litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The CS job market is very location specific, so I don’t have much advice in that regard.

  I’ve got quite a bit of experience with Linux and I manage a home server, but that probably doesn’t differentiate me much.

  That said, I have been on my company’s rotating interview panel for about a decade now, and while my company’s line of work involves a lot of Linux development, I can say that most of our college hires do not possess very much Linux background at all. Sure, they might have used Linux machines for school projects, but rarely do any of them assert to be “experienced” with Linux.

  By that, I mean deeper knowledge than just using Bash. If a candidate can tell me why they prefer csh over Bash, or any syntax difference between POSIX sh compared to Bash, that is definitely a distinguishing quality. It speaks of an operator who has enough usage under their belt that they’re annoyed by the typical distro’s defaults, and more importantly, assessed the available tools, and picked the right tool that works for them.

  I cannot understate how valuable it is to us to find a candidate that understands their tooling, especially right out of college. Considering that we assume most new hires have to be brought up to speed over the first few months, a candidate that saves us that effort is at least one rank above their peers.

  Deeper functional knowledge comes in other forms as well. It’s one thing to know how a C program’s main() function is invoked by an OS, but anything which shows a fuller understanding of, say, system architecture and how a timer interrupt leads to a context switch in an assembly ISR, to a returned service call to load an ELF, to a CPU privilege ring change, to crt0, to main(), that is another level entirely.

  I’ve interviewed candidates that had side projects involving retro game disassembly. So maybe they couldn’t give me the above level of detail for x86, they could describe the same for MIPS. And that’s good enough, because most architectures do roughly the same thing, with a few different semantics and names.

  Circling back to managing a server, if you had to deal with PAM, NAT and port forwarding, tunnels and VPNs, compiling from source, or abything like that which is non-trivial, do not sell yourself short. All that stuff is resume material, because if you can relay to an interviewer that you’ve dealt with real network or machine security tasks, it is distinguishing.

  The best part is that you have all of college to learn the CS curriculum, but it’s also time that you have to pursue any particular focus that excites you. I’ve written earlier about how embedded engineers don’t really get caught in the hype cycle, so jobs don’t suddenly appear then disappear a few years later. If you wanted to do that route, getting started with any microcontroller (eg Arduino, STM32) would help, with a goal to understand all the “magic” that the IDE and compiler are doing. Maybe instead you like das blinkenlights and find yourself drawn to hardware design. It wouldn’t be too late to consider a switch to the Computer Engineer (CE) major, so you have a small taste of the EE life.

  CS as a field is so large that there are many routes between “I want to work with computers” to a declared major and to a career thereafter. Fortunately, time is on your side; this would be a very different conversation if you were a 4th year college student.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would a disk shaped planet have uniform gravity like earth or would it vary depending on whether you're near the center or edges?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Humans that successfully visit would be honored as a Discman.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would a disk shaped planet have uniform gravity like earth or would it vary depending on whether you're near the center or edges?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC, the IAU’s definition of planet – infamously applied so that Pluto fell off the list of Solar System planets – requires that a candidate planet be large enough that its own gravity is strong enough to force it into a rough sphere, whatever it might be made of.

  So a disc-shaped planet could not ever meet this criteria, because if it were made of something strong enough to remain a disk, then it’s too small to be a planet. And if it did exceed the critical size for gravity to make a sphere, then it wouldn’t be disc shaped anymore.

  But setting that definitional quibble aside, we will focus on sizes and materials that allow a disk shape object to exist. So no Wensleydale cheese. If we say that this object is mostly uniform in its mass distribution, then it would have to be the case that for any disc shape (including cylindrical), different points along the surface will be farther or closer to the center of gravity. Thus, inhabitants would experience gravity differently depending on where they are.

  Note that we haven’t even considered whether the disc is rotating. If it is, then there’s a chance that the centrifugal acceleration at some point will completely negate the gravitational acceleration. At such points, one could hop up and off the surface, linger for a bit, and then get pulled back down once the disc has rotated to a position where there’s a net force upon you again.

  Alternatively, there would be a danger of playing on a trampoline that accidentally crosses into a net-zero gravity region. Here, a double bounce could send someone very high up, only to the accelerate back down to their death.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would I go about turning this into a power-generating wind turbine.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that RPM isn’t the primary quality to assess here, but I think angular momentum doesn’t really matter either. As a quantity, momentum describes a conserved capacity to store kinetic energy. As in, it could tell us how long the fan would stay in motion when the wind stops blowing. But that’s not the objective for a wind turbine, which is supposed to draw energy from the wind to do some work.

  Also, I understand angular frequency (the magnitude component of angular velocity, which would also have a phase angle) customarily uses rad/sec but is directly convertible to RPM. Which as we agree, is not the primary quantity for a windmill.

  At bottom, none of these quantities are the useful metric for what makes a good wind turbine. And that’s expected, because we have few details about the fan itself: the blade pitch, stall speed, and fan diameter. The only firm detail we can see is the blade count from the picture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would an LLM AI model trained wholly on consenting open source projects with a license requiring all derivative works be open source licensed still be problematic?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Given that FOSS licenses are premised on copyright, yes, the same ails would still exist: 1) AI washing of licenses (including transforming one license into another), and 2) the vagueness of whether LLM outputs can be copyright, which threatens the validity of a FOSS license upon that output.

