prime_number_314159

@prime_number_314159@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA President term limits⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You can only be elected as president twice. You can probably hack the system by getting multiple other presidents to select you as vice president, then resign. If you serve more than 2 years of the term they were elected to, that reduces the number of times you can be elected as president to one.

  The 22nd amendment doesn’t say that someone that serves 3.99 years of another president’s term multiple times can’t still be elected, and it doesn’t say that someone not qualified to be elected as president can’t be elected as vice president, but the 12th amendment might. Either of those could be an interesting legal fight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pants⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The belt and belt loops go all along the top row. If there’s only one row, the matrix can only wear a short-shorts version. There’s a crotch in each space between columns, and a leg on every column of length greater than 1.

  Sparse matrices have their own special pants that are more efficient, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨And 299999999 is divisible by 13⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With 17, I understand that you’re referring to how 299,999 is also divisible by 17. What is the 51 reference, though? I know there’s 3,999,999,999,999 but that starts with a 3. Not the same at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balls⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This makes for way better TV than if the camera simply worked. It’s a mistake that a human would probably never make, and definitely not persist in making.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pee posting?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As long as you can maintain a steady stream of ejaculate, it’ll feel the same for her.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. Army Is Upgrading an Israeli Base to Make Room for New Boeing Jets⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That must be a giant upgrade, on account of the many ways a Boeing could be coming down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many squirrels do you think you could take in a fight to the death?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m mentally well, I just like thinking about hypotheticals. I have no plans (nor any desire) to fight any number of squirrels to the death, and I do not condone doing so as entertainment or sport.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many squirrels do you think you could take in a fight to the death?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are details missing in this question that matter tremendously. Squirrels are faster and more agile than us. If they are well coordinated, and behave optimally to win (without concern to their individual survival, only the group’s success), I think it would take only a small number of squirrels to brutally murder most people, something like 5. I think their best strategy would be to go for the eyes first, then inflict bleeding injuries and escape again before the person can react. Without tools, and without backup, this approach wouldn’t take long to wear down most people.

  If the squirrels don’t care about their own survival, but make straightforward attacks, I’d think closer to 10-20. The person’s injuries will still compound quickly, but once thet have a grip of a squirrel, it wouldn’t be especially hard to lethally injure.

  If the squirrels still behave like squirrels, and are instead attacking because (for example), they are starving, then the number probably doesn’t matter much, as they’re more likely to go after each other, and the person would have the opportunity to plan and ambush small groups at a time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Regain Control in my ass⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a song per se, but I was listening to “Relaxing - Bach in my ass”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could an American please prove me wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  McDonald’s at sea is just as good (if not better) than land McDonald’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I get a screw like this out?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The rubber band trick is great, and very low effort/cost. I want to say, though, that it can take substantially more force than it looks like it should on small screws like this. You also don’t have to use something shaped for the original driver of the screw. With the rubber to help it, a round cylinder a little smaller than the head of the screw can work very well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CrowdStrike unhappy with “shady commentary” from competitors after outage⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you tried turning them off, then turning them on again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen a few projects rename during major version upgrades, when everyone has to read the release notes and make changes, anyways.

  Plenty of old deployed systems may continue using master/slave terminology, and of course some projects will stick to that language even decades in the future, but it was once more prevalent than it is now, and that declining trend looks like it will continue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Regarding this picture, where do you think quantum computers lie and why?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we’re still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.

  Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that’s a weakness or not. If it turns out they can’t do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.

  As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable, “then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million” step. I think they probably can’t do anything world shaking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think very few people mind changing it, and a few people want it changed, so it’s slowly shifting across various use cases. I’ve only discussed the change from master/slave terminology with one person that affirmatively supported the change, and they didn’t know that there’s still slavery in the world today.

  I don’t know what to make of that, other than to say ending human slavery ought to be a higher priority than ending references to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the best way to measure the size of the government?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Bigger” is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There’s also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

  As for controlling more of our lives, I think it’s significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

  A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don’t fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch “street food” videos, that doesn’t exist in the US because of our regulations.

  Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren’t even free to access.

