I also use @zksmk@lemmy.ml | lemmy.ml/u/zksmk
It’s about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend’s data in particular.
And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.
Also, what your friend said is that they basically don’t care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc…) because they themselves aren’t affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that’s that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.
And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I’m also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won’t change anything for society. But do they vote?
You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That’s how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That’s how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that’s how people won’t get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.
And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn’t an x, then they came for y, but I wasn’t a y, then they came for z, but I wasn’t a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.
Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.
And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They’re not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that’s all.
That’s what Bhutan does. It’s enshrined into their constitution as the goal of governance, as GNH, and it takes precedence over GDP.
It’s not without its problems tho, but it is a noble approach, worthy of pursuing imo.
Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.
The downside is it needs human intervention. It’s hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.
It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space… which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can’t work for small random websites in an automated fashion.
It might, and that’s a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y’know, that whole distributed consensus thing… lol… an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely…
Basically , I’m all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren’t possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.
Indeed. However, they are also very slow (usually around 30 km/h) and more importantly very slow to change that speed (cargo ships starts braking 5-10 km before port). The ships’ engines aren’t doing a ton of work themselves either, per unit of time.
Work per time is power in physics. A ship like this has an engine of about 100 000 horse power per google, which is about 400 cars’ worth of power. And 10th of that is about 40 cars. Which matches thereabouts a huge sail in a strong wind at large altitude in the open ocean like this, I think. Back of the envelope math checks out.
“The average is calculated by adding up all of the individual values and dividing this total by the number of observations. The median is calculated by taking the “middle” value, the value for which half of the observations are larger and half are smaller.”
So for example, in a country with 99% poor people, and 1% insanely rich people, the median person’s wealth is actually really small (like the poor people), but the average person’s wealth is kinda big (except a person with that mid-ground wealth doesn’t actually exist in the country).
In the case of voters, this means that in a country of highly polarized views and power, so of imbalanced sides, the median and average voter can be very different. One is what the people want, the other is what the power wants.
Emphasis mine.
…but do not seem to bear any tangible meaning. Like, what is force, work/energy, field, matter?
Contrary to what some people might expect from physics, it’s a lot more philosophical, than just tangible. These terms are in some ways more philosophical than material, and I guess that’ s the part that’s confusing you.
I guess in general, with physics you’re dealing with a different set of philosophical categories than with maths, it’s less abstract logic and sets, and is more about actions and reactions.
And in the words of people more eloquent than me, physics is a story written in the language of maths, that’s their difference, as well. It’s like grammar vs a screenplay. Technically, they’re both linguistics, but very very different at the same time.
On those notes, force is just defined as an “influence that can change the motion of an object”, sort of like in common every day parlance. Force is a thing that makes changes in the world. Energy is the ability to create those forces.
Field is something that fully permeates 3D space and exists there with its changeable local properties. It’s what enables the existence of matter in space. Matter is an “excitation”, a value lump, a value spike, in that field in a specific location. Think of it like a math graph with a small bunch of values in a specific part of it, matter in a field. And so on…
…mystical/mythical (dark matter, anti matter…
I don’t think these two are particularly mystical. Dark matter is just a phrase we invented for the fact we notice the gravity of a lot of matter when observing the way the galaxies rotate, but we don’t see any of that matter. Therefore we conclude, there must be some matter that has mass/gravity but can’t be seen, i.e. doesn’t interact with electromagnetic waves. That’s all, nothing spooky, just instead of protons, electrons etc… it’s a different type of matter.
Similar with antimatter. Matter atoms are made from massive “positively” charged protons and small-massed “negatively” charged electrons. Antimatter is the opposite, made from massive “negatively” charged antiprotons and small-massed “positively” charged positrons. That’s it, it’s like chemistry or whatever. Different lego blocks. It’s just that matter and antimatter, once they collide, go boom and turn into photons and stuff so basically all the matter we have around us is regular matter because there was more of it in the early days of yore.
… spacetime…
I guess this one might bit a tad mystical, in the sense that time and space are philosophical concepts. I actually feel tho that once they’re combined like this into spacetime they become a lot more tangible and mathematical/geometric and easier to digest. In some ways.
…I just don’t think Bell’s theorem has taken into account the entire possibility of hidden variables … I doubt myself on this one since Redditors downvoted this.
Well considering the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022 was just awarded two days ago to three scientists for establishing the violation of Bell’s inequalities, I’d say your judgment on trusting the more knowledgeable people on reddit was right. Unless you think you know more about the topic than Nobel laureates. ;)
How do you get any pleasure (lol) from all of these?
Some people enjoy chocolate, some enjoy vanilla, some enjoy strawberry. Some enjoy physics, some enjoy maths, some enjoy philosophy. We’re all different.
Also, any study references? I found Feymann’s Lecture on Caltech’s website a bit too wordy.
