GreenBeard

@GreenBeard@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On 9/11 what was the internet like after it happened? Did people quit being dicks or trolls and showed some decency? Or was it like we have today and nothing changed?⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  For people who only know the internet past 2010, the 2001 internet would be unrecognizable, so the question doesn’t really make sense. The world was an entirely different place before modern algorithmic media. There were trolls, and there were decent people, but the whole context of the world changed after the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Arguably for the orders of magnitude worse. It’s not really fair to compare then to now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨War attention priorities⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, the first three all involve a nation that produces oil and/or gas. Even people who don’t care about their neighbours killing each other, tend to get a little touchy about fuel prices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To Quote Contact. If alien life does not exist then why is there so much space out there?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The question is not whether life exists “out there” the question relates to how common it is for complex life to noticeably emerge. Statistically it’s almost impossible for a universe the size of ours to NOT have it emerge multiple times. It doesn’t matter worth a damn if we’re the only sapient organisms in our observable light-cone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the fun part. You don’t. It’s human nature, at least for neurotypical hominids to submit to confident icons, even when that confidence is unearned and grounded in hubris, not competence. Wealth makes people very confident, even about things they don’t actually understand. You’re not going to educate them into abandoning millions of years of human instinct. What you can do is make people angry enough at the current crop of billionaires they’re ready to put them up against the wall tell them you have a way to keep terrible people from getting that obscenely wealthy again, and then do it… with the knock on effect of making that level of obscene wealth disparity systemically impossible for anyone. That’s going to make people angry too though, you’re probably going to end up crucified for it, because you know, it’s a country of temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is ASHDOL a good company for an external cd/dvd drive?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And how many typical users who are using it for backing up old albums or movies or burning a one-time disk for the sake of keeping some woe-begotten antique that hasn’t been modern since Alan Turing built it himself happy, are going to know or care about the very small and exceptionally niche differences. In any case, those kinds of features aren’t exclusive to a brand, they’re model specifications. My point stands, brand is effectively irrelevant as long as you avoid the obvious scammers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could you make a maglev marimba that would resonate for longer than ordinary models?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, technically it would probably work, although it might impede the performance of the resonators. I know it’s done with Glockenspiels, but you do have to be a bit careful, because not every tonal percussion instrument is just bars sitting in a tray and marimbas in particular have resonator tubes underneath each bar…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is ASHDOL a good company for an external cd/dvd drive?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  CD/DVD external drives are niche commodity products. The brand makes almost no difference. You’re unlikely to find high quality equipment since they’re now extremely niche products with next to no market for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to store information in your brain that you can visually access it like in this clip?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean the Mind Palace Mnemonic technique? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the bible is real and dealt with real people, what were the 3 wise man wise of? Like subjects and stuff for their time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, Zoroastrianism, the original state religion of Persia, now Iran before the Arabic conquest. Its still practiced by a small minority in Iran, as well as parts of India, Afghanistan and other places in the region. Famously Freddy Mercury was Zoroastrian. It’s a belief system closely related Vedic Hinduism and more distantly related to the polytheistic traditions of ancient Europe (Slavic polytheism, Norse/Germanic Polytheism, etc.). It was the official belief system of King Cyrus the Great, who has been spoken of in recent years due to his conquest of Babylon being the thing that freed the Jews and he was the king who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. That’s prompted comparisons among some with Trump, being the goyim defender of the Jewish state. It was on his orders that the surviving texts of the Jewish Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim (what a Christian would call the Old Testament) were compiled into something recognizable today.

  Zoroastrianism believes in a true Creator god (Ahura Mazda, yes like the car, long story) and a Lord of Chaos (Ahreman), with the creator slowly releasing the world he created from the clutches of the jealous lord of chaos who tried to take it. All of the other “gods” (Amesha Spenta) are “Faces” of Ahura Mazda. Some have speculated Zoroastrian influence may have been the thing that finally pushed second temple Judaism to abandon the last vestiges of pre-Babylonian polytheism, though there were trends among the last remaining Jewish communities in that direction prior to the conquest of Babylon. Some have also speculated that some of the gaps in the Jewish tradition were filled in by Zoroastrian beliefs when reconstructing Jewish tradition, and that may be one of the distinct “Voices” in the modern Torah (see JEDP Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis). Interestingly enough concepts like heaven, hell, judgement day, and a messiah at the end of the world may also originate in Zoroastrianism.

