ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate this image because idiots will see it, not understand what its showing, and make up some crazy shit based on it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah that outer edge is called the firmament.

  I mean, it’s not the worst name for the CMB.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chat, is this true?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like “not exactly,” but it’s cool nonetheless:

  …medium.com/pre-invasion-nahuas-and-the-gulf-of-m…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure the science says it’s more like 20-30. I know personally, if I try to work more than about 40-ish hours in a week, the time comes out of the following week without me even trying. A task that took two hours in a 45-hour “crunch” week will end up taking three when I don’t have to crunch. And if I keep up the crunch for too long, I start making a lot of mistakes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sticking with Gecko for sure. Trying out Waterfox over the weekend on desktop, and Fennec F-Droid on my phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The Firefox Phone should’ve been a real contender. I just want a phone that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not the person you’re replying to, but “weaker locks” feels like something you can make allowances for or work around. “Extra keys” feels like the Damoclean threat that it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).

  Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I’ve ship-of-theseus’d the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They also announced three other products (one new, two refreshes) which are still being actively developed and are fully-modular devices at low cost. If they’re “throwing away their values,” they’re not doing it very well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For modularity: There’s also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Desktops are already that, though. In order for them to distinguish themselves in the industry, they can’t just offer another modular desktop PC. They can’t offer prebuilts, or gaming towers, or small form factor units, or pre-specced you-build kits. They can’t even offer low-cost micro-desktops. All of those markets are saturated.

  But they can offer a cheap Mac Studio alternative. Nobody’s cracked that nut yet. And it remains to be seen if this will be it, but it certainly seems like it’s lined up to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.

  I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.

  A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There’s a big huge difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  cheaper,

  Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.

  [more] reliable

  There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.

  and safer alternatives

  Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fission plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.

  As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen just hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into it to keep it running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always thirty years away because every time it gets close to 15 years away they cut the funding in half. Zeno’s Dichotomy in action.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I’ve been in that position a few times, actually; though usually it’s after I put it on a todo list. I was planning to switch to Linux, then Microsoft made Windows intolerable to use. I was wanting to buy a new laptop, then Tr*mp started a trade war. I had “back up my Amazon ebooks” on a todo for several months, and then this news comes out.

  It’s like all of these companies and groups have decided to push me into doing stuff I wanted to do anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Calibre is open-source: github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre

  So if it had telemetry, we would have heard about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what I’m looking into, too. I’m finding info about a Branch Delay, a WinterBreak, and a LanguageBreak. I don’t know which one to try.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the heads-up. I’m downloading all of mine and finally making a Calibre library.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after Meta ends fact-checking⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That was when the spell broke for me, too. Both times, actually. I got off of it in 2018 or so, and it took about 30 days. Then I had a relapse, and just cut it off on election day. I stopped trying to return to it in early December.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025 | Internet Archive Blogs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the characters that are most interesting to me. The Hardy Boys fell into public domain last year, Nancy Drew follows in a couple of years. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, obviously. Popeye. Sherlock Holmes.

  These characters are still relevant in the public consciousness, and now they can appear in other works, be remixed, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the “pivot to video,” and it’s almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, “we don’t want this!” even as Facebook was saying, “everyone wants this!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they’re going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they’re going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn’t there.

  Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it’s actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 Years Ago, A One-of-a-Kind Movie Captured the Hearts of Star Trek Fans Everywhere⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been on Trek fandom lists of best movies because the fans noticed.

  Trek fans prior to 2010-ish tended to not take themselves too seriously. They took the show seriously, sure (maybe too seriously) but not themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Both can be true: it is too expensive, and there’s no money to be made. $840B wouldn’t put a dent in the launch costs for the tens of thousands of rockets we’d need to put into space over the next several decades in order to just get rid of the Pacific Garbage Patch, to say nothing of the rest of the trash on this planet.

  And actually, there’s a third true thing: it wouldn’t help much. Having it on Earth isn’t the problem; it’s having it in the oceans that’s the problem. Partially because of the environmental impact, partially because of the biological impact, and partially because we don’t have access to it to reuse it, so we have to keep making more. Once we had it out of the oceans, we could recycle it or even just sequester it away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. To get into the sun, we’d probably want to fuel the rockets in space using reaction material mined in space (from the moon or an asteroid). That would more or less eliminate the problem you’re talking about, which is why I kind of skipped over that in my comment. But you’re right; this is one of a million things that makes space travel hard and expensive.

  2. We can get up to any speed with enough time and fuel. The trash rockets would just need to get into a solar orbit, and then burn retrograde for a fairly long while. Or if you add a gravity assist in, this is doable today; the Parker Solar Probe got to (and indeed beyond) that speed, for instance. It’s easier and quicker when there aren’t squishy people aboard (we don’t tend to like acceleration much higher than 9.8m/s², for instance).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, also: I don’t think it’s a stupid question. It’s a fun question. It might not be a workable plan, but I love thinking about this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we just gather up all the ocean's trash and all the nonrecyclables, put them in a rocket, and launch it into the sun?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Just gathering all the trash would be tricky (and, rocket aside, if we could do it easily, we’d probably have done it already; and just put it in a big garbage dump or something). Think about a swimming pool with a bunch of fallen leaves in it; it’s moving around constantly, and if you swim toward one it’ll kind of move away from you or break up when you try to pull it out.

