon than you would crossing the boundary of a timezone on Earth. If the black hole's angular momentum is 0, then the event horizon forms a sphere, because all points on the event horizon are by definition the same distance from the singularity.
But things get weird when the black hole is rotating. Because of some stuff I don't quite understand, rotation causes the singularity to turn into a ring rather than a point, so you could theoretically drive a spaceship through the hole in the middle (you could not actually do this because by the time you get there your spaceship will have been vaporised by the accretion disk and torn apart by gravity). In this case, the event horizon forms a sphere that is squashed along its axis of rotation, kind of like Earth.
But black holes are weirder still! Scientists say that they break physics, but it's even more fundamental than that. A bit below the event horizon, time and space themselves swap, so that the singularity changes from a point of irresistible attraction to an inevitable point in the future. The maths suggests that, if you were to hit the singularity, you(re atoms) would emerge in a universe with time instead of space and space instead of time.
It's bizarre is what I'm saying.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 15 comments
- Comment on Why are so many new programming languages being developed? 1 week ago:
A thin, bedraggled stranger came to the Temple one night and asked for master Kaimu. The master was roused and brought to the gate, whereupon the stranger said:
“For years I have wandered this pitiless land, seeking the perfect programming language. Name any one and I’ve given it a go, be it fast or slow, high-level or low, from Ada to Zeno. But whatever the pluses there are minuses too, so I pack my things and hit the road again—which in this case led me to your door.”
Kaimu asked the stranger to describe the language of his heart’s desire.
“It must be suitable enterprise-wide,” the stranger replied, “client-side and server-side, in scripting, in shells and in spreadsheet cells. I need it real-time, multi-threaded and optionally object-oriented; with garbage collection, deadlock detection, custom exceptions, auto-resizing arrays of things and regular expressions for matching strings. I want the simplicity of BASIC, the purity of Smalltalk, the brevity of Haskell, the speed of C, the consistency of Lisp, the readability of Python, the flexibility of Perl, and the portability of... Java, I guess, but with native code bindings that aren’t a mess.”
“Then tomorrow morning we shall assist you as best we can,” said Kaimu. “But tonight you must spend in the carpenter’s shed below the south wall.”
The stranger bowed and departed to make his bed amid sawdust and wood shavings. As Kaimu left for his own chambers a monk asked, “What is your design for him?”
“When dawn breaks,” replied the master, “our guest will see that on the walls of that shed are arrayed ten thousand tools, each crafted to serve a unique purpose. No one would mistake the hammer for the chisel, and no true carpenter would renounce one for the other.”
At the sun’s first light the stranger returned to the Temple gate, there to be greeted again by Kaimu and the monk.
“Do you still seek your heart’s desire?” asked Kaimu.
“No!” replied the stranger. “For in the shed I found a most marvelous dagger, no larger than my hand, whose hilt opened to reveal the most wonderous things: tweezers and toothpicks, pliers and drill-bits, wrenches and reamers and rulers and tiny blades too numerous to count! Holding it I understood that my destiny is to fashion the thing I have sought for—a language made of other languages, a tool to end the need for other tools!”
And with that the stranger bowed and departed.
The monk turned to Kaimu, whose jaw had gone somewhat slack. “What do the annals say on the subject of the Misunderstood Lesson?”
“That it too brings wisdom,” said the master, “If only to the hapless teacher. No doubt I would have been twice as effective had I been half as clever.”
“And what of the stranger?” asked the monk. “Surely he will fail in his endeavor, for that knife he prizes holds neither hammer nor chisel. And should he partly succeed then all the worse, for he will have added yet another language to a world that already drowns in confusion.”
“Let him try, and good fortune to him!” said Kaimu. “If not for fools of his fashion, we would not have Perl or Python, Bourne shell or Tcl, and the world would be a poorer place. I only grieve that you and I are not such fools, for since we will never attempt the impossible, we can never hope to achieve it.”