  The Magi (plural), or Magus (singular), is the Persian word for a Zoroastrian priest and loosely translates as “Wise Man” in English. The words in English like Magic, Mage, Magician, etc. is actually derived from it because their legendary supernatural powers were famous across the ancient world. The Magi were also well known for the practice of Astrology in ancient times and much of modern astrological practice is adapted from Zoroastrian tradition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the bible is real and dealt with real people, what were the 3 wise man wise of? Like subjects and stuff for their time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but at the end of the day, France and England are really more like one people divided by a thousand year old argument over whether German bastardized Latin or Latin bastardized German is the superior language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the bible is real and dealt with real people, what were the 3 wise man wise of? Like subjects and stuff for their time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Weird linguistic coincidences like that seem less weird when you remember that at its core English is just a strange dialect of German that’s been mugging other languages for loose vocabulary for a thousand years or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the bible is real and dealt with real people, what were the 3 wise man wise of? Like subjects and stuff for their time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wise men is a vague translation of “Magi,” who were the priestly class of the Persian Zoroastrians.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We all know that Mr Beast, Logan Paul, and KSI are all horrible people. Why do they still have subscribers?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In the words of Marilyn Manson, “Raise your kids better or I’ll be raising them for you.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I turn fresh tomatoes into pasta sauce?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ooooh, maybe not the stems. It won’t kill you but they’re high in alkaloids that can cause digestive issues. Your recipe sounds like mine, but I finish by wilting just a bit of spinach in it for colour and those good vitamins, minus the toilet tax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some things I can do as an apartment dweller to fight climate change/deal with the coming effects?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Vote, and get involved with activism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it paranoid to think that the midterms are already fixed for the republicans? And the Dems are just walking into a shooting gallery?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does it matter? You miss every shot you don’t take. They’re just this side of declaring martial law anyway. No one is getting out of this all in one piece to begin with. If you’re going to go down regardless, you might as well go down trying to make the biggest difference you have available to you, and that’s voting in such overwhelming numbers that it scares them.

  We’re going to die on our feet or die on our knees, and living isn’t an option unless we win. If the cause is hopeless, so be it. My ancestors survived hopeless for a couple hundred thousand years and so did yours. Make them pay for every inch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you underestimate how long these people can stay irrational. And just how entirely by the balls they have the system trapped. They already think of themselves as gods. They’re a level of delusional that would have them in a straight jacket if they didn’t have so much goddamn money. They don’t see the people that work for them as even animals, they’re barely tools. The scale and the scope of solidarity that it would take to pop their fantasy bubble has never been achieved in human history. They have engineered a world that makes raising that kind of trust and unity a generational struggle as difficult as bringing down Soviet Russia was last century. I hope to live to see the day their empire crumbles, but I’m not holding my breath.

  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better and the losses they’ll take from security breaches will be insignificant compared to the profit they extract from their monopolies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t hang a lifetime career on it. Unless you have a guaranteed job out of the gate, it’s a fool’s gamble.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Worth noting, this will happen to you a lot. Even the good small companies (almost especially the good small companies) are going to fold. A lot. I’ve been in the IT service industry for 25 years and easily 80%+ will fail within 5 years. Unless you’re in a particularly high demand market, the pay isn’t great (not terrible, but people have a very unrealistic expectation for how much your generalist IT guy makes), and you definitely don’t want to be an independent contractor because you WILL end up spending more time trying to collect payment than fixing computers (or the majority of your profit paying someone else to do it).

  It’s a lot less security than most trades in most regions, but you can still strike it lucky every once in a while. Just make sure you make hay while the sun shines, because it isn’t going to last, and dry patches are frequent in most markets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My suggestion? If you’re really clever, find a good trade shop that’s willing to work with you through an apprenticeship and stay as far as you can from CS for the foreseeable future. Don’t give up on learning how to code, but don’t sink a ton of money into certifications or degrees; stay a hobbyist and enthusiast, don’t make it a career. Some day those skills may be invaluable, but it’s absolutely not worth the money today. You want to be rich in 40 years? Be the only one left who knows how to fix machine generated spaghetti code. You want to eat tomorrow, learn to swing a hammer, bend conduit, or some other kind of skilled labour.

  Side note: Make sure whatever trade you’re going into, you have someone who is going to guarantee you a spot to get your apprenticeship BEFORE you go to school. If you go straight into school, you will likely spend a lot of money on a trade you never get your journeyman ticket in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No there won’t. Not for a generation at least. The AI momentum will take decades to unravel before anyone even thinks about going back and fixing all the broken code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come president try for goals into the future, when its a big if? Like carbon emissions and such. Why not do comprehensive plans that can be done in 4 years instead the far off future?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To put it as simple as possible, even if everyone was on board with the objective, which they won’t be, if you have 5 people try to agree on a course of action, you’re going to hear 6 different opinions. Once upon a time you could rely on a certain level of mutual trust to get to a mutually agreeable solution, but no one can trust anyone these days. You can’t trust companies, you can’t trust the state. You can’t trust the church, and you definitely can’t trust God(s), can’t trust family, can’t trust people who are different from you, can’t trust people who are the same as you… And to be honest I see no good reason any of us should. We all claim we have the same values but no one acts like it. We have 50,000 years of reasons you should never trust anyone.