  The first ail can be seen even without LLMs: the BSD variants have gone through great pains to remove GPL-licensed code from their base repositories. This basically involves reimplementing utilities and functionality from scratch, using only the ideas that are in common with the equivalent GPL code, but never copying that code directly. This is properly considered a reimplementation, which can then be licensed permissively (eg MIT license).

  If an LLM were to train on GPL code but the output were licensed with MIT, then that could be a GPL violation because GPL mandates that remixes continue to keep the GPL license.

  Maybe you could avoid this fate by limiting the LLM to only train on permissively licenses code. So that it would be permissive licenses going in, and permissive licenses coming out. No GPL problems here. But that brings us to ail #2.

  Some jurisdictions have rules against granting copyright for computer-generated works, in the same vein as works generated by non-humans (eg a macaque). If this LLM fell into this situation, then the output is not copyrightable. And if there is no copyright, a license like MIT or GPL simply cannot apply, because its terms couldn’t be enforced.

  Well, to be clear, the copyright parts of those licenses would be unenforceable. Some parts of the license may still be enforced under a contracts claim. But in any case, the things we refer to as “FOSS licenses” cannot attach to uncopyrightable works (with the possible exception of the CC0 license, which is essential the absence of any license).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What to put on a CV when I have nothing to put there?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your profile bio mentions Arch, Thinkpad, and SDRs. Just from that, you can likely expand your skills section to spell out the operating systems that you’re familiar* with (including others like Windows or Mac OS, if you’ve used those), possibly with inclusion of anything related to coreboot (if you’ve done that), and can include radio technologies in its own section under either skills or interests.

  Don’t sell yourself short, because if a job posting is upfront that they’re not looking for hard skills as a prerequisite, then the assignment is to present yourself as a candidate with depth. They’re clearly looking for candidates in a non-conventional manner, so you should showcase all your non-conventional aspects. Don’t be afraid of including “niche” details like RTL-SDR, because they can easily do a web search to figure out what that is. But do contextualize it as a tech interest, because if maybe the job requires working with complex, one of a kind tech, then they might value the candidate that self-learned.

  Regarding “familiarity” on a resume, to be “familiar” with XYZ just means that you at least know what it is and have probably used it. Listing out some skills on a resume means, at least to me, that you’re familiar with all of those skills. It’s different if you’re actually an expert or fairly accomplished with something, in which case you’d describe that skill in detail, usually giving an example that you’ve worked on. I recommend including everything you can think of, even the mundane stuff like Microsoft Word; you’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to use Word or Excel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Air Compressor Regulator⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m also poised to agree: setting the output air regulator to a low value does not change the reserve pressure in the tank. I suspect maybe Peppycito thought OP was talking about the governor, which is what controls when the pump turns on and off.

  But even then, the most common design of governor only adjusts the peak reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns off) but the minimum reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns on) is usually a fixed value subtracted from the peak reserve. Usually the control for this is inside a box and turned by a screwdriver, because of how rare it is to adjust the reserve pressure.

  That said, there is genuine merit in reducing the reserve pressure, if there’s an explicit objective to prolong the life of the pump as much as possible and the air loads are not very significant. But this usually isn’t the case for small residential air compressors, because those pumps tend to be built very small and thus oversubscribed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't I change the terms and conditions in a pre-signed contract with a corpo?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IANAL. If a bank signs the copy they receive back from the counterparty, then generally yeah, it would be enforceable. Contract law demands that result, because otherwise there’d be no point to the words on the document. Working in the other party’s favor would be any lack of notice shortly after the bank signs the contract, because the longer the bank takes to notice a problem, the easiest it is to prove that they did not exercise the appropriate care when signing, incurring all consequences as a result. Missing more and more opportunities to recast or renegotiate the contract, that’s a poor position to defend.

  That said, the other party must not have made any implied or explicit statements that the bank could have relied upon. Returning the modified contract to the bank in an email with the words “please find the signed contract attached” could ambiguously imply that the original contract has been unmodified except that it has gained the other party’s signature.

  Whereas the words “please find my signed proposal attached” would dispell any and all ambiguity, because it would clearly be a proposed contract by the other party, not the bank’s original proposal.

  To be clear, a bank would almost certainly contest the contract, even if they don’t have a leg to stand on. And the usual reason for this – besides litigiousness – is that it’s the only way for the bank’s business insurance to pay out. Or at the very least, an attempt to slightly lower the damages by opening settlement talks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How no-techy/"common" people know if a Open Source code is secure?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll offer the contrarian answer: FOSS does not guarantee secure software; in-fact, neither does proprietary software, nor government software, nor anonymous software.

  As others have mentioned, assurances about software come from audits or by trusting someone reputable who has done the audit. Delivering security guarantees is not what most FOSS projects are meant to do.