I actually think it’d be better for you to not dive straight into textbook style rigor, and instead watch some more fun physics youtubers once in a while, like the ol’ classics of Veritasium, Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, PBS Spacetime, Fermilab etc… to build that physics intuition and perspective you seem to missing here, first. There’s a treasure trove of accessible fun content there.
You can make mastodon have a somewhat more similar feel to lemmy, if you do the following:
Go to preferences > appearance and activate ”advanced web interface". Now if you do a search for a hashtag it will pop out a new column in the interface that you can now also pin, to stay. And in that column’s own settings you can now add multiple additional hashtags that will all display their results simultaneously in the same column.
So now it’s like as if you have a home feed of multiple hashtags, the feed is topic based, and not person based, and in that sense, more similar to lemmy. It gets very laggy tho if you add more than 5-ish tags, the backend code is not designed for that.
On your phone you can do the same, if you use Tusky. Just add a hashtags tab, and add multiple of them there. But not too many.
Lemmy, however, is the only one with upvote based sorting, and truly designed for the general reddit feel.
Just one. The traffic gets randomly routed through the nodes. Gather your stats over a single exit node and you’ve got your stats for the whole network. The longer you gather your stats over the node the closer they are to the precise stats for the whole network.
Just like you can poll 1000 random people and have a good, almost accurate, guess who’s the entire country gonna vote for.
If you’re trying to follow lemmy’s content from your mastodon account you should type “https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy” (without the quotes… and also omitting https:// should work as well, as well as typing “@asklemmy@lemmy.ml”, again, without the quotes) into the search field on mastodon, and it should pop up there, and you should be able to follow it. Repeat for any other lemmy community you might be interested in.
You won’t be able to post to the community, but you’ll be able to read it, and reply to posts and comments in the community, from your mastodon account.
This is one of those situations where the free market doesn’t give desirable results, and where a government could step in and give subsidies for this goal, assuming it were serious about decreasing GHG emissions.
There would be no profit for the state, beyond less climate change, but the shipping industry would profit, having to spend less fuel.
Does playing chess puzzles on lichess.org count? :D
Yeah, and even poorer to mid rich countries (that have hydro potential) can rely on it, locally, with no need to import solar panels, for example. Albania, for example, is 100% renewable, and has been for decades, thanks to hydro.
Sucks you can’t build hydro everywhere. I kinda wanna see more “run of the river” type of hydro. I think there’s more potential for that, and it’s less damaging to the surroundings. It’s intermittent tho. I’d love to see it locally in my region, I think it could work.
There are many reasons for and advantages to it!
The molten salts mixture is multi-purpose, it serves both as the coolant and contains the molten radioactive fuel in this type of reactor, compared to more conventional reactors that use solid uranium rods as fuel, and regular water as coolant.
Most of the dangers with conventional reactors stem from the high pressures of the coolant steam, as well as the build up of high pressure gases next to the fuel, which in the case of an unattended runaway reaction tend to break things and cause radioactive juices to splatter all over the place, in the ground and in the atmosphere. And then the uncooled fuel also melts through the protective barriers, with the same effects.
Salts, on the other hand, don’t evaporate at 100 degree Celsius, one atmospheric pressure, like water does, so they can get heated to much much higher temperatures at normal pressure. And considering they contain the fuel too, if they expand a bit, they pour out of the core into a safety container, and therefore separate most of the fuel away from itself, and therefore stop the radioactive runaway reaction.
The fact that the fuel is liquid also makes the fuel reprocessing and refueling easier (can even be done while it’s turned on), which is very important when dealing with all the radioactive intricacies. It even lets us use a different more abundant and in some ways cleaner fuel, thorium, instead of direct uranium, because it being liquid lets us turn it into uranium “on the fly” inside of the reactor itself, this is called “breeding” uranium, which simplifies the entire process immensely.
The big downside is, well, hot molten salts are extremely corrosive, as you can imagine. And that’s why we haven’t had reactors like this so far. This one is also experimental.
And another great thing about LFTRs is that they don’t use water as coolant, so they can safely operate in situations of drought, and even in deserts.
A powered grid that would utilize mostly this type of reactor wouldn’t face the types of problems the French grid did during this summer’s heat waves.
All in all, a promising technology.
I’d say yes. On the same note:
Should the study of non-Western history be a requirement for a history degree in the UK?
Also yes.
Even if it were specialized as a western history/philosophy degree, and not just a general history/philosophy degree, some level of knowledge should still be required (and probably is already, I wouldn’t know).
I’d like to reference this blog post by the mastodon devs from a few days ago. Joinmastodon.org just had a redesign/relaunch. Considering they’re further ahead in the same game, there’s probably some useful insight that can be gleaned from there.
I’d just like to take this one step further and say that color has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation and its wavelengths. Not at its core.
