Nibodhika

@Nibodhika@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hopeless is getting a job with a CS degree?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Dude, there’s a limit to how much issues you can put a blind sight and pretend are not there or that the next LLM will fix them. At some point companies will start getting hacked and they’ll have to take action, and that will not take decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trying to flash 256GB image to almost 256GB flash drive, space is barely not enough!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You have 256 liters of water, and a 234.3 liter jar and are asking how to put the water in the jar. Either get rid of some of the water (shrink the image) or get a different jar (different drive). Writing 256L on the side of the jar will not let it fit more water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Even by their own estimates it’s 2-10 million dollars per launch, imagine thinking that spending 6 million dollars to get a single rack in space where it can’t be maintained and will become garbage in a couple of years is a good investment. And that’s just the launch price, you still need to build the satellite, with its hundreds of square meters of solar panels and radiators. There’s no point arguing this any more than there was a point arguing hyperloop, until they present a feasible product it’s just big talk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool, so we moved from a single motorcycle to a couple of cars, still a long way from a parking lot. You’re not understanding the issue, the scale is not feasible, you’ll spend millions of dollars to launch a single satellite that’s not even 1/10th of a tiny data center.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless I missed something, all of his math assumes 20kW of computers, that’s not even one rack for heavy stuff, of course you can run a data center in space if you send one satellite up for each computer, that’s just unpractical.

  Let me put this into perspective, what you’re saying is like someone has an idea for a revolutionary parking plaza, and they’re showing you it’s feasible to spend millions of dollars to park one motorcycle in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why put data centers in space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers

  That’s where you’re wrong, this is like the hyperloop or solar roadways, where all of the experts agree it’s a dumb idea but you have a rich person trying to sell that to the public with the promise that they’ll solve the issues by the time they get to production.

  You can’t cool things in space effectively, the only way things lose heat in space is through radiation. According to Wikipedia the radiators expel from 100 to 350 W per square meter. My PC generates more heat than that, imagine a data center. A quick Google tells me it’s 5-15kW per rack or 40-60kW per AI rack. Let’s imagine an AI data center, a single rack produces 50kW, so you need 140 square meters per rack. To put this in perspective the space station could host one rack if we removed everything else that produces heat from inside. So you need a megastructure just to host one rack, that will become obsolete in a couple years.

  It’s not feasible, it’s just as stupid an idea as a vacuum tube for trains, and brought to you by the same person too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people regardless of whether their reasonings are justified or not pinpoint South Park for ruining a generation of millenials?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but he also complained about writing which is very funny as we only know that he existed because other people wrote about him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Futuristic relates to technology level, not time period. Otherwise 2001 or Battlestar Galactica would not be futuristic either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your point being?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your thoughts on anti-populism and those that say populism is fascism?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, first of all populism isn’t really a defined concept that everyone can agree with. Because of the question you’re asking I’m assuming you’re talking about populism as represented by such politicians as Trump/Milei/Bolsonaro/etc.

  In that case the answer is that Populism is not fascism in the same way that elections are not democracy. As in, you can have one and not the other, but they tend to go hand in hand often enough to be very strongly associated.

  Sure, you can have a democratic populist, but in history most examples of populism were preludes to fascist. And a fascist government usually uses populism to keep some sort of approval.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agree with everything except one thing.

  It’s just mediocre sci-fi at best

  Star wars is not sci-fi, it’s fantasy. People usually make that mistake because most fantasy is medieval and most sci-fi is futuristic, but Star Wars is an example of a futuristic fantasy story. Medieval sci-fi is harder to find, but some Stargate episodes from the point of view of the native of the planet would qualify and I’m sure there’s some 40k or Star Trek examples as well.

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

  In short the answer is this: you have two companies selling you boxes, one that it’s literally impossible to look inside, and another one that’s very easy and encouraged to do so. Even if you know nothing about bombs, if both those boxes claim to not explode, which one do you trust more?

  It’s sorta the same thing, it doesn’t necessarily means that the closed box is inherently less safe, but even if you personally haven’t verified that the open box doesn’t contain anything dangerous you can be somewhat safer in the knowledge that people COULD have verified it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What am I doing wrong with Linux/NAS permissions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The solution you’re looking for is to have a group that all those users belong to, and make the files have RW for that group.

  The solution you should do instead is to run things inside docker, so each one gets an extra isolation layer, but all can write to the same files easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can, I have been touch typing in Colemak for almost a decade. I could type without looking at the keyboard on qwerty before, but it wasn’t touch typing.

• ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even though programming is also known as hacking, I’m going to assume you’re using hacker to mean red teaming in general, i.e. offensive cyber security, as that’s what most people have in mind when they think of “hackers”.

  We’re about to enter a golden age for that profession, the reason is LLMs, AI, vibe-coding, etc. See, a long time ago things were very insecure, no one was worried about security as it was all just so new, that was the era when you could sniff on network traffic very easily, crack your neighbor password in a few minutes or login to most things using admin/admin. Over time people started to realize that security mattered, that there were enough malicious people out there that you had to at least make some effort to secure things. This brought us to today, where things are fairly secure, your router has a preconfigured long random password and uses at least WPA for security, most companies no longer store passwords in their databases so it diminishes the risk of leaks, etc, etc. A lot of thought is put into security by serious companies, but there were some cracks starting to show because small devs wouldn’t take security as seriously, be it for lack of resources or care, so while large stuff would be safe, smaller apps and sites are still very vulnerable, and people being people they use the same password for both and don’t enable 2fa, so once you grab credentials somewhere you can try the in other places.

  What changed now? Well, recently people started to vibe-code, i.e. give prompts to an LLM to generate some code. The problem with that is that in the database of things an LLM is trained in it might have lots of bad examples, be it because the code was insecure, or because it was exactly an example of insecure code. Asking the LLM to make it secure is not going to work, as it lacks the comprehension to understand what security is. It’s possible to make things better in an iterative process where you feed the output code to itself and ask it to check for security vulnerabilities, but it might introduce new ones while fixing the existing ones, because the majority of examples online are incomplete as they’re meant to be small examples of small parts of a system to showcase how to do that in a secure manner (but they leave other parts insecure as that’s not the purpose of the example). For example, a login example code might use a simple text comparison for the password field, because it’s trying to show you the structure of the API, not the content, and assumes you will know now to do that, but an LLM doesn’t know that.

  And with many people vibe-coding apps and sites it’ll become more and more easy to find those serious security holes in the wild.

  And how to learn it? Well, the short version is doing. You don’t need to buy expensive books, or anything of the sort, just start reading online, and poke around stuff. I used to play around with www.hackthebox.com and found that very interesting way to learn, however you might need to read on some stuff first before you’re capable of logging in there (although I just gave it a quick look and I think they removed the most interesting part about it which was you had to hack the website to create an account).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are modern electronic devices (i.e. cell phones) still susceptible to damage from magnets?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re probably fine.

  The reason you didn’t wanted magnets near technology before is because we relied on magnetic fields for stuff, so magnets distorted those uses. Nowadays we usually don’t have any magnetic parts on a phone, so unless you have a super strong magnet extremely close to the electronics you should be fine.

  Specifically CRT monitors were tiny particle accelerators that shot electrons to a coat of phosphorescent material, they used magnets to redirect the electrons to hit the correct pixels at the right time. So putting a magnet nearby would pull the beam in a different direction distorting the image and shifting it’s colors (because the electrons were now hitting different color pixels). It was not irreversible, usually removing the magnet is all you had to do, but sometimes you might have magnetized something and the beam would remain crooked for a while.

  The other thing that would be affected by magnets were hard disks, your PC might still have one so you might not want to put magnets near it, but our phone doesn’t. HDs stored information using magnetic fields into a disk, similar to a DVD except using a tiny needle that would magnetize the disk in one direction to write a 1 and on the opposite to write a 0. Taking a magnet near that would essentially erase all of the data in that disk. Modern storage use very different methods for storing data that don’t depend on magnetism, so you’re fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we see Oil as always being here for humans? Isn't drilling like taking water out of a swimming pool? Sooner or later your going to run out of water.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Almost, there’s just 2 corrections:

  eventually the price will be higher than it is for other energy sources despite there being plenty of hard-to-extract oil still left in the ground.

  When that happens the oil companies will lobby to get special treatment and be subsidized because they’re “too big to fail”, and everyone depends on oil.

  The second correction is that that has already happened: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where has the "www." gone?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is wrong, it’s not there anymore, it used to be, but now lots of pages don’t even redirect it, they just simply don’t work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many new programming languages being developed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting, had never considered that, it does make sense. Although that created the absolute clusterfuck that is JS where [ ] + [ ] is “” and { } + { } is NaN. Thanks for remind me of www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat hadn’t watched that in a while.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are so many new programming languages being developed?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think there are more languages being created now than before. There are tons of languages that have been created over the years, but you get the survivors bias effect where the ones that are actually useful in some context start being used in that context, and the ones that are less useful stop being used.