  So what exactly do FOSS projects do? Why are they any better than proprietary software? The short answer is that FOSS is about continuity. You can and will find FOSS projects from 30 years ago, which have been kept updated so they can run modern machines. The folks doing that didn’t need anyone’s permission to do that; they can just do it.

  Meanwhile, if Adobe of MSFT declare that a certain proprietary software suite is going EOL and will not receive any more security updates, then the user base is SOL. FOSS gives a potential route away from this fate, it someone or some group is willing to put the elbow grease in to security updates. Even if it’s one person.

  So in the short term, there are no security assurances for either proprietary or FOSS. In the long term, all software cannot escape the unstoppable march of time and vulnerabilities. But at least FOSS has a chance to be corrected, years or decades later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For handling international traffic under ICAO rules, ATC is indeed supposed to be done in English.

  But if we take a look at some of the terminology in aviation, the French words cannot be ignored. Mayday and pan-pan are from the French venez m’aider and panne.

  When radio silence is required, a station might command “SEE-LONCE” but this comes from the French word for silence. Though I think this is a rarity in aviation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Linux Version of Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wine? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What effect did COVID have on the minds of the ultra-wealthy?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  An intriguing question. I do agree that even the ultra-rich had an eye-opening time during the pandemic, but I don’t agree that their wealth acts as a singular shield, which if pierced would herald their downfall.

  When someone has the resources of tens of billions of dollars, the principle of defense in depth is both practical and is most prudent. For each of your points that suggest the ultra-rich were vulnerable, it might actually prove the strength of their fortifications.

  they were conceivably vulnerable to the same indiscriminate illness as everyone else.

  The thing with disease is that it cannot teleport: the transmission vector must convey person to person, through airborne particles, or some other physical means. What the ultra wealthy can – and do – buy are exotic islands or chalets in faraway places from other humans. Meaning that once there’s notification of a pandemic, they are best positioned to flee to whichever of their overseas fortresses as they may choose. Meanwhile, the masses have to hunker down at home, which is their only refuge, and hope for the best.

  the government can and will shut down your business

  The ultra-rich leave the daily operations of their businesses to professional managers. It has been a staple of prudent management for decades to have disaster preparedness plans and business continuity plans. You may have seen some form of these through wildfire or earthquake notification systems, so that a company can confirm which of their employees are accounted for. But such systems also serve as a planning exercise, in case a natural or manmade disaster takes out an entire industry.

  The businesses of the ultra-rich already plan for things like the loss of most of the world’s hard drive production capacity due to flooding and the closure of EU airspace due to volcanic ash. These aren’t as detailed as those specific situations, but are about the business impacts: what it products can’t get to customers? What if required materials can’t reach the factory? What if war breaks out domestically and the production line is taken over by the government?

  Not to minimize the impacts of the pandemic, but the difference is that it activated multiple continuity plans simultaneously, an unprecedented scenario but otherwise not unrecoverable. Fortune favors those who make plans.

  Indeed, a part of many business’s plans during a catastrophic situation is to – unsurprisingly – beg the government for aid or a bailout. After all, if they can get the taxpayer to partially implement their plan, they will. And business lobbying for a bailout only requires a telephone and a contact list, so the ultra-rich’s lobbyists were kept busy in the summer of 2020.

  What is most telling is that the USA stock markets recovered in the latter half of 2020. The ultra-rich have plenty of resources to survive a few months of disruption, as they have more runway to wait things out than, say, a typical working class household that needs rent relief or faces eviction.

  universal income model is not only possible, it is completely affordable and can be quickly implemented.

  One of the most under-assessed aspects of the ultra-rich is that they find ways to make money whichever way the wind blows. Even in a UBI scenario, they can still make bank if they are the sole vendors of certain commodities.

  In fact, a UBI system which automatically tracks inflation is essentially a license for vendors to also increase their prices with exacting precision, perfectly in-time with inflation. This is why a UBI system should not be implemented on its own, but alongside other social safety nets and regulation on the “demand side” of money. That is to say, business regulation (eg rent controls, anti-monopoly rules, banking reform) are all part-and-parcel of a long-term plan that defeats economic inequality. They are not separate pieces, but the ultra-rich can still take solace that not everyone recognizes this yet.

  The war of information would still be on their side even if UBI were voted into effect today.

  The luxury services that their money had always effortlessly bought could be quickly ended by decree, scarcity, and the loss of human labor to illness.

  I didn’t exactly care to track the happenings of the ultra-rich during the pandemic years, but did they actually suffer such scarcities? Their business empires recovered by the end of 2020, and it’s not like rich people don’t just find other intrigues to spend their time on. Rhetorically, what is a few billion here or there?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would people like a "X posts per Y" rate limit for this community?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “more posts create more conversations” has a logical end point, where the sheer volume means more time is spent skipping over uninteresting questions than time spent on answering the interesting ones. At that point, people with answers would rather spend their time elsewhere.

  Curation is moderation by another name, and it is hard at scale. The solutions that work for communities with a hundred followers will not work for communities like this one with 49,000 (!) subscribers.

