urist
@urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on 🔔 SHAME 🔔 6 months ago:
I’m not sure anyone has really provided a complete explanation of what is the difference between working with an absolute infinity and the way we do math normally in science and such.
Basically, no one has found the idea of using an absolute infinity to explain the world to be better than the way we deal with infinity in college courses. In college, you run across the idea that some infinite sets are larger than others (countable numbers vs uncountable).
Of course, an infinite set makes sense in math, and has practical uses in the sciences, but nothing can truly be demonstrated to be unending. Another poster put it nicely - infinity is a direction, not a destination.
I recommend this video How to count past infinity by Vsauce about (20 minutes long). It is closer to entertainment than a lecture but its pretty good. I’m only an undergrad math major but I haven’t found any real problems with this video (though, he does start talking about ordinal numbers which aren’t terribly useful to anyone that I know of, yet, except for some really complicated number theory stuff cryptographers might use, don’t ask me. cryptographers are basically wizards imho).
- Comment on Calculus made easy 6 months ago:
The author of these paragraphs summarizes it very nicely. It takes a lot of talent to break things down like this, I wish more math textbooks were written this way.
I recommend this video as well:
- Comment on FCC Imposes Nearly $200 Million in Fines on US Wireless Carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) for Illegal Location Data Sharing 6 months ago:
Nueters
Oh no
how do you pronounce this? Noiters? Nooters?
- Comment on U.S. "Know Your Customer" Proposal Will Put an End to Anonymous Cloud Users 6 months ago:
For what it’s worth, I’m entertained by people needing to tell you what they think of your copy paste. It’s fun.
Bring back forum signatures!
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Tryin to make a change :-\
- Comment on I want to speak to the meat manager 6 months ago:
You don’t know what you ask, traveler. My loins are too tender for you. They will surely kill you.
- Comment on I have so many lists... 7 months ago:
mood
I filed my taxes 5 hrs ago
- Comment on Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed 8 months ago:
The largest lemmy instance (lemmy,world) is federated with them. I assume their mastodon instance also is.
- Comment on State your music taste chat 8 months ago:
I’m still trying to figure that one out. I must not have listened to them that closely? Somehow they’re one pixel higher than Ye.
Deathgrips placement seems right though, and Joy Division, Godspeed! and Weezer (I don’t care for weezer tho). I haven’t heard the other bands enough to have an opinion. I should probably listen to more Radiohead….
- Comment on Lawful Neutral 9 months ago:
my feet don’t touch the floor in the lawful good position, it’s uncomfortable
this is discrimination
- Comment on Does Harry Potter only know fifth grade math? 9 months ago:
I always wondered the opposite of the harry potter universe.
So much of math was difficult to teach or obscure because of difficulties in visualization or computation. Surely there would have been at least one wizard over hundreds of years that could figure out how to use the powers of illusion magic to visualize things? To demonstrate integrals to the unfamiliar? To render a fractal like a julia set?
Even if magic iteslf followed little internal logic, it could be used as a tool, surely? But that’s the sort of fridge logic (warning tv tropes link) that maybe didn’t belong in a story book like Harry Potter. I had to stop reading anyway around the time house elves were introduced, anyway. I took issue with that stuff even when I was a kid.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 10 months ago:
WoW is even worse than that.
When the player base on your server dies and there are no raiding guilds left there it costs like $20 to move your character. Per character.
It’s been years since I’ve played but that’s one of the reasons I stopped.
- Comment on A literal child taking orders in a fast food restaurant in the US 10 months ago:
I had my own computer and car before I turned 18
Child labor laws weren’t meant to protect someone like you, they’re meant to stop folks from sending their kids to work to pay their rent/mortgage/power/water. Kids should know that paying their parents bills is not ideal, and child labor laws are how we protect them. Without revealing too much about myself, my dad was one of [large number] of children, and they absolutely used those kids for labor at the family farm and were worse off for it. They grew up in poverty (on top of the physical abuse). Basically, these laws aren’t supposed to stop young Timmy from buying a [insert gadget here], they’re to stop Mom from pulling him out of school for an extra shift because she overdrew her bank account.
