merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I dunno⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes it does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Actual theft ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sooo... This is happening on Imgur⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.

  Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sooo... This is happening on Imgur⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're going backwards⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Normal ones? But as infrequently as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're going backwards⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Part of the reason for the rise of AirBnB is that hotels suck too:

  • “Your $225 per night hotel”, oh sorry, all those rooms are booked, we do still have these $250 per night rooms though…
  • Oh, you didn’t want to be next to the ice machine and hear that crunch sound all night? There’s another room here but that will be $275…
  • Not next to the elevators? Well, there’s this $300 room down the hall
  • Yes, the room has a mini-fridge. Oh, we didn’t tell you but it’s 100% full of overpriced things, and if you touch one you bought it. No, there’s no way to put your own things in the fridge.
  • Oh, you wanted to use the TV? Well, we have HotelTV and every time you turn it on it goes to the HotelTV channel, you can get all the local TV stations too. HDMI? No, sorry, we don’t have that feature.
  • Of course we offer a free “continental breakfast”, it’s offered between 4:35 and 5:20 AM, and consists of reconstituted dehydrated eggs, malk, cereal, taste-free muffins, and pancakes. We’re out of pancakes.
  • Internet? Of course we offer Internet. Just sign on to this captive portal and you can use Google. Send emails? You should be able to get to gmail… Play games? You mean like backgammon? I think we have a backgammon set in the back here. VPN? That sounds like hacking…
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expand North! So much room up there.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It will be great, they said...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.

  The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One reason why there are so many nonsense lawsuits in the US is that unlike Europe and the UK, it’s unusual that the loser has to pay the winner’s costs. In Europe that’s standard. As a result, an American person or group is much more likely to sue, because if they lose all it costs them is their own legal fees. AFAIK they also do the reasonable thing and cap fees so that if someone sues a rich multinational corp and loses, they’re not out millions of dollars because the multinational hired a huge, expensive team to defend themselves.

  Justice would really be a world where these nonsense lawsuits didn’t happen at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they’d be relieved looking at just how far we are from AGI.

  Judgment day was originally supposed to be August 29, 1997. It has changed a lot due to all the time travel. But, every date has passed and now the techbros are going nuts over a form of “AI” that can’t count the number of "r"s in “raspberry”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, so what’s the rule for those 3 examples?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A rogue object so strange, scientists aren’t sure what to call it.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s gotta add up to something, even with the inverse-square law fall off

  No, it doesn’t, precisely because of the inverse square law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What if it’s a loan word from another language, like “the facebook” (El Feis) or “playstation” or “hentai”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be like in English if someone says the “I took the fono to the storage but he didn’t have batterons for it” when you mean “I took the phone to the store but he didn’t have batteries for it” Without the correct-gendered article it sounds wrong, and sometimes it changes the meaning so it’s a different word. But, if there’s enough context often you can figure out what someone is trying to say. But, if you’re the kind of foreigner who doesn’t know the genders for common things, you also probably have a very strong accent and are making all kinds of other errors, like using the wrong articles, getting the word order wrong, etc.

  In the end, a lot of it is about context and how else you’re trying to communicate. Like, if you’re holding the phone and say “fono” it will be obvious what you mean. If someone knows you were trying to get a replacement battery, then there will be enough context to understand batterons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Spanish is also easier than French because you can mostly guess the gender based on the ending of the word. Most often if the word ends in “a” it’s female (la marca, la hora, la vida, la ventana). If it ends in “o” it’s mostly male (el teatro, el dormitorio, el niño…) And for the nouns that don’t end in “a” or “o” there are often patterns. When there are exceptions, it’s often because it’s a borrowed word or a shortened word. Like “la moto” for the motorcycle, but the full word for motorcycle is “la motocycleta”, same with “la foto” -> “la fotografia”.