  On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

  It’s very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ICANN approves use of .internal domain for your network⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2.9 billion hit in one of the largest data breaches ever — full names, addresses and SSNs exposed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of businesses use the last 4 digits separately for some purposes, which means that even if it’s salted, you are only getting 110,000 total options, which is trivial to run through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI has a 99.9% accurate ChatGPT AI text detector, but won't release it.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t joke about this, the college professors will hear you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I cite a lemmy comment in MLA format for use in an academic paper?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only adult humans are legally permitted to sign the NDA that <<<NASA>>> makes you sign when you “go to space”. Dogs are not adult humans. The “moon” is in “space”. Therefore, <<<NASA>>> would never allow a doggo to go to the “moon”. I daresay that whatever you pet on the “moon” was definitely not a dog. It could have been a robot, or a man in a costume, or an alien space craft, or a Guatemalan that illegally crossed over the ice wall, or many other things.

  There’s no way it could be a dog.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk calls for “criminal prosecution” of Twitter/X ad boycott perpetrators⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He only believes in the first 22 words of the first amendment. If you want to speak about what he has done, or (far worse) gather with others that share your beliefs to speak extra loud… straight to jail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Country music⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The other 2 thirds of the Earth’s surface, obviously. As the greatest song in history says: “…We got no troubles - Life is the bubbles - Under the sea…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do recommend eating this?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Peel it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No one has predicted the end of the world in a while.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They were going to fire up the LHC to open a dimension, which can only happen when the moon is casting a shadow 6000 km away. Then aliens… or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨shrimp is bugs⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.

  Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific berry.

  A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific fruits include cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are also berries.

  I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨this one goes out to the arts & humanities⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The (really, really, really) big problem with the internet is that so much of it is garbage data. The number of false and misleading claims spread endlessly on the internet is huge. To rule those beliefs out of the data set, you need something that can grasp the nuances of published, peer-reviewed data that is deliberately misleading propaganda, and fringe conspiracy nuts that believe the Earth is controlled by lizards with planes, and only a spritz bottle full of vinegar can defeat them, and everything in between.

  There is no person, book, journal, website, newspaper, university, or government that has reliably produced good, consistent help on questions of science, religion, popular lies, unpopular truths, programming, human behavior, economic models, and many, many other things that continuously have an influence on our understanding of the world.

  We can’t build an LLM that won’t consistently be wrong until we can stop being consistently wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have We Reached Peak AI?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.

  This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.

  This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.

  This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.

  The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the agreed upon age of the Universe is updated from 13 billion years old to 26 billion years old how does that affect Science and Astrophysics?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That estimate is based on assuming that the ratio of matter to light output is the same between galaxies 10 billion years apart in age. The high light output of these young galaxies could also be supermassive stars that burn out very quickly, larger stars typically forming faster than smaller stars, or many other things.

  Blindly assuming a linear relationship between two things, then extrapolating is how you get the Windows loading bar circa 2000.

  Separately, but just as big a potential issue, the data itself may be incorrect. Previous galaxies measured at extreme redshift values were remeasured, and found to have less extreme values. This can be as simple as there aren’t that many photons from these galaxies reaching us, so a short measurement period might not be enough to get an accurate picture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨delicious⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So… corporations figured out how to clean the world, and then sell a cleaner Earth back to us, one can at a time? This sounds like the libertarian dream ocean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Advice on first 3D printer⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cost is obviously a big factor. Almost every printer can change to any nozzle size and layer height for just the cost of the nozzle. Print volume is a major limitation, depending on your use case. The filaments it can print will probably be the same across any relatively low cost printers, with the only significant change being direct drive vs. Bowden.

  Bed leveling is huge, and makes probably the most difference in print quality on low cost printers these days. If there’s an easy way to tension the belts, that’s a plus. If there isn’t a power switch on the front (or even if there is), a emergency stop switch can be a help, like if the nozzle is running into the bed.

  Maintenance varies from printer to printer, generally you’re aiming for tight but not too tight on any belts or rollers. If the pulleys on the motors aren’t preinstalled, use something like loctite blue to fix them in place better.

  Also make sure if you plan to buy a printer that it’s got a decent amount of community around it. Running into the same problems with a bunch of other people is a big plus as a beginner, so popular printers are better.

  Teaching Tech made a calibration guide website that I’ve had a lot of good experiences with.