adespoton

@adespoton@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How bad is it really to listen to music with headphones? My mother told me if I keep doing that I'd go deaf... Is that fearmongering?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  A helicopter emits sound in the 85 (max 40 hours a week) to 110 (WILL cause damage, even in bursts of 15 minutes or less) dB.

  So a helicopter mother’s yelling is likely more damaging to your ears than the headphones if it is prolonged ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How bad is it really to listen to music with headphones? My mother told me if I keep doing that I'd go deaf... Is that fearmongering?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  Remember: noise cancelling works by playing the inverse waveform to cancel out the external one. That’s still pressure waves in your ear; they’re just no longer registering as sound.

  There have been plenty of studies in this area; to minimize the risk of hearing loss, keep the headphone audio between 60 and 85 dB (remember: it’s a logarithmic scale)

  Anything from 70dB down should be safe; you want to listen to 70-80dB a maximum of 40 hours a week, and 80-85 a maximum of 8 hours a day.

  It doesn’t matter where the sound is coming from; those are just the guidelines for sound waves in your ear canal. Headphones can actually muffle external sounds louder than 85 dB, protecting your hearing.

  Most phones have a setting somewhere to prevent the headphones from emitting sound over 85dB; this is required to be the default by law in the EU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tim Berners-Lee On Apple’s Browser Engine Ban and Web Apps - Open Web Advocacy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t really care if there’s only one browser engine — but that engine had better support the latest international standards around stuff like progressive web apps.

  Apple still supports PWAs, but they’ve become second class citizens. It should be possible to deploy most software as a PWA from XCode instead of a dedicated binary, including with access to hardware interfaces. And it would still be secure, and wouldn’t require app stores or sideloading.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a realistic, low-power home server setup in 2025 for Plex/Jellyfin, Nextcloud, and reliable backups?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got a beelink minipc with NextCloud and Jellyfin and external multiTB HDDs. Works for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re probably right, but steganography with FEC should be enough to do the job; any predictive text errors would be caught with the checksumming.

  After all, Phil Zimmerman got the entirety of the PGP source code from the US to Germany as a book. OCR combined with predictive text reconstruction has come a LONG way since then. The big problem today with OCR is that it often corrects errors that were present in the original document.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the recipient.

  And you could always encrypt a message against your recipient’s public key, print it out, and then mail it from a random drop box. You could even include a public key in the message so the recipient can send you back letters, and include an address in the letter they could reach you at.

  It’d only really work if enough people were sending such letters to enough recipients though, or the act of encrypting your messages in such a manner would itself be a data point.

  Also, you could print the messages on thermal paper, so they fade over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Old We're You when You Learned the Word, "Fascist"?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends what you mean by ‘learned’ — my grandparents talked about their time fighting the fascists from the time I was born.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't people harassing marketers?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Who exactly are we talking about here? Are you saying I should be harassing the people in the marketing department at my company? Or are you saying we should have visibility campaigns about the companies involved in the Internet ad networks? Or someone else?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do air purifiers really reduce dust much?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No; however, you essentially have a line between price and noise, and you need to check what they filter, how expensive the filters are, and how often they need to be replaced, as well as how much it costs to run them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do air purifiers really reduce dust much?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on what the air purifier was filtering. Mine does PM10, PM2.5, VOC and NO2. That means it’s filtering out particles down to 2.5mm plus volatile organic compounds (smoke, aerosolized oils, water vapour with pathogens, etc) and nitrous oxide.

  The filter is a multi stage filter; the PM2.5 stuff passes right through the PM10 filter.

  Interestingly, if I want to clear a room of smoke, sawdust, drywall dust or similar, what works the best is running my shop vac with a HEPA filter installed until I can’t smell the dust (usually around 5 minutes) and then I turn my air filter on full blast and it clears up the air in around 20 minutes. If I just ised the air filter, I’d probably clog it up and then just have to replace the comparatively expensive filter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you call the beleif that gods are just higher beings on other planes of existence?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Religion has to do with habits and practices. So someone can brush their teeth religiously.

  Christianity is a religion, but it’s also a faith-based belief system that incorporates alternate planes of existence. Some people eschew the religion part but still have the belief system, and some people play inside the religion without actually believing in the spiritual side of things.

