cynar
@cynar@lemmy.world
- Comment on Average plant behavior 2 weeks ago:
Given what it does, it eating you might be considered more humane! But no, is the fuck you, I just want to cause pain tree.
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 3 weeks ago:
Latin is used BECAUSE it is dead. It means the terms don’t drift. It also lets the names/terms be a descriptive as necessary.
Asking a doctor to memorise some Latin words is a lot easier and less error prone than a sea of acronyms.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
It frustrates me as well.
Apparently the biggest problem for male teachers is accusations. For a female teacher, there needs to be proof. They get the benefit of the doubt. Male teachers don’t. Many parents and even other teachers take the “no smoke without fire” mentality. It’s stressful to do the job, when you dare not let yourself be in a room with a student without someone else present.
As a dad, I try and help with dad’s being seen as care givers, as well as just providers. It’s a long and slow fight however.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
We are not allowed to be caring and nurturing. Any man that is, is often seen as “suspect”.
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 3 weeks ago:
Fully agree with that. Tesla got thoroughly screwed over.
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 3 weeks ago:
He could give lectures, but the computer massively slowed conversations. He also apparently had a bit of a temper. Some of his colleagues took to wearing steel toe cap shoes because of him (electric wheelchairs are heavy).
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 3 weeks ago:
Apparently he didn’t trust patents etc. He would come up with fanciful ideas, that sounded vaguely plausible, as cover for what he was actually working on.
At this point picking apart the Good, the bad and the cover is an …interesting exercise.
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 4 weeks ago:
For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.
The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.
Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 5 weeks ago:
I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.
As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.
I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.
- Comment on Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display 5 weeks ago:
I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
- Comment on Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display 5 weeks ago:
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
- Comment on It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed 1 month ago:
It’s the one in Barcelona. I’ll edit for clarity. 👍
- Comment on It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed 1 month ago:
I still love that the basilica cathedral was designed upside down.
Stone only works under compression. If any area ends up under tension, it will just fall apart. String only works under tension, if it is under compression, it crumples. Critically, if you invert the model, the forces invert. The basilica was designed as a string model upside down. This made mismatched forces obvious, and is easy to correct.
Historical designers had a lot of tricks, that we have mostly forgotten, to make things work.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 1 month ago:
It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.
It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.
I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 1 month ago:
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 1 month ago:
Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.
- Comment on Is it possible to make wireless charging broadcast electricity throught an entire house similar to how wifi can broadcast to the entire house? 1 month ago:
It can, actually be done. It’s just inefficient and requires too much trust.
You either do a general broadcast of power. This is incredibly inefficient, at any real range. To get power to the edges, the power near the transmitter will likely be enough to cook your cat.
The other method is directed. You basically put out a power beam that improves efficiency. Unfortunately, you also now have a directable energy weapon in your living room. I wouldn’t trust something capable of cooking my brain, while I’m sat on the sofa, if it gets hacked.
Neither are likely viable for general use, though both could be useful under certain conditions.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 1 month ago:
The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.
Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?
- Comment on The worst day to get Groundhog Day'd would be when you have an early flight in the morning 1 month ago:
The original tends to have a certain magic that makes it work so well. Whenever you remake something there’s the risk that the magic is diluted, or lost completely. It’s extremely rare to add more of what makes it work. Sequels often suffer the same problems.
Basically it’s not that remakes are inherently worse, they tend to be more average. It’s just that studios don’t remake poor shows. So we tend to see a lot more of the decline.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 1 month ago:
Collusion and bandwagoning are real things. A large number of accusations implies guilt a lot more, but doesn’t make it reliable. Trump particularly is slippery when it comes to pinning thing on him.
Women aren’t good or evil, they are human. Most are honest, some aren’t.
- Comment on Watermarks offer no defense against deepfakes, study suggests 1 month ago:
There are already plans for metadata signing. I think some high end Canon cameras might do it already. It basically allows proof (via public private key of the hash) that a particular camera took that photo.
The idea is that you can create a chain of custody with an image. Each edit requires a new signature, with each party responsible for verifying the previous chain, to protect their own reputation.
It’s far from perfect, but will help a lot with things like legal cases.
- Comment on 6G mobile could divide the world 1 month ago:
For many places, your signal isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the back haul from the tower to the main internet. 5G won’t help if there’s a straw connected to the fire hose of 5G.
- Comment on Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding 1 month ago:
It’s actually not law, just custom. Most/all speedometers over estimate for this reason.
The motorway cameras, near Birmingham have been known to issue tickets for doing 71mph.
- Comment on Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding 1 month ago:
I would be wary of those roads. I’ve ran across several that seem like national, or 50 roads, yet limited a lot lower. Generally, there is a hidden danger on that stretch. The classic being a blind junction joining, or a school kicking out nearby. It won’t be obvious, unless you are familiar with the area.
At the same time, i also know of a 30 limit on an otherwise national road. It’s along the stretch in front of a previous Mayer’s house.
- Comment on Belkin is ending support for nearly all its Wemo smart home devices 2 months ago:
It’s our normal language for referencing each other. “The wife”, “the husband”. I’m sorry if it offended you.
As for the WAF comment, it doesn’t mean she can’t fix it, just that she has no interest in the nitty gritty of how it works. This seems to be a common occurrence with smart homes. It’s FAR more likely the male partner is interested in building it. The female partner tends to only care that it works. (And that their partner is enjoying themselves).
So far this gender stereotype holds up strongly (90%+)
- Comment on Belkin is ending support for nearly all its Wemo smart home devices 2 months ago:
There’s an open source movement basically solving this sort of problem. I’ve had various smart home things working flawlessly for a decade or more.
The key is twofold. To make sure that support won’t be dropped. Offline functionality is a key indicator of this. Open source firmware is even better.
The 2nd is WAF. Wife acceptance factor. How transparent is it for normal functioning, and does it fail gracefully. E.g. my light switches all work normally. If the network goes down, they fall back to dumb switches. The wife never has to deal with “the lights are broken” while I’m away with work.
- Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants 2 months ago:
As did the vikings. The long term results were generally an improvement however.
- Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants 2 months ago:
Looking back at the history of England. We have had wave after wave of immigrants/invaders. Each wave brought a period of tension. That period was followed by a period of innovation.
The new people, with new views means old ideas are re-evaluated. New skill, flavours and modes of thought became part of our culture.
Even our language improved. Part of English’s power is the level of nuance with word choice. A loft of that comes from melding multiple root languages in.
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 months ago:
I’ll check it out, next time I get a chance to fire it up. Unfortunately, I hate the teleport mechanism of vr games. I love hurtling through the water. Unfortunately, that also makes me motion sickness. I’m slowly training myself out of it, but it takes time.
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 months ago:
It was even worse than that.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.