You could easily have a robo-eye that reacts to water waves or anything else that might carry similar information and converts it into a bio-chemical signal that goes into the optical nerve and into the brain and you’d see color. In fact, you can see color in your sleep/dreams with no input from outside the brain. Or less abstractly, you can see flashes of color with your eyes closed after going in a dark room after being in a bright space, because of the state of the ”irritated” chemicals in the back of your eyes. The subjective perception of color, the qualia as it is called, is something that correlates in the physical world, or has its physical correlate (noun) only to something in the brain. The EM waves are just carriers of information that supply us with information that gets experienced as color once it finds it’s appropriate home in the information structures of the brain, and the mind.
Another example of this is how people with amputated limbs can feel “phantom pain” sometimes in the non existent body parts, because the stump nerve is being appropriately irritated to send a signal to the brain, that becomes pain in the brain, independently of the existence or non-existence of the body part.
Same with irritating the ear bones, without any air waves, as with tinnitus. The air waves just carry the info usually, they’re not sound itself.
You can indeed hear EM waves’ info too, not see it, just listen to a radio.
Shape is something we experience because of the existence of space, the perception of the “category”, the concept of space in the mind.
Which one is more fundamental depends, I guess, which one you believe is more fundamental, if any, quality or concepts, perception or reason.
This would be of equal true value, whether you label things as a materialist or as an idealist, just label it then as, let’s say, matter arrangement, or laws of arrangement. Or maybe simply, matter and spacetime.
I’d say they’re of equal footing, and don’t quite go, one without the other, in the human mind, or the physical world, as we know them.
Given that 16 of them already exist, I sure hope they do!
Cycleball, as it is known, the sport of the gods.
According to Ancient Greek myth, this was the sport played on Mount Olympus by the gods themselves.
It is also recorded that the Egyptian pharaohs were legally obligated to be good at the sport considering they were believed to be the intermediary between the deities and the people.
There are also, unconfirmed, writings that the Buddha also got the idea for Nirvana by observing a player spin his wheel so fast and smooth the wheel flew of the bicycle.
#truehistoricalfacts #cyclingfacts #totallynotmadeup
Types of platforms, not shown in the above video:
The sheer size of these things, specifically the “jacket” type: https://i.imgur.com/pj0qsN4.gifv
As far as I understood it, and based on that one sample video, these videos mostly deal with and spotlight the usage of logical fallacies and manipulation tactics, used by any ”side” engaged in a misinformation campaign. So the only way they could be biased is by the generalised examples they use to explain the concepts, which should be minimal, if the people watching them actually do learn a new skill that can be applied to various scenarios (even the prebunking videos themselves!).
I really like this, and hope it kicks off, and doesn’t get corrupted too much. It’s teaching people critical thinking skills, and even more importantly imo, more emotional self-awareness.
The person that made that paper is a bit out of the mainstream, for what it’s worth. Interpret as you wish, doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but y’know…
Interesting. Either something bugged out or I pasted the wrong thing (a blank), but this link should be the OP link: https://phys.org/news/2022-07-strange-phase-quantum-dimensions.html
Edit: I’ve edited it into the OP now.
Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
Oh, agreed, personally. There’s room for all these technologies, and sometimes even a necessity for only some of them, due to a lack of proper alternatives in some places. And it’s not always the same technology. There’s no one size fits all answer, for every place on Earth.
This is a debate worth having only in a specific localized context, and not to find some generalized rule imo. I never understood why it had to be either/or.
nuclear safety requires something very near to 0 corruption
Oh definitely, I’d never want my country to build a nuclear fission plant, due to how incompetent and corrupt both the system and mentality around doing these kind of things is around here. I’d be way too worried the thing would explode (despite all the safety measures) because somebody washed some money through the project, the funding got cut beyond safety limits or somebody simply got lazy and didn’t do proper maintenance, alas. Ty, but no ty, at least for another half a century, we’re not mature enough. I’m sure this applies to many poorer and smaller countries across the globe.
Fusion I’d feel safe with, but that’s a dream within a dream.
Said that, I never support the ‘‘renewables are intermittent’’ point
I do wish we had better developed and more universal grid storage tech than just pumped hydro. A large/continental-sized grid is cool and all, but energy independence is still important in geopolitics unfortunately, and simply in practical terms in general too.
Done with this simple trick! Desertification hates it!
That’s human-powered right? I think i can see the chain there (plus why else have that seating setup if not for pedaling).
Judging by the size of that cargo section it must be pretty hard pedaling all that stuff in the back, assuming it’s heavy packages. Seems like a workout. But then again, it’s sort of like a rickshaw I guess, so doable? I hope the driver is paid extra accordingly. I assume it also has some gearing system that makes it easier on the legs but extra slow.
If it has an extra electric engine somewhere in there tho, why even have the pedals? Maybe the pedals are just for the empty trip back.
Overall I don’t hate it (let me rephrase that: I like it!), but I’m not the one pedaling. :D
Nice, it uses Solvespace’s solver. Good choice, it’s very intuitive.
I still prefer FreeCAD (over Blender and SS) for CAD for its NURBS abilities (which SS lacks) but this is a great fit for Blender’s poly modeling! Better than whatever FC’s solver is (I forgot).
👍