There’s no way that kid is 13, by the way. Far too young for working the register at Culver’s. At least they don’t have him at the deep fryer. If the other comment I see in this thread is to be believed (the one that says this is a Manager’s child and school was closed), it’s probably not as nefarious as it seems. Republican states have been in the news fighting against child labor laws though, people are rightly outraged about that.
- Comment on Weather app asking for permission to manage calls 10 months ago:
Once upon a time I wrote an IRC chat bot for my friends and I that could do calculations and convert units (metric -> imperial) with a command.
My friends were impressed that I included units like furloughs, leagues and bushels.
My chatbot was just googling their request and returning the result haha. This was 15+ years ago.
- Comment on Pornhub blocks North Carolina and Montana as porn regulation spreads 10 months ago:
I am being a pendant here but I feel I should share for those who value privacy:
Due to the way federation works, votes are not anonymous. Instance admins can view who votes. Since anyone can create their own instance, you should be aware that your votes are not anonymous, only difficult to view.
- Comment on Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow 10 months ago:
Shunnnnnn… shun the non believers charlie
- Comment on VW Is Putting Buttons Back in Cars Because People Complained Enough 11 months ago:
Hmm, that’s a strange comment you left. I’m not the person you responded to but:
When I get off work it’s just before dawn (coldest part of the day) and it’s frequently 10 Fahrenheit or lower in the winter (below freezing). I wear gloves in my car in the winter because cars don’t warm up enough for the heat to come on right away. I don’t want to walk through the cold into a cold car and grab a literal freezing steering wheel and hold on to it for 10 mins until the heat kicks on. My drive is about 35 min in good conditions.
I’m assuming you live in a warm place or don’t drive a car, good for you. Wish I had public transportation.
- Comment on Top 50 defederated instances 11 months ago:
Thanks for sharing. Good luck 👍
- Comment on Top 50 defederated instances 11 months ago:
Out of curiosity, why are you here, then?
- Comment on Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users 11 months ago:
You know honestly, now that I’ve typed that I’m not sure. I don’t do a lot of texting audio snippets or other stuff other people do, so maybe, maybe not.
The problem is, I should be able to text people at default without worrying I have cell signal or if group chats are going to work correctly, instead of needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer.
- Comment on Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users 11 months ago:
It’s not just about the color of the bubbles. I have Wi-Fi at work but poor cell signal. Because I have an iPhone and my husband has an android, we have to use another chat client to text while I’m at work. No cell signal means no texting android phones for me, because I can only text people with iMessage over Wi-Fi.
Plus, remember: kids have phones. They do get bullied over chat bubble colors, just like I got bullied for wearing clothes from Walmart in school. It doesn’t have to be this way, it’s Apple’s fault for making iMessage a walled garden.
- Comment on Seasonal Affective Disorder 11 months ago:
Exactly lol
- Comment on Seasonal Affective Disorder 11 months ago:
I was a youngin’ when this happened, and I loved webcomics so I was paying attention to the scene. I hated CAD though.
Everything you said is right, and I want to add my own perspective.
The author took his uninspired joke strip where there was no plot, gave the main character (the self-insert) a girlfriend (and keep in mind, the self-insert was your typical no-personality nerd main character), and started to make a plot arch out of it. The girlfriend got pregnant, and this is drama. And instead of having any of the characters grow into people with personalities, he gave that girlfriend character a miscarriage. So he could get back to his no-plot video game joke strip.
It felt very much like those sit-com episodes where everything has to be wrapped up in a half hour, and nobody can learn anything because the show will go to syndicated reruns and be played out of order.
Miscarriages are stressful, emotional events, and he turned it into a disposable plot point. The girlfriend character had no real character development. She was a cardboard cutout introduced to be a girlfriend, and her suffering was used to neatly wrap this plot up for the strip.
