NateNate60
@NateNate60@lemmy.world
- Comment on Great Depression: Part Deux 4 days ago:
Food in the kitchen is usually measured in pounds for meat and vegetables (similar to the UK) and grams for most other dry goods. So the recipe would call for 2 pounds of beef but 5 grams of salt. The Costco hit dogs are guaranteed to weigh at least ¼ pound.
The most confusing thing is soda, because it is sold in containers of either 350 mL, 16 oz, or 2 L.
- Comment on Great Depression: Part Deux 4 days ago:
They’re like $12 for a pack of 18 huge ones at Costco
- Comment on Great Depression: Part Deux 4 days ago:
It tastes similar to Kraft macaroni and cheese (known in Canada as “Kraft Dinner”). So I would guess young, unaged cheddar or Colby cheese. There is also probably a good amount of whey powder, which is a by-product of cheese production.
It’s not fake, just highly processed.
- Comment on Actual footage of real life events 1 week ago:
What Dutch, English, or German speakers think about speakers of the other languages
- Comment on Just in time 2 weeks ago:
Remember that one of the biggest contributions to women’s liberation was the invention of the washing machine.
- Comment on Just in time 2 weeks ago:
Congratulations. SpaceX, Inc. is pleased to conditionally extend you an offer of employment (contingent on a successful political background examination, employment eligibility verification and genetic scan) to the position of FACILITIES MAINTENANCE SPECIALIST at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As discussed, your starting daily wage will be 96 DOGE, and working hours will be MONDAY-SATURDAY 05:00-20:00 UTC. Please report to ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE at 04:00 UTC MONDAY 14TH JUL 2093 to begin work.
As an employee of SpaceX, you are entitled to numerous benefits, such as discounted employee housing at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As agreed, you will be provided a Class-8 dwelling at the location indicated at a rate of 1,700 DOGE per lunar day. Please inquire with your supervisor for move-in information. As a reminder, housing at SpaceX facilities is contingent on good performance and your continued employment.
Your supervisor has provided the additional information:
Meet at Spaceport 9 at the aerodrome at 04:00 UTC. Remember to set clock to UTC and prepare 7 days for jet lag before arriving. Employee space shuttle tickets from Kennedy Space Centre on Florida Atoll can be purchased from SpaceX site for 20,000 DOGE, company will deduct payment from future payroll. Employee access card can be obtained from security desk in front of Spaceport 7. Welcome to SpaceX family, hail Elon.
- Comment on Dutch government intervenes at Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Sora AI Slop is here 2 weeks ago:
Woe will be the day when humans can no longer determine whether a video is AI or not, even after careful analysis. I wouldn’t have caught this one either but if given the fact that it is suspected of AI, it isn’t hard to prove it. The timestamp in the top left corner is off. 22-13-43-21 is a nonsensical date and the time jumps from 23:15:07 to 23:15:98 then 23:15:59 then 23:15:54
- Comment on Whoa! Windows 7's market share surged, tripling in users last month 3 weeks ago:
People who build their own computers, AKA the group most likely to complain about this
- Comment on Whoa! Windows 7's market share surged, tripling in users last month 3 weeks ago:
They should make a Windows version called Windows 10P which is the same as Windows 10 but only the bare-bones necessities and no extra crap or required online services, and sell it for $59.99 (seeing that Windows is already de facto freeware). That’s probably an order of magnitude than what they make from intrusive advertising anyway to a single user over the lifespan of a computer.
- Comment on I Got This Right, Right? 5 weeks ago:
According to some right-wing spaces (r/conservative on Reddit), there is apparently evidence to suggest that the shooter was an outlier within their otherwise hard-right family.
Is there any evidence to the contrary?
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Students view doing that as basically the same amount of work as writing the paper yourself
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Aye that’s exactly the same thing that I said
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
This is why invisible watermarking of AI-generated content is likely to be so effective. Even primitive watermarks like file metadata. It’s not hard for anyone with technical knowledge to remove, but the thing with AI-generated content is that anyone who dishonestly uses it when they are not supposed to is probably also too lazy to go through the motions of removing the watermarking.
- Comment on Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ 1 month ago:
- Comment on Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ 1 month ago:
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
- Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline 1 month ago:
And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.
—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato
- Comment on We can't all be astronauts. 1 month ago:
r = 50 m by court order, but m~2~ is also now 135 kg.
- Comment on We can't all be astronauts. 1 month ago:
How do you get LaTeX in the comment?
- Comment on I may swear like a pirate, but I'm a fucking PRINCIPLED pirate 1 month ago:
Words become more acceptable over time. In centuries past calling someone a devil or saying that they should go to hell would have been deeply offensive. Today these insults are so mild that even schoolchildren say them to each other. Even twenty years ago the word “fuck” was viewed with nearly as much taboo as racial slurs. Now, it’s a very common word that people will throw around in a casual context.
At the same time, new words emerge and get labelled profane. For example, the word t****y (slur that means “transgender person”) would not have meant anything twenty years ago, and now it’s one of the most offensive words in the English dictionary. Similar story with the word f****t (derogatory term for a homosexual person).
- Comment on Where has the tax money "saved" in uk austerity gone? 2 months ago:
The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.
For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.
I’m American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they’re not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.
- Comment on Do gangs that collect protection money actually do any protecting? 2 months ago:
Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 2 months ago:
The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:
- Democratic Party: 40%
- Republican Party: 28%
- Libertarian Party: 11%
- Green Party: 8%
- Working Families Party: 6%
- Constitution Party: 4%
- Independents: 3%
For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.
The final distribution:
- Democrats: 4
- Republicans: 3
- Libertarians: 1
- Greens: 1
- Working Families: 1
There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.
The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to win a seat, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.
The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 months ago:
You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 2 months ago:
Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
- Comment on Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict 2 months ago:
Please read the article. I hate when people upvote bullshit just because it says things they like to hear. I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone else, but the jury’s findings were this:
- The driver is ⅔ responsible for the crash because of his negligent driving.
- The fact that the driver did in fact keep his foot on the accelerator was accepted by the jury.
- The jury accepted that the driver was reaching for his cell phone at the time of the crash.
- Evidence in court showed that the speed of the car was about 100 km/h. Keep in mind that this incident occurred in the Florida Keys where there are no high-speed expressways. I couldn’t find info on where exactly this happened, but the main road in the area is US Route 1, which close to the mainland is a large four-lane road with occasional intersections, but narrows into a two-lane road for most of the distance.
- The jury found Tesla ⅓ liable because it deemed that it had sold a faulty product. For international readers, in the US, a company that sells a product which is defective during normal use is strictly liable for resulting damages.
- Obviously Tesla plans to appeal but it is normal for everyone to appeal in these sorts of cases. Many appeals get shot down by the appellate court.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 2 months ago:
Wireshark can’t but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 2 months ago:
I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.
As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”.
Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 2 months ago:
Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath “User Datagram Protocol”, you can see the words “OpenVPN Protocol”. So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can’t read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it’s OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It’s a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
- The size of the transmission
- The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
- The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
- The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