  French also has some patterns, but not the easy a -> female, o -> male rule that Spanish has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pedo planet⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Languages evolve in weird ways. Pedophile comes from “pedo” child and “phile” for love. It could just be a mother or father, someone who loves children. But, it has been used to describe people who love children, but in the wrong way. Similarly, homophobe has been used for people who hate gays, but the “phobe” part is about fear not hate. Also, “homo” isn’t necessarily homosexual, it could be homogeniety. Homophobes could be people who are afraid of people of their own race, but instead we’ve decided it’s the term to use for people who hate or are angry at homosexuality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Fuck Jar⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So it boosts STR, does it also boost INT? Maybe it debuffs WIS?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A rogue object so strange, scientists aren’t sure what to call it.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If the rogue planet is truly all alone in space, you’re definitely right. 4 million times is a lot, but space is really, really big, and solar radiation falls off with 1/r^2.

  Let’s assume the auroras are proportional to the size of the magnetic field. That’s probably not true, it’s probably actually proportional to the square root of the magnetic field because field strengths fall off with 1/r^2, but let’s give it the best possible chance of having huge auroras. That would mean that a planet with 4x the magnetic field of Earth would have the same Aurora brightness at 2x the distance. So, something with 4 million times the magnetic field would have the same brightness at sqrt(4,000,000) the earth-to-sun distance, or 2000 the distance. If it were in our solar system, or even just near our solar system, it would be bright. But, space is big.

  Since the earth is about 500 light-seconds from the sun, 2000 earth-distances is about 1 million light seconds, or about 11.5 days. By comparison, the closest star to Sol is Proxima Centauri at 4 light years. So, these Auroras would only be earth-like if the rogue planet were very close to some star. It wouldn’t have to necessarily be in orbit of that star, but it would have to be pretty close. If it were out in the space between the stars, there’s just nothing there for the magnetic field to interact with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shut up science!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they mean they are putting their faith into the scientists performing the science

  It’s not just the scientists, it’s the whole process. You trust that the journals are selecting articles based on their scientific merit. You trust that the journalists reporting on the stories are doing their best to accurately summarize the scientific articles, and that if they get it wrong they’ll issue a correction. You trust that when science makes it into textbooks that those textbooks are accurately summarizing and maybe simplifying the science in a fair way. You trust that teachers or professors who are explaining the science to their students are doing it faithfully and accurately.

  The Alpha Wolf theory shows how that sort of thing breaks down. There was a scientific study, and at the time there was no reason to suspect it wasn’t legitimate. The scientist who did the study was accurately describing what he saw. The journal that published it had no reason to doubt it was good science. The peer reviewers did their job well. It just turned out that he was studying captive wolves, and that wolves in the wild didn’t behave the same way. Unfortunately, “wolves live in family units where the parents are in charge” isn’t as interesting a story, so while scientists have been trying to correct the record for a while, there are still people who have been taught by “science” or at least “the modern media and educational system with science at its base” that think that there are “alpha wolves” who take charge of a pack based on being strong and aggressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

  If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

  In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

  The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes, sometimes not. Many 401(k)s have restrictions not that “you can’t invest in X”, just “you must choose from the things offered by this account”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shout out to my engineering homies.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  He got a job making $100k a year

  $100k per year writing code at a defence contractor isn’t very much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨same shit every day, on god⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A good example of how you can do amazing things with steam is looking at the very last of the steam locomotives. Before they switched to diesel or electric, the steam locomotives were engineering masterpieces. Yes, you still got the classic steam locomotive puffs of steam coming out of the locomotive, but they only let the steam go once they had extracted the maximum possible energy from it.

  Here’s a good video going over the whole design.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.

  Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen

  People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.

  Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.

  My neighbors, friends, family, all of us

  That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]

  That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.

  Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Existential cowposting⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that they’re not doing anything illegal.

  The bigger problem is that they have the power to keep anybody from passing new laws that would make what they’re doing illegal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I dunno⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve done that, but that’s ugly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I dunno⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, you can use this for more than just arithmetic. The first thing in the list is the name of the function, and everything else is something that you pass to the function. So you could instead write

  (plus 1 2 3 4)
  

  Which would be like plus(1, 2, 3, 4) in other kinds of programming languages.