thebestaquaman

@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨there's a Costco at the other end⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  “America!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨👴☝️I did that⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t exist in my country, and to be frank, I’m shocked they aren’t vandalised to hell and back by masked vigilantes at night.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨that's some fucking aerodynamics bro⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Depending on how heavy simulations you want, it’s surprising how light hardware you can get away with in OpenFOAM. I used it for some university courses on a 2012 MacBook Pro (dual booted with Ubuntu) around 2021, and I could run 2D, two-phase simulations just fine.

  Of course, if you want to run 3D stuff with large shear forces or turbulence and high time resolution you’re gonna have to grab a veeeery big coffee while you wait. However, the ability to stop and restart the simulation is really nice, and lets you see what’s been simulated so far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨that's some fucking aerodynamics bro⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Do it! It’s great fun to play around with!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨that's some fucking aerodynamics bro⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s like a 90% chance you’re right, but aerodynamics gets especially messy with stuff like this that has a more or less flat wall at the back. A significant portion of the drag comes from the turbulence behind the vehicle, rather than cutting (more “plowing” in this case) through the air in front. When you change the geometry of the back, you change that drag.

  So, if I were to bet, I would bet that turning the boat around would help. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Some wacky interaction with the geometry of the rear could somehow cause it to get worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wat⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why it shouldn’t be viewed as ignorant to ask questions that put a different spin on the problem, that potentially no one has asked yet. And why “this is the best explanation that we have at this time” is no reason to shut down conversation/speculation about it.

  I don’t view you as ignorant, and it hasn’t been my intention to shut down the conversation. If that was your impression, I apologise. I was very honestly just trying to give my own best interpretation of what the common consensus is, and why it is the way it is. Asking questions is an unequivocally good thing, and I enjoy trying to answer them to the best of my (meagre) ability: It helps me gain new perspective.

  How does anybody presume that the universe isn’t vastly bigger than what we’ve observed of it to date?

  I’m honestly not quite sure, but I think it’s broadly accepted that the entire universe is far larger than the observable universe. From a more philosophical stance one could ask if anything outside the observable universe should really be considered part of “our universe” since, as far as we know, it is unreachable even for light (hence, unobservable).

  As for estimating the size of the (entire) universe, I think they do that indirectly by estimating the age based on observing the cosmic microwave background, and then estimating the size based on the age and rate of inflation.

  Of course, as with anything in natural science, everything is based on imperfect models that (I personally believe) will never more than asymptotically approach the true underlying reality. Thus, there’s always a possibility that anything we haven’t explicitly verified empirically will turn out to be completely wrong.

  Someone once asked me how I would react if the second law of thermodynamics was proven to be wrong (I’m a theoretical chemist), and I responded that I see the second law as an extremely good model that’s been shown capable of representing a truckload (put mildly) of things accurately. A single counter-example doesn’t mean it suddenly becomes inapplicable to all the things we use it for today. The same things apply to Newton’s laws, and a bunch of other models that already have been proven wrong. The point is: I see no reason at all to believe our current astronomical models are the “actual truth”, but I do think they’re good models for the things that we’ve actually verified that they work for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wat⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If “every point in the universe originated from the exact same point” then that origin point is somewhere in the center of the universe

  This is where I’m disagreeing. Since space itself is expanding, every point “originated” where it currently sits, and has “expanded in place” so to speak. You can’t really imagine this as an expanding bubble (the balloon analogy was bad here), since a bubble necessarily expands into existing space. In our case, the bubble itself is the space.

  tracing the trajectories of every point backwards should intersect somewhere very close to that point.

  That’s where you get a problem. Space is expanding, so if you pick an arbitrary point in space, you’ll observe that the universe appears to be expanding out from that point. No matter where you are, and what direction you look, you will see that everything is moving away from you. Thus, if you reverse that process to “trace it backwards”, then no matter where you stand, you’ll see everything contracting towards you, and conclude that you are at the centre. For reference, Hubble agrees with this interpretation.

  Saying “sometimes physics is mindboggling” in order to rationalize invalid leaps is not a strong argument.

  I’m not trying to make any bombastic claims and hand-wave them away with “physics is hard”. I’m trying to give an accurate recollection of the current consensus based on my own understanding of it (which is rudimentary at best).

  Honestly, if the concept of time breaks down when you look at t=0, then that only tells me that the idea of t=0 itself is invalid and needs to be abandoned.

  It breaks down within our current models. You can of course always ask the question of “what happened before X”, and the answer today is that our current models can take us more or less arbitrarily close to a singularity (t=0), but not all the way there. There are several theories out there regarding what the “initial state” was.

