Sasha
@Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Yes, that Sasha
- Comment on Climate activists to plead not guilty en masse under NSW’s controversial anti-protest laws 2 weeks ago:
Our representation has been incredible, there is the option to appeal but we haven’t discussed that yet. We had one successful appeal for a slightly different charge yesterday, so I suspect we’ll give it a go.
In my case the charges were entirely reasonable, my statement about them being inconsistent and political applies to those who are facing S214A which carries a maximum penalty of $22,000 and 2 years prison.
- Comment on Climate activists to plead not guilty en masse under NSW’s controversial anti-protest laws 2 weeks ago:
I had my court case today, and due to very different circumstances compared to these brave climate warriors, I plead guilty. The only tidbit I can really give is that they’re really leaning into the anti-protestor stuff and most likely want to make an example out of as many of them as possible (we were basically told this to our faces today). It’s unfair, the charges have been inconsistent, randomly changed and clearly politically motivated. I’d be watching this one closely, and if you can chip in to support them please do.
It’s not good news for protestors in general that we’re actively watching a crackdown unfold all over the nation, but at least in the case of rising tide, it likely means they’re using an effective strategy.
- Comment on How close are we to "manually tuning" LLMs? 1 month ago:
It would be easier and faster to just train it on the stuff you want it to output. There are hundreds of billions of weights in models like gpt, and no one really knows what any individual one does.
- Comment on We need faster speed limits in Australia - and I'm not saying that because I'm a hoon | Opinion - Car News 2 months ago:
I absolutely agree, getting your Ls should involve a short course and test like it does for motorbikes. Just scanning the road and looking out for danger properly is a whole skill that people need to be taught.
I’d say the biggest thing we can really do for road safety is to just reduce car numbers, so of course more trains and a bunch of HSR between the cities. Going 130 can reduce your travel time by a tiny amount, but going 250-300 on one of the safest modes of travel is something else entirely.
- Comment on Dr. Stone is a refreshingly, persistently upbeat series 2 months ago:
Dr. Stone is amazing and really scratched a nerdy itch for me, haven’t watched all of the anime but from what I have seen it’s a solid adaptation of the manga
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 3 months ago:
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely an idealist and I acknowledge that.
Let me be clear, I specifically think we shouldn’t immediately jump to killing as the first choice. If killing an evil person is going to lead to actual good outcomes, and is seemingly the best/most viable option, I’m not necessarily against it even if I don’t care for it. Violence is a tool we can use, but I prefer to limit it where possible.
Reform would be great if possible, it likely may not be. I think taking away the ability to do harm is probably the best place to start, imprisonment is certainly an option there but it’s not the only one (and doesn’t need to look like the current prison systems we have). If killing leads to a good outcome, and it’s not possible to do anything less (for example we don’t have the power to just round up all the billionaires and corrupt politicians to do these things), then it’s justifiable.
Once approaching justice after the harm has been stopped, one also needs to consider how victims feel and what they’re going to need to try and reduce the impact of the harm they’ve suffered. I’m no expert on any of this and I don’t pretend to be, but I know there are better ways than the current judicial systems. In all honesty I think it’s a case by case kind of thing.
My main concern with this whole affair, is that it hasn’t changed any power structures, people will still be exploited. I want to see structural change, not just blind revenge.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 3 months ago:
I am vegan, and that’s exactly the reason why.
I think it’s quite simply the case that we should make the choice to try and make life as uncruel as possible. That’s what I believe and I understand that many people won’t agree with me.
Also hey, I’m just having a discussion here we’re all friends. There’s no need to be mean and say I’m talking gibberish.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 3 months ago:
It is in some cases justifiable, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the only option in the majority of cases where people might jump to it.
I don’t really agree we’ve been trained to respond that way, when I quite often see the exact opposite. Killing is a fast and easy solution that many people are quick to advocate for. I’m quite steadfast in my belief that being able to look beyond killing is one of the few privileges our intelligence gives us, to be better than the cruelty of nature.
I don’t agree the breaking the social contract means death is appropriate or justifiable, but it does mean we can seek to undo that injustice and reduce the harm by other forceful methods. Acting in vengeance is not justifiable.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 3 months ago:
I don’t want him prosecuted, but not because I think killing people is good or forgivable (though it couldn’t really happen to a better person lol) but because the criminal justice system is awful, especially in the US.
If the death penalty is on the table, then I don’t think I need to explain why that’s bad, but I fundamentally disagree with imprisonment. I’m no expert, but there are better ways to handle harm and justice, and I feel the current system is unjustifiably evil in it’s treatment of convicts.
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 4 months ago:
I’ve seen it a lot, mostly by road trains on the Nullarbor, and we would wait for them to stop indicating. It’s just a brief signal, one or two flashes and then you’re safe to check if it’s safe.
- Comment on Dyk, Bobby? 4 months ago:
Oh that’s so cool, thankyou for sharing!
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
I’ve only ever done QFT in curved spacetime, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do EM, it’ll be a vaguely similar process. I never actually dealt with any scenarios where the curvature was that extreme, and QFT in a curved background is kinda bizarre and doesn’t always require one to consider the specific trajectories, though you definitely can especially if you’re doing some quantum teleportation stuff. In my area it’s simpler to ignore QED and to just consider a massless scalar field, this gives you plenty of information about what photons do without worrying about polarisations and electrons.
