adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Can someone explain, calories, carbs, glucose, and gluten? 1 day 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? 2 days ago:
You’d have to ask the ones you know. But how well do you really know them?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days 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? 2 days 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? 2 days 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? 2 days 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? 2 days 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? 4 days 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? 4 days 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? 6 days 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week ago:
You could say that about me, too.
- Comment on How can I personally convince Donald Trump not to needlessly sacrifice CENTCOM? 1 week 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? 1 week 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. 1 week 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 1 week 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 2 weeks ago:
I suspect the headline is incorrect though; likely numerous people knew and were smart enough not to say anything.
- Comment on Weapons for defense only 2 weeks ago:
The other part of the “self defense” mentality is that a well defended entity is more likely to attack others through whatever means is available with the confidence that they don’t have to fear retaliation. It’s Titanic syndrome.
- Comment on How does a server work? Is it like a hard drive where it can fill up with info? or does it recycle it some how? How much does one cost and does lemmy.world need more servers? 2 weeks ago:
A server is a computer that’s configured to efficiently take network requests, process them, and send network responses. You can use any general purpose computer as a server, but custom built computers will likely be more efficient.
Servers can be self-hosted, co-located by high speed internet connections, or part of server “farms” where a lot of computers and hard drives are stored in dedicated racks where a physical hard drive failure means they pull out that drive and pop in a new one, with no loss of data because the data is written to multiple disks.
- Comment on Is it even possible to drop 20 lbs in a month? Are there any diets for people who want to go to the extreme? Kind of like celebs do for roles? 2 weeks ago:
Generally it’s best not to focus on losing weight but on adjusting calorie intake. Because muscle weighs more than fat, water weighs more than either, and the goal is generally to feel fit, not light.
When wrestling I used to do the “drop a kilo class” thing by bulking up in a way that could rapidly store water, then running to temporarily shed that water before weigh in, then immediately rehydrate up to the next weight class. That was usually around 10 lbs of weight, but I was dropping it and regaining within a 6 hour period.
Losing weight for health reasons isn’t going to be the same for everyone. Personally I find the best way for me to lose weight is to increase my metabolism, which I find I can do through endurance running in threshold temperatures. But for other people that just makes them tired and hungry without their metabolism adjusting. And without the metabolic change, you don’t get the added benefit of literally burning off stored energy.
Also, depleting fat cells isn’t the same as removing fat cells. Those cells are still there, and it’s going to take months for cellular change to happen in your body. So 20 lbs of weight loss in a month will mostly be loss of water, muscle, and energy stored in the fat cells. And as soon as you stop starving yourself, it’ll all come back. And that can happen in a matter of days.
- Comment on Is it reasonable to tell a person you once loved about the fact years later? 2 weeks ago:
I think I’d remove the “stupid” bit though; a lot of people who live their fantasy life in their head seem to be much happier in general than those of us who hold up such things against a backdrop of critical thinking.
They don’t, however, seem to learn from their mistakes or improve their lot in life, except by accident. But they’re generally quite happy at the expense of the people around them they invariably impact by remembering what never was. Some people will abandon them to their fiction after attempting to help them escape it, but others will enable them, trying to create a semblance of the reality that would never happen naturally. See the US government for a fascinating case study of how this plays out.
- Comment on Is it reasonable to tell a person you once loved about the fact years later? 2 weeks ago:
The problem with sharing now is it comes off as insincere — why, after all this time, is NOW suddenly the time to share?
- Comment on What is a good delta between indoor and outdoor temps using only ventilation? 2 weeks ago:
Remember to move as much of the warm air as possible at night — this means opening all your cupboards and drawers, which retain a LOT of heat. Cooling those down means they’ll help retain ambient temperature during the day instead of continuously leaking heat into the main airspace.
- Comment on is the romantic period due, in any part, to the high alcohol content of their food ? 2 weeks ago:
The ones that come to my head are the expanded accessibility of opioids and the volcanic eruption that dropped global temperatures for a few years (the reason Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein got written in the first place - they were homebound and bored).
- Comment on Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% 2 weeks ago:
I’m looking forward to my next round of technical interviews. The people who depend on AI usually end up looking very foolish. Especially on the questions designed to make various LLMs hallucinate.
- Comment on How would you evaluate having more pay vs an easier job? 2 weeks ago:
Those are only two variables of many.
At one point, I had job offers from four places at the same time, offering me different salaries, benefits packages, work culture, work effort and work mobility.
I ended up taking the job that was the most intellectually stimulating, had the best benefits package, and had a good cultural fit. Sometimes I had to work weekends, but got paid double for doing that; usually that was one weekend shift a month. Overall pay was on the low side of competitive.
I never regretted the choice.
- Comment on A lot of people who try to start a religion are seen as mentally ill. Like Jim Jones, David Koresh, the UFO guy, and L Ron Hubbard. Then could it be a safe bet that Jesus was mentally ill? 3 weeks ago:
Really? Looking at it from one angle, he was a Jewish Rabbi, teaching a continuance of the existing religious teachings, but rejecting tradition for tradition’s sake.
Looking at it from another angle, he claimed to have always been the God people were already worshipping.
At no point did he call people to new religious practices. Everything he taught came straight out of the Tanakh, with bits from the Talmud (but mostly repudiating the Gemara portion of the Talmud in favour of stricter interpretations of the Tanakh).
The only point at which you could argue he was starting a new religion would be after his death and resurrection — at which point the main order to his disciples was still, according to the bible, to share the core truths of the Jewish teachings and religion with the rest of the world.
Christianity becoming a distinct religion happened over time between a time 50 years later and Constantine decreeing it the official religion of the Roman Empire.
- Comment on A lot of people who try to start a religion are seen as mentally ill. Like Jim Jones, David Koresh, the UFO guy, and L Ron Hubbard. Then could it be a safe bet that Jesus was mentally ill? 3 weeks ago:
Probably not; he didn’t start a religion.
A better question would be around Moses.
Paul of Tarsus had a lot to say about appearing to be mentally ill because of what he believed, though.
- Comment on Are Edward Snowden and Jeffrey Epstein assets? 3 weeks ago:
Interesting concept; ask a question where one part is demonstrably true and the other demonstrably false, with a quick look on Wikipedia.
I’m not sure what the goal is though?