• ⁨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’ve copied a portion of an older comment I wrote, answering part of the question:

  One thing which isn’t immediately apparent, even to Americans themselves, is that the large American political parties are less equivalent to individual political parties elsewhere, and are closer to “uneasy coalitions”, like those found in Europe involving multiple parties trying (and maybe failing) to form a government. That makes it harder to draw broad conclusions like “USA Democrats would be right-of-center” because progressives and “DINOs” (Democrats in name only) within the party would be left-wing or right-wing, respectively. Logically, the same applies to the Republican party, although ranging from right-wing RINOs (Republicans in name only) and “moderate Republicans”, to the far-right factions of the party, like neo-Nazis and MAGA.

  That’s what I wrote then, and what I’ll add today is that because of the enormous variety in different parts of the USA, two members of the same national political party from different parts of the country might sit down for dinner and find they have very little common group. What appeals to them about their party might be highly local.

  For example, a registered Democrat in California might be fully onboard with regards to the rule of law, as applied to immigration and unlawful detention, but might be a bit apprehensive about tax reform that would eliminate middle-class subsidies (eg SALT exclusion) because that hits very hard in a HCOL state.

  Meanwhile, a registered Democrat-Farmer-Labor (the state’s Democratic party) in Minnesota may be fully convinced that environmental protection is important to preserve both the planet and the nation’s public lands, but wouldn’t necessarily support the wholesale ban of hunting because of the rich cultural value instilled from an early age.

  With the exception of vanguard political parties, I’m not aware of any political parties that strictly adhere to and enforce the party platform. That is to say, membership that mandates exsct alignment to the values of the party, and failure to do so requires expulsion or resignation. This is a rarity in American politics, because parties generally want the barrier to entry to be low. The downside is that there’s no party discipline whatsoever for members that aren’t in government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any payment aggregators (Like Paypal for instance) that prioritize user privacy?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this correct though, in terms of a confidentiality or non-repudiation guarantee? For a ledger system – blockchain or not – every unit can be traced back through the history, to one or more sources. Yes, multiple transactions can serve to obfuscate the sources, but the real source is within that subset of all possible sources. So unless obfuscation takes place by involving all possible addresses, there’s still going to be some amount of knowledge revealed about the relationship of some source and some destination address.

  But I think non-repudiation could be more damaging in a cryptocurrency context. Imagine a corrupt politician that takes a cash bribe. Unless the briber recorded the serial numbers, the politician can plausible repudiate any connection with the briber, because the cash could have come from anywhere else.

  Whereas with cryptocurrency, if the briber’s wallet address is ever revealed (eg. by hack, by change of heart, by blackmail, or by cryptographic collapse), then there’s a line which can connect the briber to the politician. They cannot deny that it’s possible to have received the bribe, which is itself a scandal unto itself. Probably not good enough to convict of a crime, but enough to do political damage.

  Ultimately, I’m of the opinion that a ledger system still isn’t as strong on confidentiality as cash, because cash records nothing at all, so there’s nothing to accidentally reveal. To be clear, bribery is a stand-in for any sort of payment that would cause adverse effects if revealed. Other examples include secret child support, for a secret pregnancy, for a secret abortion, or anything else that people don’t want to reveal to the world. The whole point of privacy, I maintain, is to have a choice on what other people get to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can an Swedish style draft work in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m relying a lot on the background of Sweden from this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CsSs0eQKKA

  In essence, the USA does not have the same pressures that led Sweden to their current strategy. For that reason alone, duplicating the same strategy in the USA would be a failure to meet the country’s actual threats, use up more cultural and military capital, while also throwing away some of the USA’s natural strengths (eg stable geopolitics in North America, service exports economy, vastly distributed population).

  As a reminder, only until fairly recently, the USA military branches met most of their recruitment goals through voluntary enlistment, an approach that succeeded against the backdrop of 1975, when the country was deeply against the draft. What fuels the enlistment pipeline is, rather unfortunately, the poorer class, because military service is a route to a better life. In some ways, the voluntary enlistment benefits are a perverse form of state support.

  So the need for a draft is, IMO, wholly inappropriate if voluntary enlistment is still viable. The next question would be whether the USA would find itself overwhelmed by crisis or disaster that it would need the civilian population to help defend the national interest.

  And still, I don’t see as being plausibly, because it really shouldn’t ever get to this point: the USA still has (we think) credible nuclear deterrence and power projection. This can, and does, make up for the lack of civil cohesion and, quite frankly, civil apathy for anything beyond putting food on the table. That is to say, a threat would have to seriously infringe on the average American’s daily life before they will do something about it.