  Time didn’t just magically start at some random point before which time didn’t exist. And space didn’t just magically expand into 3 dimensions before which there was only 0. (…)

  I’m not really saying it did. I’m saying that, as far as I know, we have no better model or understanding than that if we extrapolate to t=0, we get a singularity (0 D), that for some unknown reason “magically” started expanding into the 4 D space-time we inhabit today. The fact that this process violates pretty much every known law of nature really just means there’s something here we don’t understand yet. I believe it’s pretty well established that our current models more or less completely break down at around the Planck time (see the “in cosmology” section).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lol⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I love how you can Get the evolution from the original “XD”, which low key resembles a facial expression to the “more refined” “xd”, which resembles nothing at all but just relies on cultural awareness to be interpreted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wat⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  By the nature of the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, everywhere is at the origin. That is, if we believe that the universe started out as a singularity, and that the expansion of space itself is what causes that singularity to grow, then every point in the universe originated from the exact same point, and that nothing has “moved”, in the sense that the point itself is expanding. Thus, every place is at the “origin”.

  To use the balloon analogy: Draw a small dot on the balloon, that dot is the entire universe as a singularity. Now, inflate the balloon so the dot grows, and try to determine the “origin” of the dot. Of course, you could point to the centre of the dot, but I would argue that if the initial dot is infinitely small (a singularity) then every point on the expanded dot in fact originates from the exact same point.

  This does cause a bit of a headache because we’re arguing that a zero-dimensional thing suddenly became 3-dimensional. I’m honestly not sure how astrophysicists reconcile that, but I seem to remember reading that they boil down to saying “we know what happened <some extremely short time> after the Big Bang, but we don’t really know anything about what happened at t=0” per my understanding, even the concept of time breaks down when you go to t=0, so it becomes impossible to get to t = 0 + h.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Need to clean my keyboard⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  … the off-button?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you so much for taking the time to read and understand what I mean! I honestly mean it, it means a lot to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What you say is true. What you’re neglecting is that you need a random process to choose who will go first. Let’s use your own example: If four players go around the board 100 times, there’s a near 25% chance that a given player gets around first. As you correctly say (indirectly), you will asymptotically approach a 25% chance as you increase the number of rounds towards infinity.

  What you seem to be forgetting is that there’s a very easy way to skip the infinite number of rounds, and get directly to the 25% chance: By choosing randomly who goes first. Of course, you need to do that anyway in order to start the warm-up rounds at all, so what you are effectively doing is

  First: Give every player a 25 % chance to start. Then: Spend an arbitrary amount of “warm-up” rounds to randomly choose a different player that gets to start the real game.

  Of course, these are not independent random processes, so the player that wins the first selection has an advantage in the second selection. The overall probability that a given player starts the “real” game first then becomes identical to the probability that they start the “warm-up” first. An infinite number of warmup rounds is literally identical to a single dice roll in terms of the probability that a given player goes first. So what you’re doing is one quick random selection, which you immediately throw out in favour of an infinitely time consuming random selection with the same distribution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not how standard deviations work though. The point is that if you are n players, the probability of any given player starting is 1/n. After an arbitrary number of dice throws, the probability that a given player is ahead remains 1/n, when you account for the throw that decided who would go first.

  Let’s put it this way: Would it be “more random” who goes first if you throw ten dice to decide instead of one? Of course not. But that’s essentially what you’re doing when you go “warm up” rounds. You’re just throwing the dice more times, and letting whoever has the highest total go first. Clearly, the probability that any given player gets the highest total remains 1/n, regardless how many dice are thrown.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re misunderstanding something here?

  Let’s say you and a friend are playing: You can roll a dice or flip a coin to decide who goes first, and both of you have a 50/50 chance of going first, then you start playing. After the first throw, the player that starts will on average be ≈ 7 squares ahead of the second player, and can buy a property before the second player. Let’s call this a “7 square advantage”.

  Alternatively, you play one or more “warm up” rounds. When you get around the first round, the player that started will on average still have a 7 square advantage, and can still buy the same property before the second player. In fact, you can do as many “warmup rounds” as you like, and the player that started will retain their 7 square advantage whenever the first “real round” starts.

  The point is, this doesn’t become “more random” by playing “warmup rounds” the probability that any of the two players reaches a given square first is determined the instant the coin flip that decided who would go first landed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I commented this elsewhere, but feel obliged to copy it in here as well:

  The player that goes first has the EXACT SAME statistical advantage, regardless how many round trips you do before allowing purchases. No matter how many times you roll the dice, each player will, on average, be ≈7 places in front of the person that rolls after them (not exactly 7, because there are rules for rolling again on matching dice etc.). This is true for the first roll of the dice, and it is true for the millionth roll. The distance between two consecutive players is on average equal to the mean number of places you move on a turn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The house always wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea though was so the first player to go doesn’t have an advantage