Thus master and monk left the gate, and went in to the Temple together to greet the morning.
--ibid
- Comment on Why are so many new programming languages being developed? 1 week ago:
A novice asked Java master Banzen, “What is the most perfect programming language?”
The master answered, “The one which accomplishes the desired task with the least effort expended by the user.”
The novice asked, “Is there a language which exceeds all others in this regard?”
The master answered, “Build me a garden of ten thousand stones!”
--From The Codeless Code - Comment on Which movie have you seen where an actor started as an extra prior to becoming famous? 1 week ago:
Jackie Chan is an unnamed martial arts student in Fist of Fury and a random mook who gets killed by Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. He mostly worked as a stunt double at the time, and was so good at stunt work he transitioned into credited performance.
- Comment on Weapons for defense only 2 weeks ago:
"An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways." — Salvor Hardin, The Merchant Princes (Isaac Asimov, 1944)
- Comment on What is with America and the #9? For example stuff cost something like 9.99 or 3 payments of 39.99 or 9 out of 10 doctors or dentists or whomever agree? 2 weeks ago:
I was sceptical about psychological pricing until I worked at a call centre and had this conversation multiple times a week.
Caller: Why is my bill £10 higher this month?
Me: I see you made a £2 call to a premium rate number
Caller: That's only £2.
Me: Yes, your bill is normally £19.99 a month. Add on the £2 and you get £21.99, which is what you paid this month.
Caller: (notices the other digits) Oh, so it is. - Comment on Xbox needs to make a choice, says former PlayStation leader Shawn Layden: be a publisher or a platform, but you can't be both 2 weeks ago:
Back in the 1970s, ActiVision sued Atari for the right to be a publisher but not a platform. The idea of being a publisher but not a platform was a new idea at the time.
But most gaming companies aren't, and have never been, platforms. The exceptions are Atari, Mattel, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega, SNK, Hudson Soft, Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and CD Projekt.
- Comment on Has there ever been a game whose name was intentionally suffixed with "2" despite no original game? lol 2 weeks ago:
Atari released Sprint 2 in arcades in 1976. It was followed by Sprint 4 and Sprint 8 in 1977, and then Sprint One in 1978.
In this case, the numbers refer to the number of concurrent players, not the order of release.
- Comment on Number of hours you need to work to buy GTA VI around the world 3 weeks ago:
Initial thought: My country is looking pretty good, quite a bit better than the Brits!
But then @plyth pointed out that the numbers of Russia and Türkiye are drastically different between the Euope and Asia maps, so I decided to do a bit of digging.
The Europe map just says they used "a mathematical formula that determines the working time", but the other maps indicate they used the median income rather than minimum wage, so let's go with that.
According to the Central Statistics Office, median weekly income in the first three months of 2026 AD was €1074.61, which works out to €26.87 an hour assuming a person gets paid for 40 hours each week. €26.87/hr * 2.19hr/GTA6 = €58.83/GTA6). Which, uh, considering GTA6 is going to cost €79.99, either these people aren't using the median. Someone earning the actual median wage would need to work just shy of three hours to afford 1 GTA6, and that's not taking taxes into account.
All right, let's check the UK. According to the House of Commons Library, the median weekly income is £767, which for a 40-hour week works out to £19.18 (that's €22.38, which is a fair bit lower than the Irish median. I wonder if Brexit has something to do with this). If the map is using median income and ignoring taxes, it means that GTA6 will cost £95.68 in the UK, which it fucking won't (because it's €111.62). The BBC reports that it will cost £70, which is about normal; the UK price is normally computed by taking the cost in yankeebucks, applying an exchange rate of 0.9 English lira per yankeebuck, rounding it to the nearest £10, and subtracting 1p. At the actual price, the map indicates that the median income in the UK is £14.03 an hour, which is just £1.32 above the minimum wage for people over 20.