  If this were seriously part of the national defense, then we’d have already lost the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a famous person or character's likeness is copyrighted and you need to license it to use it, could you find a real-life lookalike and say you modelled your character off of *that* person instead?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a few things that need to be clarified, because they’re all fairly distinct even though they might seem to be doing similar things:

  • Copyright: protects the reproducibility of some work. Objective: a time-limited monopoly for the owner to control copies

  • Trademark: protects the authenticity of a vendor. Objective: elimination of marketplace confusion; vendors are judged on their merits

  • Patent: promotes disclosure of innovations and protects the use or application of an invention. Objective: a time-limited monopoly for the owner to control uses, but must disclose the secrets for how to build it

  • Defamation: (USA specific) protects against provably false statements published about someone. Objective: elimination of lies from the marketplace of ideas, but does not affect opinions or public mores

  • Right of publicity: protects personal marketability and opportunities. Objective: elimination of labor marketplace confusion; person will be judged on their merits

  There are two things which can cut against almost all of these: fair use and parody. Fair use arises commonly in copyright but the logic is the same: in order to discuss something, the thing must be identified. The marketplace of ideas cannot exist if nobody was allowed to screengrab a TERF’s wizard movie or mention why they don’t like a certain cola company. The key is to be minimize the incursion to what is absolutely needed. For example, someone organizing a boycott can indeed use a brand’s logo to refer to that brand.

  As for parody, it goes a bit further and will (for comedy or sarcastic intention) assert that the statement is true or the work is authentic. This too is allowed, because – at least in the USA – poking fun at things is a valid (and human) way of discussing things that would otherwise be difficult to say. How it relates to defamation, trademarks, and right of publicity is that a reasonable viewer of the parody must be able to determine that yes, it’s a joke and it’s not actually making that particular point but rather a different one. This is akin to someone nodding their head to say yes but verbally saying “no”: there are enough mixed signals that nobody would take the assertions seriously.

  So would someone’s face be “locked out of the arts”? No, not by copyright. But under right of publicity, they could have a claim if the depiction could potentially be confusing. Fortunately, this generally can be cleared up by explicitly identifying who the depicted face belongs to. And also to never try to sell or distribute artwork that rides on that person’s coat-tails.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you maintain a phone number in different countries on the long-run ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Since this would be the phone number that you’d rely upon to have continued access to those government services, I wouldn’t skimp on the expense: consider the monthly charge for a domestic phone plan as a cost of citizenship or residency.

  Supposing you find and set up an eSIM with a domestic carrier in that country, then one which supports WiFi calling would allow you to receive SMS/MMS from anywhere, provided that your phone also supports WiFi connectivity.

  As an aside, WiFi connectivity was greatly useful when I was traveling in Japan, since I’d be back at the hotel with WiFi in the evening, which conveniently overlapped with USA West Coast time, so calls were perfectly natural.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens when you just refuse to pay and go ... ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to try answering the titular question, despite the factual situation being wholly divorced from sanity, through no fault of the OP directly. Unless some new convention on the laws of the sea has been enacted vis-a-vis international waters – which the Strait is – a nation which provides some sort of service over that area is not entitled to remuneration. It would be gratis.

  That said, in the very different context of aeronautical navigation, there is indeed precedence for providing a service to an international zone, but this is agreed to by multilateral treaty, not imposed. For this, we look to the massive area of the north Pacific Ocean, for which there is essentially no radar service available. And yet, to enable civil aircraft to fly without colliding with each other at speed, somebody needs to coordinate the flight routes and provide weather information. Through ICAO, the USA is the contracting state that provides such service over the Oakland Oceanic Flight Information Region. This means most of the Pacific Ocean is not USA airspace, but does follow the American procedures for organizing traffic (which follows from ICAO rules but possibly with small tweaks). This is the distinction between “USA airspace” and “USA controlled airspace”. ICAO chose the USA because no other country can realistically perform this service, nor has anyone else put in an offer to ICAO.

  To pay for this service, the USA FAA charges overflight fees. Since the FAA is a civil agency, it does not have authority to order a shoot-down of an airline’s jets due to non-payment. Rather, the FAA can collect the owed fees through the American courts, just like anyone else would through a lawsuit for money damages. The FAA could also take adverse regulatory action, such as providing less or no service, subject to minimum obligations required by ICAO. The agency can also choose to cancel or disapprove of flights headed to/from USA airspace. If an airliner flies into the territorial airspace of any country without permission, then the air force would respond, not the civil air regulator.

  So what does this have to do with international waters and maritime navigation? The air example shows how an equivalent fee for water passage would have to be implemented, when it concerns international waters. Everyone has to agree to the terms, the fee has to be economically reasonable, the contracting state must have some relationship to the area in question, and an international organization must actually contract with a qualified state to provide said service.

  The present action in the Strait meets none of this criteria.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the water to make the medication work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Without knowing which medication, there can only be speculation as to why it requires a specific quantity of water. And even then, the best source of authority would be to ask the doctor for the reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be better to just have a lot of society be underground?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are indeed places where large amounts of human activity takes place underground, often being metro systems and their associated retail spaces; Tokyo Station in Japan comes to mind as having an underground mall attached to it.

  But the same caveats for underground construction of transportation systems also apply to all other underground structures that humans would like to build. Consider the differences between ground conditions in: the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, and New York City.