It’s been a long time since I did any reading on the geometric optics approximation (in the context of GR this is the formal name for light travelling on null geodesics), but for the most part it’s not something you have to consider, even outside of black holes the curvature tends to be pretty tame (that’s why you can comfortably fall into one in sci-fi), so unfortunately I don’t know of any phenomena (in GR) where it’s important. QFT in curved spacetime generally requires you to stay away from large curvatures, otherwise you start entering into the territory of quantum gravity for which there is no accepted theory.
Outside of GR, it breaks down quite regularly, including I believe, for the classic double slit experiment.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
On that first point, calculating spacetime metrics is such a horrible task most of the time that I avoided it at all costs. When I was working with novel spacetimes I was literally just writing down metrics and calculating certain features of the mass distribution from that.
For example I wrote down this way to have a solid disk of rotating spacetime by modifying the Alcubierre warp drive metric, and you can then calculate the mass distribution along the radius. I did that calculation to show that such a spacetime requires negative mass to exist.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
Yeah, once you add in a second mass to a Schwarzschild spacetime you’ll have a new spacetime that can’t be written as a “sum” of two Schwarzschild spacetimes, depending on the specifics there could be ways to simplify it but I doubt by much.
If GR was linear, then yeah the sum of two solutions would be another solution just like it is in electromagnetism.
I’m actually not 100% certain how you’d treat a shell, but I don’t think it’ll necessarily follow the same geodesic as a point like test particle. You’ll have tidal forces to deal with and my intuition tells me that will give a different result, though it could be a negligible difference depending on the scenario.
Most of my work in just GR was looking at null geodesics so I don’t really have the experience to answer that question conclusively. All that said, from what I recall it’s at least a fair approximation when the gravitational field is approximately uniform, like at some large distance from a star. The corrections to the precession of Mercury’s orbit were calculated with Mercury treated as a point like particle iirc.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
Yeah it would fair point, I’ll be honest I haven’t touched Newtonian gravity in a long time now so is forgotten that was a thing.
There’s a similar phenomenon in general relativity, but it doesn’t apply when you’ve got multiple sources because it’s non-linear.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
Possibly?
A bowling ball is more dense than a feather (I assume) and that’s probably going to matter more than just the size. Things get messy when you start considering the actual mass distributions, and honestly the easiest way to do any calculations like that is to just break each object up into tiny point like masses that are all rigidly connected, and then calculate all the forces between all of those points on a computer.
I full expect it just won’t matter as much as the difference in massed.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
I actually thought the answer might be never, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests you can do this by dropping a ~1kg bowling ball from a height of 10^-11m.
This is an extremely rough calculation, I’m basically just looking at how big a bunch of numbers are and pushing all that through some approximate formulae. I could easily be off by a few orders of magnitude and frankly I didn’t take care to check I was even doing any of it correctly.
10^-11m seems wrong, and frankly it probably is. But that’s still 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times further than the earth moves in this situation.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
This is not correct, the force on the objects is the same sure, but the accelerations aren’t so you can’t calculate them both in one go like this.
- Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g 4 months ago:
If anyone’s wondering, I used to be a physicist and gravity was essentially my area of study, OP is right assuming an ideal system, and some of the counter arguments I’ve seen here are bizarre.
If this wasn’t true, then gravity would be a constant acceleration all the time and everything would take the same amount of time to fall towards everything else (assuming constant starting distance).
You can introduce all the technicalities you want about how negligible the difference is between a bowling ball and a feather, and while you’d be right (well actually still wrong, this is an idealised case after all, you can still do the calculation and prove it to be true) you’d be missing the more interesting fact that OP has decided to share with you.
If you do the maths correctly, you should get a=G(m+M)/r^2 for the acceleration between the two, if m is the mass of the bowling ball or feather, you can see why increasing it would result in a larger acceleration. From there it’s just a little integration to get the flight time. For the argument where the effect of the bowling ball feather is negligible, that’s apparent by making the approximation m+M≈M, but it is in this system an approximation.
I could probably go ahead and work out what the corrections are under GR but I don’t want to and they’d be pretty damn tiny.
- Comment on Scientists dismayed as UK ministers clear way for gene editing of crops - but not animals 4 months ago:
Depending on the way it’s modified, I think there’s some environmental risk particularly for soil erosion and potentially cross breeding with non-modified crops.
I don’t think these should stop us from making better food sources, but it does concern me because there isn’t much corporate incentive to adequately test for these things.
- Comment on Australian government pilots Microsoft Copilot with mixed results. 5 months ago:
Inb4 robodebt 2.0
- Comment on The Most Loved Digital Audio Streaming Platforms. 5 months ago:
Just pirate, it’s better than paying these companies to rip off artists. Support your favourite artists directly, streams are basically worthless compared to other forms of income like merch.
- Comment on Why is space 2 dimensional? 6 months ago:
Best video you’ll ever see on the topic imo (and very short)