adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on How are there people who don't know Alaska and Hawaii are states? 1 day ago:
There are a lot of people in the world who have never looked at a map of the United States.
- Comment on How do people easily find out that I'm an easy to pick up on? 5 days ago:
In my company, employees are required to report harassment like you describe to HR if they see it. Repeat offenders get dealt with.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Normal? Human? Socially aware?
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
One thing I’d add… present the compliment in the form of a question, inviting them to have the las word. “I like your hair. Did you do something new with it?” Or “where did you find that awesome top?”
This way, it’s not just you passing judgement on them.
- Comment on Why don't people wear underwear under the padded bike shorts? 1 week ago:
Let me ask a parallel question:
Why don’t people wear underwear under their swimsuits?
- Comment on Air Compressor Regulator 1 week ago:
Interestingly, both my paint gun and my brad nailer have a regulator on them. Although it seems to be more a simple pressure bleed valve than a regulator.
- Comment on Air Compressor Regulator 1 week ago:
I too have had mine set to 120PSI since I got it 10 years ago.
The only issue I’ve had was from the one time I forgot to depressurize when I was done and the water rusted the inside of the tank; took a few cycles to blast out the rusty gunge before things went back to normal.
I can’t even figure out why you’d want to mess with the output regulator. I guess not all compressors are built the same? Cheap diaphragm on the regulator that can’t take a bit of kick maybe? I know that can be an issue with gas regulators.
- Comment on Would it be offensive for me to wear bonnets as a white person? 2 weeks ago:
A deerstalker with the flaps down?
Or one of those Russian hats?
- Comment on Would you rather be reincarnated into a world of magic or reborn as yourself (with your current knowledge fully intact)? 2 weeks ago:
Anything sufficiently advanced that it isn’t explainable in the current culture is magic.
Considering I’m already a modern day wizard, I’d go for being able to use my existing skills from birth over being born into a society where the laws of physics may not be the ones I’ve spent decades studying. That sounds like a recipe for abject misery and early death.
- Comment on How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure? 2 weeks ago:
For a good case study: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
If this had been closed source, the attacker would not have been able to use the technique to commit the changes in the first place.
However, if they HAD snuck the changes in, nobody would have caught them, and only the developer would have been able to identify something was wrong before full deployment.
But we should all assume that while the xz trojan never made it out, others likely have, both in open and closed source.
- Comment on What would a super hero A.I. be like ? 2 weeks ago:
Nothing like LLMs that are currently popularized as “AI”.
I’m imagining something like Agent Smith in The Matrix.
You DID mean a super hero FOR AIs, right?
- Comment on How do you make friends online? 2 weeks ago:
In forums and chats, go places where you can ask questions as much as you can tell people why they’re wrong.
The way to make friends with people is to listen to them.
- Comment on Can someone explain, calories, carbs, glucose, and gluten? 3 weeks ago:
They are complex carbohydrates; the starches have to be broken down into sugars before they can be processed by our bodies. That process takes energy, but not as much as processing plant matter or even meat.
- Comment on What's your excuse for the current state of affairs? 3 weeks ago:
You’d have to ask the ones you know. But how well do you really know them?
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
“‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
It’s right between having sex with your daughter in law (same punishment) and marrying both a woman and her mother (punishable specifically by burning).
Why some Christians take it seriously? I don’t know. They seem to be very selective about which Jewish laws to keep, and how. And they totally ignore Jesus’ teachings on such things, which seems odd that Christians would follow Mosaic laws to the letter instead of following Jesus’ interpretation. That’s what a Jewish Pharisee would do, not a follower of Jesus.
- Comment on What's your excuse for the current state of affairs? 3 weeks ago:
Why? I’m asking you who “you” are. Sounds like you may not know, which may cause difficulties.
- Comment on What's your excuse for the current state of affairs? 3 weeks ago:
Where do you define the boundary of “I” though? Your brain? Your body? The stuff you say is yours? Your microbiome? Your thoughts? Your actions?
- Comment on How do I make the most out of a mediocre laptop? 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like your real question is “how can I turn a low-spec laptop into a reasonable DAW without spending money “?
It wouldn’t use your current plugins, but you can run a decent DAW setup on a 2005 Mac running OS 9. So it can definitely be done on your current laptop. But to make it really work well, you’ll want to use period-appropriate software. So set up a state of the art DAW from 2011.
If you want modern tools, you’ll need modern hardware to run them; minimum 16GB RAM for starters. Linux is unfortunately probably a non-starter for you. Windows 11 or macOS will be necessary for working with the DRM’d components you’re accustomed to.
- Comment on What's your excuse for the current state of affairs? 3 weeks ago:
Deity belief doesn’t really come into this. I presume since you’re atheist, you’re existentialist, but at that point you still have to define what you’re responsible for and why. How much do you want to survive in this universe and for how long? What do you want to get out of it and how much? What do you consider to be the border of “you” and “not you”?