  But that means if you want to get something done, you need to build agreement from square one every time. If people don’t agree to it, you’re just going to end up with roadblocks, opposition, and sabotage. People need to be on board, and I mean fully committed or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish is never getting done, even if it could potentially help people. You don’t build support in a day, you’re not going to be able to have a face to face conversation with everyone, and we all know you can’t believe anything in an ad, in the news or on the internet.

  So the simplest things take decades to get moving. Because getting people to do anything for someone they can’t trust is nearly impossible.Trust is the rarest commodity on earth, no relationship, from family, to friends, to nations can operate without it, and humanity is almost tapped out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At this stage in technological advancement can humans at the point where we can create a new element on the periodic table?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Several, most are highly radioactive and prone to rapid decay. Technically they occur naturally but don’t last long enough to be “found in nature.” If you’re looking for vibranium, you can stop looking, it won’t happen, but yes we have created new elements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  2 questions:

  1. Why do you believe magic is incomprehensible and supernatural? The earliest conception of magic is just a part of nature like everything else. We don’t fully understand it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t comprehensible.
  2. What is the explanation for quantum mechanics? I’m not suggesting that there isn’t one, I’m asking if you understand the underlying principles that make the observations of quantum mechanics work.

  No one asked you to believe in angels or demons or devas or yokai or anything else that is objectively not real. The fact that’s how some people define “magic” does not mean that’s the only definition. Some people have defined marriage as a holy sacrament exclusive to their mythological beliefs. That doesn’t mean that’s the only definition, and I find it odd that you would dismiss the very many viewpoints that do not have such an Abrahamic bias.

  We do not have all the answers to every question nor are we ever likely to, if for no other reason than the maximum information density of our brains is finite and a mind vast enough to know everything would necessarily exceed the limits of our finite universe.

  Now, far from finding imagination foolish, I think it’s one of our most important skills, but let’s be clear, most of the fantasy magic systems we fantasize about would be objectively terrible because in almost every case, the consequences of such a world would not be how we imagine it, particularly since every magic system we imagine is almost universally internally inconsistent. That by no means suggests we should stop imagining, I merely stated I’d rather live in a world that has consistent rules than one that is arbitrary and capricious.

  Perhaps you might learn to practice some humility and ask a question or two before you go throwing around terms like “ghoulish.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And what makes you think we haven’t got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.

  Whimsy is in short supply, but it’s not because the world lacks magic. It’s more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I’m not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.

  Do you accept, traveller?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really don’t understand what magic you think we don’t have? Chances are you typed this question on a slate of crystal and wire that allows you to see and hear across the planet in nearly real time. There are people who, with the right tools can summon fire at their fingertips, unleash arcs of lightning, draw water from thin air, and make rocks that talk. We are surrounded by forces that both well mapped (at least locally) and are completely incomprehensible to the best of us. While we have not mastered the veil between life and death, we have certainly learned to draw it back.

  You are, I fear demonstrating the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. You’re confusing the comprehensibility of the world with mundanity. We are living in a world full of “magic”… It just doesn’t look like the magic you read about in old fairy tales, and importantly, it’s not shared equally to everyone.

  I’ll take reincarnation with my mind intact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you know that proprietary code is secure? Open source at least has a collective self interest in finding and patching flaws. There is no such natural mechanisms in software development by giant corporate conglomerates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s probably fair, but I would also worry that anything coded in Finnish would be trying to find a way to kill me for not respecting its personal space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If everyone in power is racist, a pedophile, and just all-around hates poor people, happiness, and everything that's good, then how do we keep winning?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That’s not exactly how this works but it’s close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.

  Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn’t matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they’re a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we’ve tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It’s a hard problem.

  We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn’t start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can’t really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We’ll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What effect did COVID have on the minds of the ultra-wealthy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It spooked them. Think of them like stunted teenagers who think they’ll live forever and have no concept of consequences. Suddenly being faced with the potential consequences of their largess, and the potential for coordinated, distributed, non-hierarchical response, as well as the recognition of their own mortality sent them into a state of existential panic. Their retrenchment and consolidation in response to this panic has only accelerated the damage they’re doing. They fully expect a mad-max style social collapse, and want to be sitting on a little slice of Eden when it happens.

  The fact that we could avoid all of the necessity for recreating the most horrific dystopias mankind has ever envisioned by them simply… not being so damn greedy seems to have missed them entirely.