  2. Ok, let’s handwave getting the trash out of the ocean. It’s probably a solvable problem. First we need to sort it; all of the recyclables need to stay and be recycled, because we still need that material and because we need to reduce the weight. Compostable stuff can probably also just stay and be composted. Corrosive stuff probably shouldn’t go on a rocket. All of the wet trash (it came from the ocean, it’s all wet) needs to be dried out first; partially because we need the water, and partially because water is really heavy. And once we’ve done all of that…well, trying to figure out something productive to do with that big pile of dry trash is almost certainly going to be cheaper than launching it into space.

  3. Ok, let’s handwave that problem too; let’s imagine we’re just going to grab it out of the water, compress it, and get it onto a rocket. Except we’re going to need a whole lot more than one rocket; a decent guess says that we’ve launched 18,003,266 kg into space ever—over our entire history in space—but the Pacific Garbage Patch alone is estimated to be at least 45,000,000 kg, meaning we’d need to launch more than twice the number of rockets we’ve ever launched before. More than 60,000 rockets have been launched since 1957, so that’s substantial. It would take a while; even if we turned the entire space industry’s output toward the project, they’re “only” launching about 1,000 rockets a year nowadays, so it’d take at least 120 years of NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Roscosmos, the ESA, the Chinese Space Agency, etc. doing nothing but trash full-time.

  4. Ok fine. Again, we’re handwaving; let’s imagine we have everything loaded up on rockets on the launch pad. Just getting it into orbit is tough for the simple reason that we have to take not just the payload (the trash) but also the fuel we need to get it there, and to get that fuel off the ground we need fuel, and to get that fuel off the ground, we need— you get the picture. The Tsiolkovsky equations govern how much, and thankfully the number isn’t exponential. But we will still need a lot of rocket fuel. Good thing we’re devoting the entire space industry’s output toward this for the next 120 years.

  5. Now it’s all in space. Great! That was actually the easy part. We could just leave it in orbit around Earth; that would be a really really bad idea for a lot of reasons (but it’s what we’re already doing with our space junk, so…), and you said “into the sun,” so let’s talk about getting it there. Believe it or not, getting it into the sun is actually way harder than getting it out of the solar system entirely. If you were on a rocket, and you pointed it toward the sun, and you burned and burned and burned and burned until you ran out of fuel, you would counterintuitively end up somewhere out past the Earth’s orbit on the other side of the sun. This is because you have to actually cancel out your (very fast) orbital rotation, which you inherited from the Earth when you launched, before you can get pulled into the sun; otherwise you just end up going around the sun in a very elliptical orbit. It takes a lot of fuel to cancel out Earth’s substantial orbital rotation. So we have to get that up there too.

  6. The good news is, once you get it to the sun, you’re good. It won’t cause any noticeable change to the sun (the entire Earth could fall into the sun and it wouldn’t care). And while the trash would initially melt and then burn due to all the heat, smoke is entirely a product of atmosphere and gravity; so no smoke would be generated and it would not make it back to Earth. But once all the ash made it to the sun, it wouldn’t continue burning per se; the sun doesn’t produce heat by burning, but by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. The Garbage Patch is mostly plastic, so carbon polymers. But the sun isn’t big enough to fuse carbon into magnesium, which means all of those carbon atoms would just kinda…sink into the sun, hanging out under all the hydrogen and helium and lithium and beryllium and boron, but on top of the nitrogen and oxygen and such, for the next ten billion years until the sun turns into a red giant. At which point the sun will expand outward, potentially to engulf the Earth’s orbit; at which point it will reclaim all the atoms of the trash we didn’t send up there.

  7. Eventually, after a bunch of different cycles and drama, the constituent atoms of our trash and everything else would become part of the white dwarf that our sun will become; a small, slowly-cooling stellar remnant. After that…we don’t know! The time it takes for a white dwarf to cool completely is longer than the life of the universe so far, so we have to speculate. It’s possible that the remnants of our sun and our trash and everything else might end up becoming a black dwarf, which might look like a shiny spherical mirror the size of the Earth.

  All of that seems like a lot of work. I think we should try something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fairly common expression in English, too, with much the same meaning. I don’t know what sort of rock these people are living under.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this emoji mean? Is this a British thumbs up?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember using the second definition in elementary school in the early 90s, before cell phones were on common use, long before they flipped open, and even before they had extendable antennas. I suppose they might have been a cordless landline, but I always assumed it was a corded phone. The “call me” message, then, wasn’t about being able to see someone but not hear them except in very specific circumstances; instead, it was implied to mean “call me later.” It could be used as a way of flirting, or it could be more platonic. I suppose it could also be used in a business setting, though I wasn’t really old enough to know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indiana Bones!!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

  Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.