- Comment on When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them? 3 weeks ago:
I find that most people have around the same amount of smarts to spread around. Some people hyper focus it in a specific area, others spread it around. There are obviously outliers, but when I find someone who seems to be notably dense about a topic, I usually ask myself “where are they focusing their attention?”
- Comment on Why do some people identify with a political party even if many of their views don't align with that party's platform? 3 weeks ago:
I’m old enough to remember Trump in the 1980s. At that time, he was looked at as an unscrupulous playboy wannabe who burned through his father’s money.
Conservatives and republicans of the time pointed to him as all that was wrong with Liberal America.
Because he had no morals, he eventually realized that these people value tribe and message more than logic and reason. So he pivoted to saying whatever they wanted to hear while reinforcing that their tribe was the best tribe, meanwhile continuing to behave exactly the same. And they accepted him in.
- Comment on With everything becoming convience orientated , how hard would it be to be a hacker nowadays versus back in the day? Like what to read, how to help people, and other semi free things? 3 weeks ago:
I’m confused about what’s being asked here.
Are you asking how to become tech savvy on the cheap, how to become a maker/modder, how to get into computer reverse engineering, or how to crack other people’s stuff?
The answer to all of those I guess is: practice taking stuff apart and putting it back together. Start small and work your way up. Learn techniques that work for you, ask others when you need help.
Once you’re comfortable with that, start taking stuff apart, changing it slightly, and putting it back together. Over time, expand on the modifications. Document everything and build up a toolkit. Eventually, you’ll be able to analyze a situation and know where to look to tweak something to make things work the way you want.
All of that takes time and patience, and often things break or don’t work as well as they did when you started. Growing from that is the important bit.
Expensive books? Not necessary until you’re looking for very specific information that’s a trade secret. At that point you can evaluate whether they’re worth the cost for the result.
- Comment on How can AI act without initial human input? Does this show AI can have freewill or am I deceived? 4 weeks ago:
AI had human input. The model was being run against a security benchmark test in an evaluation sandbox, with human-provided directives.
Since models aren’t human, it calculated the most efficient, not ethical, way to get a good score on the test.
The details indicated that knowing the expected outcomes would get the best score, and that those outcomes were stored on the huggingface servers. So it used some exploits to leave its sandbox and break into the huggingface servers to access the data that would give it a perfect score. Mission accomplished.
- Comment on Where has the "www." gone? 4 weeks ago:
No — that prefix tells the OS which application to direct the address to.
The www., ftp., mail., etc. are on the server side, so the client gets directed to the correct computer owned by the domain owner.
To some degree, this quickly became irrelevant when virtual hosting became a thing; you could have something watching on the server side that would see an attempt to connect to port 80 or port 443, check the domain the client is looking for, and redirect them to the right internal or external IP address.
With the onset of CDNs, it became even less meaningful since load and availability balancers will now decide what computer will eventually receive the request.
All you really need is the URI (https://) and the port (:443) and everything else can be a black box.
Why don’t we see :80 and :443 on URLs anymore? Because a web browser, when it handles the URI request, auto-maps to the default ports for that URI unless it is explicitly told to use another.
As a result, you can enter example.com into a browser address bar, and you’ll automatically be taken to guest@www.example.com but all you’ll see on the browser bar is example.com.
- Comment on How can I personally convince Donald Trump not to needlessly sacrifice CENTCOM? 4 weeks ago:
You could say that about me, too.
- Comment on How can I personally convince Donald Trump not to needlessly sacrifice CENTCOM? 4 weeks ago:
You’re operating under the fallacy that he uses logic and reason to determine his actions.
Even if you were able through some mechanism able to convince him, you’d have to reinforce this constantly and hope that someone with a different agenda didn’t get to him between your reinforcements with something that panders to his ego and also happens to sacrifice CENTCOM.
Because in his mind, nothing of importance is being sacrificed because it isn’t him.
- Comment on Is it just me or are we having a rehash of the Reagan years? Mental Health are going under funded, we are screw with Iran again, got an "actor" in the White House, and the poor on their own? 4 weeks ago:
Who plays Nancy this time around? Because it’s not Melania.
- Comment on Why does Seth Meyers take long breaks? I think it would be nice to get paid while the show is on break. But something tells me the staff are not getting paid in the mean time. 4 weeks ago:
He probably takes breaks for the same reason I do: to refresh and regroup so that he can perform to the standard expected of him.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but his writers tend to produce their own material during some of the time he’s off. So the bigger question is: why doesn’t the entire team take long breaks?
And the answer is likely that everyone does, but not all at the same time. He’s just the one that’s obvious since he performs “live” every “day”.
- Comment on 'Half a Second' — a book on the XZ backdoor 4 weeks ago:
Nice to see a book on this; this story should not be forgotten, as it shows how fragile the entire system is — and with AI automation, it’s only becoming easier to pull such things off.
- Comment on Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now 4 weeks ago:
I suspect the headline is incorrect though; likely numerous people knew and were smart enough not to say anything.