  When you were learning python was already established, but I remember having long discussions trying to convince people to use it instead of Java because it was a much higher level with much better in many aspects at some cost performance, and if you’re not willing to pay that cost you should revert to C++ which is much better than Java anyways.

  And that’s sort of what’s happening here. C++ is good for things that need to be fast, but it requires careful consideration to avoid several issues, if you don’t need the speed, python gives you a much better experience in several aspects. For other specific things there are specific languages that fit better, if you’re developing for web JS is already in most browsers so that’s an easy choice, and if you want to make a game maybe you learn C# to use in Unity. But for general stuff C++ and Python have been the de facto standards as they cover most use cases very comfortably, so there hasn’t been any real competition for them.

  Enter Rust, Go, Zig, etc. Even if something is a standard it doesn’t mean it’s the best thing, Assembly, Cobol, Fortran, C have all been standards, but C++ can do 99% of what those other languages did and makes things easier, so slowly it became the default language. Of those “new” languages the only one I know enough is Rust, so let’s talk about what Rust brings to the table that’s not available on C++ or python, and why people are so excited for it.

  Rust is fast, we’re talking C level fast, this means that Rust beats almost every other language (including C++). Rust is safe, it’s purposefully designed not to allow you to miss use it accidentally, this includes memory safety which is the most talked about, but it’s a whole thing in Rust, with enums you need to match all cases, result types that includes error responses, and optional objects that force you to acknowledge the None. Rust has a great package support, better than python because it’s standardized. Besides all that Rust is able to be used almost everywhere, whereas C/C++ does work in many places, but libraries for it don’t.

  So, why new languages? Because there are things to improve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the hate against Pit Bulls? Everyone I've met are super friendly like my BC. Or are they the new Doberman for this cycle?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have at no point compared black people to dogs, or even mentioned anything related to race beyond a comparison of statistical facts to showcase how ridiculous the argument is. You’re creating a Straw man to attack and deflecting my question, so we’ll keep going in circles forever, because answering a straight yes or no would compromise you.

  Read everything that I posted so far and you will realize the entire time what I’m saying is “a small subgroup causing the most fatalities, therefore subgroup aggressive” is a bad argument. That is the whole of what I’m saying, and you haven’t replied whether you think that is a good or a bad argument. The reason why you haven’t done so is simple:

  • If you say it’s a bad argument you’re agreeing with me, therefore no reply is needed.

  • If you say it’s a good argument then you’re agreeing with any racist asshole who uses the same argument applied to people, and you should take a long hard look at yourself to see whether that’s the kind of peraon you want to be. And honestly, I don’t want to keep talking to anyone who thinks like this as they have been so brainwashed they won’t get convinced by a random person online.

  In reality I’m fairly confident you want the argument to apply to dogs but not to people, and that’s just not how logic works. Facts are facts, you can’t disagree with them, the conclusion from those facts is logic, and that can be flawed (as is for the case of the proof of aggressive behavior). So when confronted with the fact that you’re defending a logic argument that can be made about people, instead of thinking “huh, I guess it’s a bad argument” you go “I’m not racist, you’re racist”, that is called deflection. So you attack a Straw man argument that I’m comparing people to dogs so that you don’t have to admit that your prejudice against pitbulls made you agree with an undefendable racist argument. Still the conclusion is the same, there’s no reason to reply to someone who’s being fallacious at best and making bad faith arguments at worst. If you honestly expect any answer from me your reply should clearly state whether you consider the “X is a small subgroup yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous” a good argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the hate against Pit Bulls? Everyone I've met are super friendly like my BC. Or are they the new Doberman for this cycle?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At no point in my reply did I mention race, I said the argument of “X is a minority, yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous” is a bad argument. That is the whole of my point.

  Two possibilities exist: Either you think it’s a good argument argument, or you don’t.

  Which is it? Do you think the argument “X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities, therefore X is dangerous” is a good argument?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Water analogy still applies for that. If the pipes are already full of water if you inject water on one end it almost immediately comes out of the other, even if the water is only being injected at a slow speed. It’s not immediate because the moment you inject water the water in the pipes first compress and that compression travel like a wave much faster than the water.