  The Bay Area is the outlet for major rivers in northern California, bounded by mountain ranges on virtually all sides. The surface is either a thin covering of soil atop this mountain rock, or is a layer of looser soil or mud, made from the sediments carried in by those rivers. This makes for fantastic agricultural conditions but presents a real risk of liquifaction when there’s an earthquake. While an underground structure wouldn’t fall over – because it’s within the ground – it could certainly lose its supports unless it has piles all the way down to the rock. And that’s only buildable on the narrow shoreline region where there’s sufficient depth before hitting the rock layer.

  With Denver, it’s basically all rock, so to build within the rock would require blasting it away and building within the hole, or to build normally then bury the structure in fill, so that it’s below grade.

  With NYC, it’s a different story because the ground conditions make it fairly easy to dig tunnels and drive piles, and the bedrock layer beneath Manhattan is strong enough to support the weight of supertall-class skyscrapers. On this point, the New York Fed’s Gold Vault is in the basement in Manhattan, precisely because the volume of gold inside would be a serious strain on any foundation and the geology beneath.

  All that said, the surface conditions in some extreme climates may warrant building underground, or avoiding the underground outright. Burying a dwelling in New Mexico would make a lot of sense, due to the hot and dry Southwestern climate. But in Alaska, an underground dwelling would cause melting of the permafrost layer below, resulting in a similar situation to liquefaction. I suppose this can be mitigated, but it would be a monumental effort, akin to Camp Century in Greenland. That project was abandoned due to changing ice geology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I generally shy away from downvoting even things I dislike. I don’t want to fall into an echo chamber where all I see are only the things I agree with.

  This is not how Lemmy works. If you don’t ever up or down vote anything, and if you have your client hide the up/down votes on all comments and posts, you will still see the same content as someone who prodigiously votes. Votes here are, in the truest possible way, optional.

  But for people who do utilize up/down votes, they are a signal. Sometimes they’re a weak signal, sometimes a bad signal, and yet other times might be a strong signal from the community. How to evaluate the signal is a matter of continued debate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between socialism and communism? Is there one? Or are the terms interchangeable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Then there is the modern usage of the terms which seem to vary based on who invokes the[m]

  I think the thing to keep in mind is: 1) words evolve over time, and 2) the people using those words might be abbreviating what they actually mean, because they don’t know that there’s another related concept that is named similarly. The best example of the first is how “truck” in the 1910s meant what we now call a “hand truck”, and “car” from that era meant traincar. Whereas in the 2020s, “truck” and “car” both refer to automobiles, and we had to create the backronyns of “hand truck” and “rail car” to avoid confusion.

  I don’t think your theoretical understanding of Marxism is wrong – though I’ve not read enough to confirm – but I would hazard against using other people’s wrong definitions and usage guide your own understanding. If you understand the ideology, then it’s a matter of rendering it using the right words; that is, it becomes a communications problem.

  For example, Republican politicians will use the term socialism to mean communism and vice versa

  I would especially not suggest relying on right-wingers to properly use – let alone understand – left-wing ideology, since their objective is to denigrate leftists through FUD and infantile repetition. Basically, the maxim of “if enough people are ‘talking’ about something, it must be controversial” or “I’m just asking questions bro”, neither of which are anywhere approaching a good-faith discussion on the merits.

  Some politicians like Mamdani or Bernie will describe socialism to mean a more humane type of capitalism that has other priorities other than pure profit seeking

  How the two use the word “socialism” is almost always understood as a shorthand for what Europeans would call “social democracy”. So it’s definitely on the list of valid implementations of socialism, but is specifically about reforming an openly capitalist system into something more egalitarian. That said, “social democracy” still leaves out a lot of details which need clarification: do Mamdani or Bernie support (re)building the social safety net? Does the state need to also own railroads the same way that they own highways? For the former, there’s the standalone word “welfare state”, but I’m not aware of a compound phrase that means “social democratic welfare state”, if that even describes Bernie or Mamdani at all. I’d certainly love a word that means “social democratic welfare railway state” but nothing has caught on.

  I think that should underscore my point: even after resolving exactly which word they might be abbreviating, there aren’t enough short words to succinctly describe any particular ideology. Rather, the words are useful to get a rough idea of a person’s views, but ultimately, every one and every candidate is going to have a slightly different take on certain questions.

  Some people use communism to describe an authoritarian system that has no regard for human agency

  I personally refer to this definition as “Stalinist communism”, because it does accurately describe how the USSR was operating under Stalin. Essentially, it wrapped a cult-of-personality in the trappings of communist thought, though people like Trotsky pointed out how communism could be done much differently. Obviously, history is quite clear that the Stalinist approach was not adopted as-is by any other country, nor retained in the USSR after Stalin’s death. Indeed, I’ve never come across anyone who genuinely refers to themselves as a Stalinist or who seriously proposes to the adoption of Stalin-style, top-down authoritarian communism. Maybe some right-wing Russians do, but idk. My point is that, like the Republican examples above, Stalin and authoritarian communism is usually only brought up as a “thought terminating answer” rather than to seriously debate the merits of communism, either theoretically or practically.

  multiple people will have multiple definitions that most often don’t align with how Marxists describe communism and socialism

  Yes, because they’re usually talking past each other about different things. Being able to detect which definition someone means to use is a skill that you can develop for yourself, to have a clearer picture than they do.