It was loathsome. Just awful, unfunny obtuse nonsense written by a man with no ability to self reflect, and no intellectual curiosity about how other people think and feel.
- Comment on Yes, ‘Australian sushi’ exists. Get over it, argues Adam Liaw 11 months ago:
I know right?
When I called my husband’s breakfast “grain stew” he got all precious about it. Apparently cooked oats in milk is called “oatmeal”, and I’m wrong, but it’s just stuff cooked in liquid? That’s stew.
Why can’t people make up their minds?
- Comment on Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family 11 months ago:
I agree.
I haven’t had much issue with Jellyfin, but I don’t watch a lot of things with subtitles. I don’t have a lot of specialized video, just some TV shows, movies and music dumped on a local computer. I think we had an issue with a video where we couldn’t figure out how to change the audio channel (default was not set to english) but that might have been fixed in an update? I’m not sure. I just grabbed a different copy.
The IOS app is not very good though. If you start the app, you can lock the screen once while having background playback. After that you have to force close and re-open it for background playback. Not sure why, might be an IOS bug honestly.
- Comment on Your Loved Ones Are Prisoners, and You Made the Chain 11 months ago:
This is some crazy ramble. Jesus. I can’t read it all but in summary:
Computers are becoming nessisary to be a full person and we don’t own our digital identity at all. Therefore, programmers should take it upon themselves as individuals to stop building these systems.
I can agree with some of the points I skimmed, but the conclusion of programmers should individually rise up… that’s just not going to happen, pal. We need legislation, putting the onus on individuals is horribly naive. Also, this is so long, why is this article so long? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- Comment on 95% sure this is accurate 11 months ago:
ah yes my love
the standard normal CDF as an approximation of the binomial distribution (so long as np > 10)
- Comment on I can't swim... 11 months ago:
don’t forget:
Being responsible for online ratings for quality of service in an understaffed workplace (and the staff that is there has settled for a wage that doesn’t support a 1 bedroom apt and a car).
- Comment on If you can create a Lemmy instance and federate, you can shovel data about every vote linked to an account 1 year ago:
There was an era of reddit where some nerds used addons to tag users for their own personal notes. Nothing wrong with making your own tags for people, imo.
But I do remember there were extensions for “mass tagging”. You could install browser extensions to label people based on their post history. Someone would run a script, aggregate data, put little tags on people based on how they post. Like, maybe you would install a tagger to label people who don’t agree with you politically, based on someone’s aggregated data.
I never personally liked the mass tagging stuff. It felt toxic to put people you don’t know in boxes. But, I never felt like it should be prevented. At the end of the day if you post something publicly, you shouldn’t be surprised when people respond to that.
But, some people here might not realize how public their vote history is. Not sure anyone wants weird graphs about how they vote. I upvote a lot of stuff, I’m sure a lot of people upvote stuff they don’t totally agree with. Maybe I’m imagining a problem where there isn’t one. I’ve just seen how weird people get when it’s easy to put people in boxes.
- Comment on If you can create a Lemmy instance and federate, you can shovel data about every vote linked to an account 1 year ago:
In order to read gmails, you have to work at google.
In order to read the upvotes on this post, all you have to do is spin up your own lemmy instance. Anyone with technical knowledge can do it. The problem is a bit different. I could do it, if I was motivated.
If lemmy gets popular enough, there will be 3rd party sites with search bars and nice UIs and graphs to help you see how someone votes.
Not sure what the solution is. Maybe if we can’t make votes private, they should be fully public.
- Comment on University of Chicago researchers seek to “poison” AI art generators with Nightshade 1 year ago:
Indeed, but an academic discussion about it’s limitations would be nice, that’s why I’m taking a class. Literally, it’s undergrad, that would be a nice topic.
Also, I have to point out, this happened, and it was not brought up in class except by a student in a discussion topic (online course). Seems important that the dudes that came up with the fancy equation bankrupted their hedge-fund, just saying.