adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on How would one exit a black hole? 1 day ago:
You’d have to build them first.
Anything more complex than an atom is going to be disintegrated before it even enters a black hole due to the intense energies at play at the interface.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
These days, experience. I know it will pass, just like it always has before. And I don’t want to rob future me of all the potential opportunities just because current me feels like nothing is worth it.
- Comment on Your CV is not fit for the 21st century 6 days ago:
Unfortunately, companies are being bombarded with AI- generated CVs at a massive scale, and so have turned to AI filters to filter out all the slop. This has resulted in filtering out a lot of qualified people as well. But in an employer’s market, that doesn’t really matter to them.
Once you get past the filter, everything is mostly business as usual; many hiring managers are probably even unaware that their HR department uses AI filters.
- Comment on The Math Hack You Didn’t Know Was in Your Credit Card 6 days ago:
I’m insulted they thought I didn’t know what a LUHN check is.
Of course, my current credit cards don’t even have a magnetic stripe, so the original purpose for the check digits is history. Still useful for ither situations where the number might get garbled though.
The other thing useful about credit cards is that the first set of digits refer to the issuer, not your account. Once you strip off the issuer code and the check digit, there’s much less that’s unique to your card.
- Comment on I have some very old CDs, mostly retro video games. Is there a way to pull the games and data off the CDs for preservation? 1 week ago:
The format (mixed mode, red book, multitrack, hybrid, etc.) is usually stamped on the CD.
- Comment on I have some very old CDs, mostly retro video games. Is there a way to pull the games and data off the CDs for preservation? 1 week ago:
Yes, because it records “all” the data.
Other image formats also store the extended data at the start of the disc and the gap data between the tracks, but unless it’s an odd format or has some really nasty copy protection, that information isn’t usually useful.
- Comment on I have some very old CDs, mostly retro video games. Is there a way to pull the games and data off the CDs for preservation? 1 week ago:
Depends on the CD. If it’s just a data CD, iso is the way to go. If it’s a mixed mode CD with data plus audio, bin/cue will preserve the audio tracks but iso may not. Also, mixed Joliet/HFS CDs can lose one of the formats if imaged with an iso imager.
The big thing is that you want to image the entire CD and not just the most recent track on the CD.
- Comment on Flipper Zero 'DarkWeb' Firmware Bypasses Rolling Code Security on Major Vehicle Brands 1 week ago:
Why do you use your key toget into the car?
- Comment on What are the easiest types of internet videos to make that are not slop? 1 week ago:
Whatever it is you can talk engagingly about, unscripted. Following that, whatever you can talk engagingly about, scripted.
Doesn’t matter if you’re actually doing the voiceover; just having the ability means less time setting up shots and editing.
- Comment on How to trick id verification 1 week ago:
Yeah; that’s passkeys in action. It’s your Android phone setting up the passkeys vault that’s doing the face capturing, not LinkedIn. LinkedIn is showing you the QR code as a means of using passkeys for verification.
- Comment on How to trick id verification 1 week ago:
You’re not using the app are you?
Avoid the app at all costs. Use the web site. I can log in there with nothing but a username and password.
- Comment on How to trick id verification 1 week ago:
What is LinkedIn requiring of you exactly?
Years ago I uploaded an extremely low-res image of my face to LinkedIn and it’s never asked me for more.
- Comment on [Inverse Thinking] How do I make sure my place gets messy again after I thoroughly cleaned and organized it? 1 week ago:
Don’t schedule and organize your life, so you’re constantly having to drop what you’re doing to respond to an event you could have planned for.
Have children.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
No. Please no. Learn another instrument and some music theory before playing a shaker. People can totally murder a piece of music with a badly played shaker, throwing off all the other musicians.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
As someone who’s been a drummer for over 30 years, let me say that drummers very much cover other drummers. Most of my drum practice has been practicing other drummers’ patterns and techniques.
But percussion is generally more rewarding than limiting yourself to an 8-piece drum kit or a cahone. Piano is a percussion instrument after all. But my favourite percussion instrument is the djembe — really versatile drum once you learn how to use it. Second favourite is kettle drums — but they’re rather niche.
Things I recommend a beginner percussionist avoid are tambourines and shakers. They’re easy to play badly, and you really need to master rhythm before you can make them sound good.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Why not harmonica? They’re likewise keyed instruments and can be taken anywhere.
I’d argue though that the easiest instrument to pick up is a stick.
The easiest to learn music theory from? Any keyboard based instrument (piano, concertina, accordion, harmonica (virtual keys), autoharp, etc.). Bells, glockenspiels, vibraphones and xylophones are pretty easy too, but you need the aforementioned sticks as well.
- Comment on If you had 1 dollar and 24 hours what would you do? 2 weeks ago:
We used to start with random objects; usually something nobody would want.
- Comment on What do you think is the largest number a human can actually grasp / truly comprehend? 2 weeks ago:
As an average, I usually see the number 7 bandied around. After that we start “chunking” where each group becomes its own conceptual object.
This is why phone numbers without the area code have 7 digits in North America.
- Comment on Is it possible to make wireless charging broadcast electricity throught an entire house similar to how wifi can broadcast to the entire house? 3 weeks ago:
Not for a full house, but there are per-room solutions on the market today.
The problem is the rule of squares… for the field to be strong enough to charge devices at the edge of its range in a house, it would have to be strong enough to scramble all electronics and possibly cook your food at the emitter.
But one per moderately sized room? Yeah; very energy inefficient, but you can get it installed today.