  The moment the water analogy falls apart is when you depend on magnetism, because electrons moving cause a magnetic field around, but water moving doesn’t generate any field around it, so it can’t imitate an electromagnet or a transformer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the hate against Pit Bulls? Everyone I've met are super friendly like my BC. Or are they the new Doberman for this cycle?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There might be, but I’ve only ever heard “X is a minority yet causes the majority of fatalities” used for two Xs, it’s bad logic in both cases, it would be bad logic in any other case too, feel free to find me another example of that logic that people instinctively understand it’s wrong and I’ll use that next time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Uh, interesting, I had never heard of that before, I’ll definitely give it a read some time.

  I find the water analogy works well even with electronic concepts like diodes (one way valves), capacitors (something like a shishi-odoshi), etc. The only place it fails is when magnetism is involved, like transformers or electromagnets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is gun violence lower in Switzerland than in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re correct, in one my edits before submitting I must have erased the 100 there and forgot to move the decimal place, thanks for pointing it out. The rest of the math was done considering the correct number, i.e. 1.2 weapon per person, it was just a wording mistake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Others have already answered, but one thing I think helps a lot in understanding electricity is to think of it as water. Water running through a hose behaves exactly the same as electricity running through a wire.

  The amount of water running through the hose is similar to the amount of electrons running through the wire. We call this current, and measure it in Amperes. Whenever you read amperes think about the flow of material through the medium. Can this value be negative? Sure, it means the current is flowing in the opposite direction.

  If one end of the hose is higher than the other the water will flow from the taller part to the lowest one. Measuring how tall one part of the system is compared to another tells you a what potential difference there is there. We call this Voltage and measure it in Volts. Whenever you read volts think about the potential of movement, if there is a 5 Volt difference between two points in your circuit, connecting a wire between those points will produce a flow, just like how if one reservoir is higher than another connecting a hose between them will move water around. Can this value be negative? Sure, it means the other side has more potential energy.

  If the inside of the hose has a rougher surface water will have more difficulty flowing through there than if it’s smooth. We call this resistance and measure it in Ohms. Whenever you read ohms think about how difficult it is for the current to flow through. Conversely Mhos (OHM spelled backwards) is how easily current flows through the material. Can either of these values be negative? Not usually, but things can behave as if they had a negative resistance, e.g. an amplifier, which in our water analogy is a device that uses a small water flow to control the doors for a larger door, if you have 1 drop per second it let’s put 1L per second on the other side, so it can be seen as something that increased the water flow, therefore negative resistance.

  Now you want to move a wheel with your water, for the water this wheel is seen like a hose that’s harder to move through, so it offers some resistance. If you don’t have enough water flowing it won’t budge. You can move the wheel ba raising the other side of the hose, this increasing the speed the water flows and giving it more energy, or you can do the same by putting more water in the hose thus increasing the current. Therefore we need a unit to measure how easily the water at a given point can move a wheel. We call this Potence and measure it in Watts or VA (Volt-Ampere). Whenever you see Watt think about the amount of energy the el electricity has at that point.

  Lamps have a measure in Watts, because they’re like a wheel that the water will move, and they’re letting you know how much water energy you need to throw at it for it to move, you can use high amperage low voltage, or high voltage low amperage to get to this result. Because both the Voltage on your house, and the resistance of the lamp are fixed values, you can calculate the resulting amperage and wattage.

  I think I went a bit off topic, but I hope this helps clarify some of those concepts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is gun violence lower in Switzerland than in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  According to a quick check on Wikipedia Switzerland has 27.6 firearms per 100 people, so in average you can expect 1 in 4 people to be armed. While the USA has 120.5 weapons per person, so you can expect in average that 1 in 5 people has an extra weapon besides the one 100% of the population does.

  I think the 436% increase in weapon per capita might contribute to an increase with gun violence, but that’s just my guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the hate against Pit Bulls? Everyone I've met are super friendly like my BC. Or are they the new Doberman for this cycle?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And I suppose you also think that in this comment I’m trivialising the struggles of pit bulls by comparing them to apples.

  Bad logic is bad logic, whether applied to dogs, humans, apples or whatever. The fact that you can instinctively understand the argument is wrong when applied to people is the exact reason I used that, so people would understand it’s a bad argument that proves nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you guys deal with the death of a parent?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Came to say exactly this. Lost my dad at 18 and I’m 37 now, you just learn to live with it. Time makes it easier because it distances you and gives you lots of other experiences without them, but even decades later you might catch yourself thinking about them.

  I always remember a quote by Terry Pratchett:

  No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away

  And you yourself are a ripple, your father is alive within you, remember him and carry him with you.