(Some of the above figures have a discrepancy of 1% of the unit of currency due to rounding).
So yeah, I have no idea where these people are getting their numbers from or what maths they're doing.
- Comment on Number of hours you need to work to buy GTA VI around the world 3 weeks ago:
It's going to be €80.
- Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles 4 weeks ago:
yet all of the comments below their post prefer physical
Comment sections are not a representative sample. These are people who actively follow Sony news and care enough about physical media to leave angry comments.
I prefer physical media myself because I'm a middle-aged fogey, but if you want to see how PlayStation players as a whole are buying games, you have to look at Sony's financials. Since Sony are a publicly traded company, those are publicly available
The relevant data is on page 12 of this supplemental document
In FY 2025, Sony made G¥121,159 on physical game sales and G¥949,799 on digital game sales. Those numbers exclude DLC, which is listed separately (and combined with lootboxes). In short, Sony make 7.8 times as much on sales of digital games (excluding DLC and microtransactions!) as they do on physical games. To put it another way, physical game sales make up just 11% of Sony's revenue from game sales (again, excluding DLC and microtransactions). And that figure has been trending downward ever since the PS3.
The obvious caveat here is that lots of indie games never get physical releases, which skews the ratio toward digital. That's true, but the same page of the document shows that of games that get physical releases, 76% of sales are still digital.
The fact of the matter is we're a dying breed. Most people today either prefer the convenience of digital games or are just indifferent. Comment sections may say one thing, but actual data shows a massive trend toward digital games.
- Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles 4 weeks ago:
I'm mostly just surprised that Microsoft didn't do it before Sony.
- Comment on Are Lemmy and Mbin the same instance? 4 weeks ago:
Mu.
Lemmy and mbin are different software. You are on lemmy.ca, which is a Lemmy instance. There are other websites that run Lemmy, notably lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and sopuli.xyz. They are different, independent websites, but they all run Lemmy, and thus are all Lemmy instances.
All these sites communicate with each other because Lemmy is based on ActivityPub, a protocol for letting social media accounts on different websites talk to each other. (A common analogy is that email lets people on different websites communicate because it's all based on SMTP).
My account is on thebrainbin.org, a website that runs mbin. mbin is less popular than Lemmy, but there are still a few other websites that run it, including kbin.earth and fedia.io. Each of these sites is an mbin instance, and because mbin, like Lemmy, is built on ActivityPub, all those websites are able to talk to each other.
Now you might be thinking that, because Lemmy and mbin are both built on AcitivityPub, then logically accounts on Lemmy instances should be able to interact with accounts on mbin instances and vice versa. And if you think that, you are correct. The reason you see posts from Lemmy when using an mbin account and vice versa is that the various instances all use AcitivityPub to talk to each other, even though they're on different websites.
But it doesn't stop there! Mastodon is also built on ActivityPub, but aims to be like the website formerly known as Twitter, whereas Lemmy and mbin both try to be similar to Reddit. But because it's all ActivityPub, accounts on Mastodon instances and interact with accounts on Lemmy and mbin instances and vice versa.
The same applies to other ActivityPub software, such as Sharkey (imitates Tumblr), Akkoma (also Tumblr), PeerTube (YouTube), and WriteFreely (blog).
- Comment on What's a word for "I actively endorse it for others even though I dislike it”? 5 weeks ago:
"Not my cup of tea"
- Comment on Kingdom Hearts AI art accusations hit Square Enix, and that sure looks like slop to me 5 weeks ago:
OK, so Disney licensed their characters to OpenAI for three years so they can be legally used in Sora-generated videos; I figure Disney gets a cut of OpenAI's revenue proportional to how often people use Disney's characters. This includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm in addition to core. The article says that some vetted Sora-generated videos will go up on Disney+ (so nothing violent or sexual). And apparently they'll be doing something with OpenAI's stuff on Disney+.