  I’m primarily writing this comment because I abhor the idea that an idea – it could be anything, from rocket science to theorrtical mathematics – is perceived as being an arena where everyone is just making up stuff, and if that should lead to people becoming turned off the idea of studying it for themselves, that’s a net-negative. No doubt, some countries, politicians, and agencies want to denigrate or prop up their own definitions, but that just makes it easier to identify fake socialists and “communists in name only”.

  The merits and failures of socialism and communism deserve to be comprehensively hashed out in the public mind, and it only serves the status quo that this not happen. And the longer the conversation is delayed, the more that the indisputable ails of the status quo take more victims.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between socialism and communism? Is there one? Or are the terms interchangeable?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is definitely a difference, and they are not interchangeable. I’ll let other people chime in with a rigorous definition for communism, but at a minimum, it must have abolished the state and social classes entirely. So one could say that communism is at the very end of the road, and the various flavors of socialism are the routes to get there.

  Various flavors of socialism? Yes, I’ve written an earlier comment about that, and another one here. In brief, there are many ways to move beyond capitalism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would a metal gazebo be safe during a lightning storm?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  but electricity will always run the path of least resistance, which will invariably be the metal gazebo if they’re close enough.

  Not according to the USA National Weather Service:

  The presence of metal makes absolutely no difference on where lightning strikes. Natural objects that are tall and isolated, but are made of little to no metal, like trees and mountains get struck by lightning many times a year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Despite the USA being somewhat of a political pariah at the moment, it has long been the case that American universities are desirable from an educational perspective and for “clout”. Not to say that TU Delft or anywhere else doesn’t have name recognition, but being a fully English instruction on a continent with few neighbors, it is a very “exotic” destination to go study at.

  That Hollywood and media hype up the American collegiate experience (eg red Solo cups, fraternity/sorority life, binge drinking, road tripping for spring break, etc), even some non-research public college systems like the California State University (CSU) system will receive international students, while the reaearch-focused University of California (UC) systems remains in the top tier of public American universities.

  From the university’s perspective, they have a commodity they can market to an international audience, so why not charge more? As for why these colleges are behaving like capitalists – especially the public universities – it is because of chronic state underfunding: the USA federal government does not pitch in very much to the universities, except as research grants. And when push comes to shove, state legislators will cut university funding, meaning more has to be paid for by students. Some states even slash school funding and then try to replace it with state lottery proceeds, which means schools are only well-funded when there’s a gambling epidemic…

  Now in your case, it should be noted that the University of Southern California (USC) is a private university, that regularly jostles with UCLA (a UC campus) for the highest ranking as a college in southern California. Accordingly, they are priced similarly for international students but not for domestic students: the UC system first-and-foremost must serve its constituent citizens, so to keep tuition low for in-state students, they will raise the price of out-of-state or international students. USC and other private colleges would follow suit, because free extra money.

  We haven’t privatized the public universities in the USA, but they’re almost operating as though they already have been, charging as much as the market can bear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do tires have the width and diameter they do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s negligible compared to the load carrying provided by the tire pressure.

  My comment was in reply to the “always equal” assertion, which it definitely is not. No doubt, it’s a handy rule of thumb but nobody should walk away thinking it is a hard rule of tire physics.

  And that’s the gyroscopic effect, not any of the other things that contribute to bicycle stability but don’t depend on wheel size.

  Correlation does not prove causation. You assert that bicycle wheels are big because they have more gyroscopic effects. That is a correlation. I assert in my other comment that small wheels would be swallowed by potholes. That is a causal relationship: the wheel must be bigger to deal with real roads AND is something a smaller wheel cannot handle. It is a fact that a big wheel rolls over protrusions and holes that a small wheel would fall into.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The premise of my question is that it is a false dichotomy: there need not be tension between pedestrian and roadway users if the drainage system spread out the water over a larger area of already-paved surface. Everyone wins!

  In a rural area where roads are already narrow, this wouldn’t work and I acknowledged that in the title, limiting the inquiry to urban/suburban. I agree 100% that rural country roads built with ditches are entirely appropriate, cheap, and allow natural absorption into the soil. But urban streets aren’t just souped-up country roads and need to be constructed for the built environment.

  Whereas rural areas prioritize land, livestock, and the great outdoors, urban areas prioritize people. And that means pedestrian facilities are non-negotiable in my book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do tires have the width and diameter they do?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The TL;DR is that at one point in history, automobile wheels did in-fact use the same construction as bicycles. But the needs of automobiles diverged somewhere in the first half of the 20th Century. And since tires are mounted onto wheels, we need to discuss those first.

  I’ve written prior comments here about bicycle wheel/tire fitment and wooden carriage wheel design.

  Basically, early horseless carriages used the same wooden wheels that horse-drawn carriages has used for centuries, which have a squared off profile that contacts the ground, sometimes with a steel band – a tyre – to both hold the wheel together and reduce wear on the wheel itself. The only requirements for carriage wheels were to: 1) roll, and 2) bear weight. And using thick wooden spokes, a wagon wheel could achieve those objectives just fine but were really heavy.