- Comment on I'm an Israeli-American thinking of moving to Canada, is it a friendly place to move to? 3 weeks ago:
Really, it depends where you live; Canada has all the same types of people as the US. The difference is that so far, we have stuck with neo-liberals in power instead of neo-conservatives.
Outside the cities is more conservative, but only in some ways. We like our social services for the most part, even if healthcare is a shadow of what it was 50 years ago — but again, healthcare is now administered at a provincial level, so different provinces will have emphasis on different levels of care.
On the education side, expect the college of teachers to be without a contract 2 years out of every 10 — which results in strikes. Also, a lot of “extra” programs like the arts are massively underfunded at the elementary level. Teachers often go above and beyond to provide equipment and programs out of their own pockets because the government no longer provides the funding.
All that said, I feel a lot safer living north of 49, and feel like even if there still are things like systemic racism, at least it gets called out and doesn’t usually lead to violence.
Oh yeah, and school shootings are VERY rare.
- Comment on Is it possible to sell semi-old computers/parts? 3 weeks ago:
For Macs, I’d visit 68kmla.org, which has a buy/sell/trade forum. There are other forums specific to other platforms as well,
- Comment on DuckDuckGo now lets you hide AI-generated images in search results | TechCrunch 4 weeks ago:
Am I the only one who misread the title to say that DDG was now hiding AI-generated images in your search results?
- Comment on is there any way to invest ethically as a sole individual? 4 weeks ago:
Single word answer, but it really is the best option: invest in people who need a kick start but are for the most part too poor to be grossly unethical.
Just make sure you’re investing in an ethical microloan company; some of them aren’t above a bit of grift themselves.
- Comment on Why doesn’t Apple/Samsung/Google use new tech like every other phone maker? 5 weeks ago:
I’ve been using Apple products since 1979. I’d definitely say that the statement is true; Apple rarely leads the charge. That doesn’t mean they never do, but they tend to, in most cases, wait for a trustworthy tech to come along, and then push forward with it, dragging the rest of the market along behind them. There’s always innovations and synergies, many of which wouldn’t happen naturally in the market, but the stuff they integrate is generally already well tested and proved.
Counter examples include the original Macintosh, the Newton MessagePad and kinda-sorta the iPhone. More common behavior is related to things like PowerPC/ARM, USB, Firewire/Thunderbolt, nVME, trackpads, wireless peripherals, and the like.
- Comment on Now everybody but Citrix agrees that CitrixBleed 2 is under exploit 5 weeks ago:
I wish reporters wouldn’t conflate two timelines.
On June 26, Citrix had no verifiable evidence that it was being exploited.
On July 9, Gossi had evidence that it had been exploited as far back as June 23.
Now, Citrix isn’t innocent in all this; they’ve had 3 days to put out an update stating there’s now evidence it was abused as early as June 23.
But that second paragraph in no way damns the first: an executive at Citrix had as little evidence as everyone else of the abuse 3 days after it had begun. That does indicate that telemetry to flag this sort of thing was lacking though — and Citrix knew about the issue itself long before; that’s just when it was made public and immediately abused.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Well, browse Google below the SEO dreck. Then follow the links.
Or, find some niche hobby site and follow its links.
Branch out from the world wide web… I still visit Hotline sites, the odd Gopher server, and other protocols of yesteryear.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
That means you need to get out more.
The old Internet is still out there; it’s just that it is as flaky and hard to navigate as it always has been.
The “modern” Internet is just a select number of services that send each other traffic and run by the algorithm.
Most of the Internet I use in my spare time is stuff that’s been around since the 90s and still has about the same number of users it had then. Some of it is even indexed by search engines.
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 5 weeks ago:
I wholeheartedly agree.
There are better emotions to feed, and they don’t tend to result in rejection.
“Black pill” is a different thing from not dating.
I never dated, just spent time with people who shared my interests. Eventually, I and one of the people who I shared interests with realized that we were often doing so exclusive of other people.
We essentially went from just living our lives to everyone seeing us as a couple, eventually us included.
Pursuing dating for the emotional high will let you down every time. Being real about who you are and what drives you, and learning to have healthy give and take relationships that don’t involve unrealistic expectations means you’ll end up with a more fulfilling life.
- Comment on How does AI use so much power? 5 weeks ago:
Supercomputers once required large power plants to operate, and now we carry around computing devices in out pockets that are more powerful than those supercomputers.
There’s plenty of room to further shrink the computers, simplify the training sets, formalize and optimize the training algorithms, and add optimized layers to the AI compute systems and the I/O systems.
But at the end of the day, you can either simplify or throw lots of energy at a system when training.
Just look at how much time and energy goes into training a child… and it’s using a training system that’s been optimized over hundreds of thousands of years (and is still being tweaked).
AI as we see it today (as far as generative AI goes) is much simpler, just setting up and executing probability sieves with a fancy instruction parser to feed it its inputs. But it is using hardware that’s barely optimized at all for the task, and the task is far from the least optimal way to process data to determine an output.
- Comment on In languages which use complex written characters (such as Chinese's logographs), is there an equivalent to English's "text speak" shorthand? 1 month ago:
Isn’t there also shorthand where you just write the base components and people understand what you mean because even though the radicals are missing, the core meaning of the glyph is still close enough?
The difference is that the shorthand isn’t based on phonetics but on the core meaning of the calligraphic strokes.
It’s why Japanese writers can communicate with Cantonese speakers through quick strokes on their palms. The radicals are all different but the base components are the same.
Similar to a German person stripping back words to core syllables.