  I like to explain Christianity as the belief in a multidimensional being who defines the dimensions we can observe and has done a bit of mucking around in a way that was measurable by us. Angelic appearances? Most would call them aliens, as they’d be extra terrestrial intelligences. Spiritual possession? A different dimension that has an effect on the ones we inhabit, but is currently beyond our capacity to fully understand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone Snuck Into a Cellebrite Microsoft Teams Call and Leaked Phone Unlocking Details⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the most popular conspiracy theories?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People online actually exist and aren’t just a simulation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I learn to estimate the likelihood of real-world events?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What you’re interested in is actuarial science. It’s an interesting and complex field. Pretty much every insurance company is built on the backs of a few talented actuaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you sure there aren't any ... ??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So… to answer the first question: as I said in a different response recently, questions are just questions. They might be asked out of ignorance, curiosity or malice, but the question itself should never be considered stupid.

  As for what lemmy.world is: it’s an online service managed by a small group of people that enables users, and users of other lemmy servers that have an agreement with it, to post information in sub-forums, which can be up and downvoted by the users of the forum community; those votes and their effects can be managed based on the rules of the specific community.

  Nostupidquestions@lemmy.world is one community; I’m part of it, even though I’m not a member of lemmy.world, but of lemmy.ca, which is federated with lemmy.world. This means that when I access/post content on lemmy.ca, that gets shared across to the other lemmy servers like yours that hosts or carries the communities I’m involved in.

  So… single platform, multiple instances, which have different peering agreements with each other to federate content.

  To complicate things further, Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, a larger group of online services that share the same federation structure and much of the same network code, but are designed for different purposes. Lemmy is similar to Reddit, Mastodon is similar to Twitter (ability to broadcast short messages that go into subscriber’s feeds and get aggregated), there’s one specifically for sharing video with others, etc.

  This only tangentially answers your questions, but I felt like it was a good idea to get the foundation concepts out of the way first, after which others can reply to the particular bulletin points.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there really no stupid questions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Questions are just questions. How they’re framed can be inappropriate or unwelcome, but the question itself is just a question.

  Asking a question that’s already answered isn’t asking a stupid question, just inappropriate. Same goes for asking a question where the intent appears to be to demean someone else or push an unwelcome viewpoint.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And bars/pubs used to be fine with the regulars hanging out in the corner, only buying a pitcher of beer each per night.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help figuring out my pressure washer?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Likely the nozzle then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help figuring out my pressure washer?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it plugged into a socket rated for 120VAC/20W? Is there a ground fault on that socket (a fault, not a GFCI sensor, although that’s also a consideration)?

  Is it connected to a rigid hose (not one of those collapsible ones)?

  Have you tried using it with the motor turned off? Do you get a steady stream of water with no air bubbles?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When did people start saying "have a good rest of your day"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been using that phrase with people I’m talking to in a different time zone for years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do people get rid of or sell stolen jewelry? I ask cause the news says the the Louve thieves can never sell it because it so known?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Third option: the thief wanted it for themselves and has no plan to sell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak supports interim ban on AI superintelligence⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I support an interim ban on global thermonuclear war, too. And on time travelling flowerpots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t fluff your pillows or make your bed or wash the linens? Bed stuff needs daily maintenance; hopefully flashing the firmware on your smart pillow wouldn’t be daily, but you want to keep the bed bugs away, Shirley?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because that’s when you have the time to do the maintenance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My first months in cyberspace⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember 1995 well… the year the Internet was sold to entrepreneurs.

  I remember dialling in to an internet connected mainframe on a 300 baud modem. Elm for checking email, gopher for gopher sites, ftp for file transfer. IRC and usenet newsgroups.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introverts of our era spend their time on their computers, but what did introverts do before? Like when literacy rates were lower (pre-1950s)? Or before the printing press?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before the printing press was before organized timekeeping or most automated machines.

  This meant there was plenty of space for introverts doing isolated manual labour that we now automate.

  What did they do at the end of the day instead of visit at the pub? Probably collapse in exhaustion.

  For those who had more power, there was always religious orders.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trove of surveillance data challenges what we thought we knew about location tracking tools, who they target and how far they have spread⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a great list of global media for me to ensure I’m watching.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s normal. And for some reason it makes me think of Caught in the Crowd by Kate Miller-Heidke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is known about darkrooms?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that about covers dark rooms? Although I’ve never used one for colour photography; I doubt many people have though, as that’s been mostly done by automation in full darkness since it became a thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I find a post I saw about a local alternative to Perplexity?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you saw it in Lemmy, try using the search function with keyword perplexity?

  I think I remember the article you mean; I think it was about local agentic search. No idea where that was though.