  I… the player that goes first has the EXACT SAME statistical advantage, regardless how many round trips you do before allowing purchases. No matter how many times you roll the dice, each player will, on average, be ≈7 places in front of the person that rolls after them (not exactly 7, because there are rules for rolling again on matching dice etc.). This is true for the first roll of the dice, and it is true for the millionth roll. The distance between two consecutive players is on average equal to the mean number of places you move on a turn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The idiot mayor of Toronto extended bar hours to 4am so fans in Toronto can enjoy the World Cup no matter time the game is⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, it’s definitely a worker protection ting. Sure, it has religious origins, which is why it’s specifically on Sundays, but that’s not why we keep it in place. It’s pretty widely supported that we should have one day per week where most shops are mandated to keep closed, and nobody sees a good reason to make it any other day than Sunday, so we’ve kept it on Sundays.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They probably disable it first thing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly: These things are crap because they assume an idealised system where the only time you’ll be crossing a line is while your turn signal is on. Reality is much more messy, and requires that you actually read the road and traffic conditions, rather than blindly trusting the lines, which is what these systems try to annoy you into doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They probably disable it first thing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The stuff that beeps like hell if you touch a line? That’s just annoying as shit for a plethora of reasons. First that comes to mind is: Have you ever noticed how a lot of turns have worn-down lines on the inner edge of the turn, because the more comfortable and natural path cuts the corner a bit (especially prevalent on narrow roads)?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Luke Aikins No Parachute 25,000 Feet Airplane Jump Complete Video⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  SAY AGAIN?

  ^pls^ ^don’t^ ^hurt^ ^me^

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Luke Aikins No Parachute 25,000 Feet Airplane Jump Complete Video⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re massively misunderstanding me here. Watching people do incredible things is awesome, you bring up some great examples here. Watching someone do something with a high probability of catastrophic failure is just nerve wracking. When I watch skiers jump 10 m in the air in a slopestyle comp, I know that they’re doing things that they land successfully > 99/100 times. Even when they fall, there’s a good chance they get off with only minor injuries. None of these things make those enormous athletic feats any less awesome to watch.

  I don’t think I would be able to watch someone do something like this, where they’ve never done it before, and just a minor mistake means I will be watching a person splatter on the ground at terminal velocity, both because the sight would likely be horrendous, and because I would get way to nervous just thinking about the possibility that they could miss.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Luke Aikins No Parachute 25,000 Feet Airplane Jump Complete Video⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On some level I can understand wanting to do this: You’re pushing the limits of what people think is possible, and you get a massive adrenaline rush. I have a harder time understanding those watching, who are setting themselves up to potentially seeing someone smear themselves on the ground at 250 km/h up close…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It makes you feel good to be nice to others⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wondered the same, then my SO got one, it’s a seam that makes it look real funny when not worn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4 rules of firearm safety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  During my service the rule was pretty clear that any assembled weapon is always treated as loaded, regardless how many people have checked it. Part of the idea was that no matter how sure you are that your weapon is clear, there’s no way for me to be sure, and if you ever muzzle-swipe me you can bet your ass I’m not taking any chances on whether it’s clear. So basically, if the weapon is assembled, it’s loaded. Always.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4 rules of firearm safety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Aha, then I understand! In my training, a “clear” drill was always concluded by firing in a safe direction (e.g. the ground), so I would regard that trigger pull as the conclusion of the clearing drill, not as “treating the weapon as unloaded”. The point of that step was exactly the mentality that “You just cleared the weapon, so obviously you should treat it as loaded and fire a shot into the ground to re-check that you actually cleared it”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4 rules of firearm safety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Never used a Glock before, how is that? Don’t you disassemble it before cleaning it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4 rules of firearm safety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you clear it then put it on the ground and walk away for a bit? Surprise! It’s magically loaded again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come it seems the transfer rate from an hard drive to usb is noticably slower? But a usb to usb is incredibly fast?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Downvote means incorrect/unhelpful/unrelated

  I’ve never before actually seen anyone argue that downvotes should be used for stuff that’s incorrect, especially when it’s not touted as being correct in the first place. Downvotes are for “the thread would be a better place without this”.

  Either way, the OP here isn’t even stating anything as fact, but openly speculating. If just can’t fathom why anyone would downvote someone for being open about their ignorance and freely speculating/hypothesizing over an answer. The only thing that does is contribute to the discussion by adding a new facet/idea people can respond to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come it seems the transfer rate from an hard drive to usb is noticably slower? But a usb to usb is incredibly fast?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First of all: I hate that you’re downvoted when you’re explicitly up-front about having zero expertise on this, before putting forward a completely valid hypothesis.

  Secondly: It’s very unlikely that formatting is the culprit here. I/O operations (read/write) are far slower than CPU operations, especially on spin-discs (like HDD’s), they can be several orders of magnitude slower. When you copy data, it’s basically

  • Read data (I/O)
  • Possibly do some formatting, scanning, whatever (CPU)
  • Write data (I/O)

  Whichever of these is your choke-point will determine your speed. It’s very unlikely that a pure copy operation will be choked by the CPU-bound task. Much more likely that the read/write speed of the HDD is the culprit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has a very specific goal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He doesn’t need all chicks though. He just needs that one chick with a twin sister that’s down for a threesome. I’m close to 100% certain those twins exist, given that you have enough cash.

  I’m not meaning to judge anyone, I’m just pointing out that there are plenty of people that are willing to stretch their personal boundaries for cash. OP just needs to find those people.