booly
@booly@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Empires fall 1 day ago:
Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.
Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).
- Comment on In honor of the start spooky season (yay!), I have a question about an apparently beloved spooky meme/skit. What about "David S. Pumpkins" is so funny? 1 day ago:
It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.
This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.
The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.
In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.
- Comment on Elon Musk destroys astronomy 1 week ago:
It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Yeah. The mass and altitude are too low.
The thing with Kessler Syndrome is that collisions create debris, which cascades with more collisions, until there’s too much debris. But each collision actually results in the loss of kinetic energy or gravitational potential energy overall, so that the subsequent pieces are less energetic and/or less massive. Start with enough mass and enough altitude, and you’ve got a real problem where it can cascade many, many times. But with smaller objects at low altitude, and there’s just not enough energy to cause a runaway reaction.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 week ago:
The kinetic energy in that stardust, and the gravitational potential energy of stardust pulling itself into tighter balls, doesn’t necessarily come from fusion. There’s all sorts of cosmological forces and energy out there, and I don’t think they all trace back to nucleii smushing together.
- Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power 1 week ago:
So is biomass. And wind. And fossil fuels. And hydro.
In fact, I think only geothermal and fission aren’t fusion-based.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 weeks ago:
I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.
The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.
- Comment on The US federal loophole that allows food companies to decide what's safe for you to eat 2 weeks ago:
The NOVA system is bad science, in my opinion.
When asked to classify centuries-old staples like cheese or jam or bread or pickles, the experts struggle to find a consensus on which category any given food is. And so the classification system itself is so imprecisely defined that studies based on the system will rest on a shaky foundation.
It’s better to identify what specific foods and what specific cooking techniques are bad and how they might be bad, rather than trying to say that the act of chopping, blending, mixing, cooking, or fermentation automatically makes a food less healthy.
If certain additives are bad, say that those are bad. Don’t try to lump in the other processing techniques into one basket.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 weeks ago:
Typing of the dead
Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.
- Comment on If lemmy.world became the biggest in the fediverse with a user base that could rival Reddit. Would it become monetized? 4 weeks ago:
I think you’re right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.
And it’s not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.
It’s just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.
- Comment on JPEG is Dying - And that's a bad thing | 2kliksphilip 1 month ago:
I still think it’s bullshit that 20-year-old photos now look the same as 20-second-old photos. Young people out there with baby pictures that look like they were taken yesterday.
- Comment on Oh jeez 2 months ago:
The first Rambo was definitely about PTSD and how the act of killing fucks up American soldiers.
- Comment on Somehow USB disks are still the easiest and most reliable way 2 months ago:
Yes, that’s in the picture.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
Actually, I disagree that DD/MM/YYYY even qualifies as being small to big.
If you actually treat it as a counter from 01/01/2024 onward, note that the first digit that moves is actually the second digit in the 8-digit representation. In terms of significance, the most significant digit is the 5th one in the string, then counting down the significance it’s 6th, then 7th, then 8th, then jumps back to the 3rd, then the 4th, then the 1st, then the 2nd.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
Well the convention was to store it as a 32 bit signed integer, so that is any number from -2^31 to (2^31 - 1). Prime numbers are formally defined as a subset of whole numbers, so let’s ignore the negative numbers and the number zero.
Fun fact: the largest signed 32-bit integer is itself a prime. And the wikipedia page lists it as the 105,097,565th prime.
By the time we hit the 2038 problem, there will have been about 105 million seconds since 1970 where the Unix time was a prime number. And it’s a 10-digit number in base 10, where prime frequency is something about 4% of the numbers.
Does that answer your question about prime frequency today? Eh, I’m sure someone else can figure that out. If not, I’ll probably have to wait until I’m in front of a computer.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
No, I’m taking back the word “prime” from a company that shouldn’t have exclusive rights to define the term. I’m not going to cede that territory just because I don’t like the company.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
If you’re looking for a proof:
Our base 10 system represents numbers by having little multipliers in front of each power of 10. So a number like 1234 is 1 x 10^3 + 2 x 10^2 + 3 x 10^1 + 4 x 10^0 .
Note that 10 is just (3 x 3) + 1. So for any 2 digit number, you’re looking at the first digit times (9 + 1), plus the second digit. Or:
(9 times the first digit) + (the first digit) + (the second digit).
Well we know that 9 times the first digit is definitely divisible by both 3 and 9. And we know that adding two divisible-by-n numbers is also divisible by n.
So we can ignore that first term (9 x first digit), and just look to whether first digit plus second digit is divisible. If it is, then you know that the original big number is divisible.
And when you extend this concept out to 3, 4, or more digit numbers, you see that it holds for every power of 10, and thus, every possible length of number. For both 9 and 3.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
It works for 9, too.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
ISO 8601 is the only normal date system.
- Comment on Amazon should've made Prime Day fall on a date corresponding to an actual three-digit prime number. 2 months ago:
Yes, and recurring dates naturally drop the year, so MM/DD better fits that general rule.
- Submitted 2 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 42 comments
- Comment on Life, huh 2 months ago:
I’ve seen some discussion hypothesizing an explanation that Millennials actually use more sunscreen, use less nicotine, and exercise more than Gen Z. I can buy it.
- Comment on Watching videos of people screaming "shooter on the roof" at law enforcement 2 months ago:
I think in some jurisdictions it’s considered a bump stock.
- Comment on Real 2 months ago:
Plus they’re cheaper, relative to repair professionals’ labor.
If a new refrigerator costs the same as 100 hours of skilled labor, then a 10 hour repair job (plus parts that cost the same as 1/10 of a refrigerator) will be economically feasible.
But if a new fridge costs the same as 20 hours of skilled labor, and the more complex parts come in more expensive assemblies, then there’s gonna be more jobs don’t pass a cost benefit threshold. As a category, refrigerator repair becomes unfeasible, and then nobody gets skilled in that field.
- Comment on Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right. 2 months ago:
They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.
By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.
On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.
- Comment on Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right. 2 months ago:
you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.
USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.
Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.
- Comment on "Theory" of Evolution (SMBC) 3 months ago:
Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.
Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.
- Comment on Boring ass planet 4 months ago:
not meant to be consistent with the human eye.
Even then, postprocessing is inevitable.
As the white/gold versus blue/black dress debate showed, our perception of color is heavily influenced by context, and is more than just a simple algorithm of which rods and cone cells were activated while viewing an image.
- Comment on Google fixes two Pixel zero-day flaws exploited by forensics firms. GrapheneOS discovered and reported these flaws. 5 months ago:
A zero day is an exploit that has been identified by someone but not yet used.
I’ve always understood that the counting of days comes from the vendor’s knowledge. So any exploit from before Google was aware of the vulnerability would be a zero day.
It wouldn’t make any sense to refer to the days counted from when an attacker first discovers the vulnerability, because by definition any vulnerability in active exploitation wouldn’t be a zero day.
- Comment on Google fixes two Pixel zero-day flaws exploited by forensics firms. GrapheneOS discovered and reported these flaws. 5 months ago:
disclosed active exploitation
So, not a fucking zero day.
I’m confused. Isn’t an active exploit that hasn’t been patched yet, by definition, a zero day? So the release of a new patch that closes an actively exploited vulnerability patches a zero-day?
- Comment on degree in bamf 5 months ago:
I agree.
I point out that pretty much everyone in that group experiences it, so even those who aren’t in that disadvantaged group should show some empathy towards the experiences of others, that we may never directly encounter ourselves. Part of that empathy, of course, is to provide support and structures for reducing the likelihood that these things happen, and mitigating them when they do happen.