  When the bicycle was invented in the 1820s, the first iterations used slender variants of wagon wheels, but since 100% of the moving power came from the human rider, this is still unnecessary dead weight to haul around. So bicycle wheels evolved to use very thin spokes, which by the late 19th Century were made of steel in tension, rather than the compressive loads through wood that wagon wheels used. Although steel is heavier than wood, a thin steel spoke has more tensile strength than the same weight of wood has in compression. So overall, it’s a weight savings. Specifically, we say that a bicycle wheel must: 1) roll, 2) bear some weight, and 3) allow for leaning.

  The last requirement is crucial for bicycles: they cannot use squared-off carriage wheels, or else leaning the bike will start riding on the edge of the wheel/tire. The solution is simple: round off the contact point so that leaning doesn’t change the profile.

  As it turns out, by the 1910s or so, automobiles also realized that wooden wheels were too heavy, and so they also adopted the steel spoked wheel. But they kept the squares off rubber tire, precisely because an automobile does not (normally!) lean during a curve, and instead should be firmly planted on all four wheels. So at this point in history, both automobiles and bicycles are using spoked wheels but just have different shapes for their rubber tires. Great!

  But this wouldn’t last: the spoked wheel – which already is a phenomenal structure, essentially being a suspension bridge wrapping upon itself – has one small quirk which bicycles tolerated but automobiles do not. When a spoked wheel is subjected to a straight downward force, the structure distributes the force essentially evenly. But if the force is sideways from the left (ie along the axle), the spokes on the left are heavily stretched but the spokes on the right aren’t. This is uneven loading, that then reverberates from side to side.

  This is no issue for bicycles, because they usually lean and so the sideways force is often zero. Sure, a BMX rider can intentionally ride the bike askew, but it’s workable. For an automobile, sideways forces are a regular occurrence, such as during a sharp turn. But also during motorsports where the car is sliding. Spoked wheels can disintegrate when subjected to enough sideways force, which is why cars switched to solid wheels.

  Also around this time, cars got very heavy – some would say “land yachts” – and this required making the tire wider to deal with the weight. Since the tire and wheel are the same width in cars, this means wider rims as well. Bicycles have no such issue, because most bicycle tires are “balloon shaped”, and so already are wider than the rim, sometimes almost comically.

  In the end, the closest that bicycles and automobiles got was in the early 1900s, and have diverged ever since. Fatbike bicycles and now ebikes pushed the width of tires to some 4+ inches (100+ mm) while touring cars are luxury vehicles meant for long distance, high speed cruising on the Autobahn, and so need wide, high aspect ratio tires.

  As for wheel diameter, that’s much simpler to answer: as Jeremy Clarkson noted in the Vietnam Top Gear Special, smaller wheels fall into potholes easier. Bigger wheels roll over them. Automobiles for paved roads use modest diameters, capable of slowly rolling over a 4-6 curb to access a driveway. The same diameter on a bicycle would be the 27-inch (aka 700c) or 29-inch class used for road cycling or mountain biking. Whereas smaller folding bikes used exclusively for last-mile commuting can tolerate smaller wheels, because the benefit doesn’t outweigh the diameter penalty when folding it down.

  For overlanding or bouldering, 4x4 automobiles have some enormous tire diameters and even then, they sometimes have to intentionally reduce the air pressure, so the tire can conform to rock surfaces and thus get more traction. But such tires are wholly inappropriate on a roadway at freeway speeds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't urban/suburban streets and roads use a center storm channel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with everything up until this point:

  If the road were sloping towards drainage at the centre, then floodwater fills the entire road basin before overflowing, and your road is blocked

  I’m imagining the scenario of a residential suburban neighborhood, on mostly flat land. With moderate rain and fallen leaves from the Autumn, some storm drains will clog and need manual intervention. If this neighborhood were built with conventional crowning, then the properties unlucky enough to be next to a clogged drain will see some flooding, but other homes in the neighborhood will have no issue.

  If instead the entire neighborhood used center gutters with center drains, but spaced the drains closer together so the drains/km is identical to a conventional build, then the same rainfall should cause smaller impacts, because: 1) a single clogged drain will only flood a small patch of the road, until 2) reaching the next open drain, which is closer and thus the flood is a smaller area, and 3) does not disadvantage the unlucky property immediately adjacent to the clog, since the flooding is concentrated at the road center.

  In both constructions, the road area is identical, the rainfall is identical, and the storm drain capacity is identical, yet the latter needs only one half the linear gutter distance and can spread out the flood risk across the whole neighborhood. Phrased another way, center gutters should stave off flood damage to any property, until such point that the drainage is simply overloaded and then every property would flood. No more “lucky” or “unlucky” neighbors: either everyone is safe or they all need to evacuate.

  That’s the situation in a flat neighborhood, but in a sloped neighborhood, center gutters aren’t any worse: the most critical drains are at the bottom of the neighborhood. If those fail, it’s still game over for those adjacent homes. And that still is the case for side gutters anyway.