So it's a contract, but they didn't buy a company. Well there goes that hope.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Yes, languages get mistaken for each other all the time when one is not familiar with the writing system, and sometimes even when one is. I have struggled to understand posts in Spanish before realising they're actually in Portuguese, which I don't speak. (Also I'm pretty sure Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language).
Can you tell the difference between Telugu and Kannada just by looking at them? How about Arabic and Persian? How about Arabic and Ottoman Turkish? Persian and Kurdish? Yoruba and Xhosa? Ukrainian and Kazakh? Sumerian and Akkadian? Actually, could you tell the difference between Akkadian and Old Persian? They are both written with cuneiform characters, but the characters themselves are apparently as different as hiragana and hangul.
If your sentence is written entirely in Chinese characters, there is no way for somebody unfamiliar with them to determine whether it's Japanese, Mandarin, or Hokkien. And if somebody hasn't seen enough Japanese text to figure out the difference between kana and Chinese characters, they still won't be able to tell the difference.
As to why Google can't tell, Google doesn't actually understand anything. It's based on a massive database of which characters and combinations of characters come next to each other (and there's also some Markov stuff to account for common spelling mistakes). If your search string is made entirely of Chinese characters, it's going to get hits on websites written with Chinese characters, many of which will be in Mandarin. Google.com probably isn't able to detect your UI or browser language settings. To ensure you get results from Japan, try using google.jp instead, as it will prioritise Japanese results.
- Comment on Kingdom Hearts AI art accusations hit Square Enix, and that sure looks like slop to me 5 weeks ago:
Nintendo don't use generative LLMs because of the copyright issues. Disney are even more lawyertastic than Nintendo. Hopefully a small batallion of Disney's lawyers will show up at Squenix's offices and tell them to cut that crap out.
- Comment on How much money do you think Superman could make if he offered his services to NASA as a launch vehicle? 1 month ago:
$0. Because first and foremost, he is a goodie-two-shoes who wouldn't charge for it. And even if he was willing to charge, doing so would mean compromising his secret identity.
- Comment on Is there a sublemmy where people suggest ideas for a sublemmy? specifically, a sublemmy to review fediverse instances. 1 month ago:
Even on Lemmy (and also PieFed), they're officially called communities.
I use mbin and we call them magazines fir some reason.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I would make it illegal to buy a house if the buyer already owns a house which is unoccupied for at least half the year.
Patents expire if six months pass during which the patent holder does not make any products which use that patent. The countdown dies not reset if the patent is sold or traded away.
Companies must publicly post everybody's wages once a year.
All job ads must include wages offered and all benefits. Candidates can try to negotiate higher wages if they wish, but they at least know where the floor is.
Any digital product sold or "licenced" with DRM must be patched to remove the DRM if the verification server goes down (Stop Killing Games is actually making some solid progress on making this into EU law).
Sex workers sharing a home out of which they both work shall not be considered a brothel.
Living off the proceeds of a prostitute will be legal as long as there is no coërcion. The existing law mostly makes it illegal for sex workers to rent homes or support disabled friends and family members, while pimps simply ignore the law.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 1 month ago:
No, I'm actually quite big.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 1 month ago:
I genuinely think Daikatana is a decent (but flawed) game.
- Comment on If I have PMOS would I be allowed to participate in the Olympics? 1 month ago:
You're thinking of Caster Semenya. She's XX, she just happens to have unusually high testosterone levels.
If you aren't taking testosterone... I have no idea, but I would imagine you could compete as whichever gender you wish.
- Comment on Call of controversy? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 imagines a revived Korean war 1 month ago:
It's a prequel starring Phoenix's Japanese ancestor in the 19th century. I haven't played any of the games so I don't know how it translates. I do know that Sherlock Holmes had to be renamed Herlock Sholmes because copyright can be ridiculous.
- Comment on Does anybody actually work from 09:00 to 17:00 2 months ago:
Workin' 8 to 5
What a way to make a livin'