Contravariant
@Contravariant@lemmy.world
- Comment on Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns 3 weeks ago:
Well, who did you trust to build your hardware?
- Comment on Half as Hot 4 weeks ago:
Well at some point you encounter a phase change, which complicates things, but mostly the heat capacity (how much energy it takes to raise the temperature) is fairly constant. In an ideal gas it is exactly constant, but that is a bit of an approximation, even if it works quite well for most gases.
- Comment on US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues 2 months ago:
Lenovo definitely deserved to be banned after that shit they pulled with the malicious root certificates.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
That same description applies to downloading a zipped file.
- Comment on Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads 3 months ago:
Reminds me of the time I did roughly the same thing trying to get people to move away from internet explorer.
- Comment on Cars Are Now Rolling Computers Now. So What Happens When They Stop Getting Updates? 3 months ago:
Please tell me someone though about a switch to take them offline.
- Comment on Madougushi Dahlia wa Utsumukanai • Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools - Episode 4 discussion 3 months ago:
If you think it has potential I’d say give the LNs a try.
At this stage you’ll stand a better chance of enjoying the story by reading the LNs. So far the anime is mostly leaving stuff out without adding much to compensate.
- Comment on Madougushi Dahlia wa Utsumukanai • Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools - Episode 4 discussion 3 months ago:
Yeah it’s not a good adaptation. The MC’s motivations come across a lot better in the LNs.
And yeah those shadows are freaking weird.
- Comment on YouTube tests server-side ads to make your coveted blocker obsolete 3 months ago:
Well the upside is that they’re not actually trying to get it to stop, they’re just making an effort to please their customers.
- Comment on The first GPT-4-class AI model anyone can download has arrived: Llama 405B 3 months ago:
That doesn’t sound like much of a change from the situation right now.
- Comment on Square Enix Confirms They Won't Cancel The Apothecary Diaries Manga Serialization Following Artist's Conviction 3 months ago:
Huh mangakas must be paid better than I thought.
- Comment on What is a stupid question? 3 months ago:
At some point even the pope disagreed. Or well, one of them did. It was complicated.
- Comment on What do to if I survive a nuclear blast in my city? 4 months ago:
It’ll be a rather unpleasant death I might add. Plan accordingly.
- Comment on Authy got hacked, and 33 million user phone numbers were stolen 4 months ago:
Use TOTP wherever possible. It’s standardized, and typically can be found somewhere if you keep digging hard enough.
Plenty of services push their own proprietary systems hard though. Looking at you M$
- Comment on Why is the current labour party in the UK considered more center left? Do you think they will pass any policies that are considered left leaning now that they have won the majority? 4 months ago:
Keep in mind that for the way UK elects MPs something like Alternative Vote (or even approval voting, which I prefer) would only help with the problem that only 2 parties have any chance of winning in each particular constituency.
It doesn’t get around the issue that ‘% of constituencies where party X wins the election’ and ‘% of votes cast for party X’ are in no way the same thing.
- Comment on Why is the current labour party in the UK considered more center left? Do you think they will pass any policies that are considered left leaning now that they have won the majority? 4 months ago:
If UK politicians had any sense they’d fix the voting system that let that happen.
Obviously they won’t because that same system put them in power and is currently holding far-right at bay, but it would be nice.
- Comment on Can you have local reverse proxies? 4 months ago:
I am, no worries.
- Comment on Hive mentality is the opposite of creativity. 4 months ago:
Dissent is not creativity.
- Comment on Can you have local reverse proxies? 4 months ago:
Using reverse proxies is common enough now that quite a few apps can deal with subpaths, and for the ones that can’t you can generally get nginx to rewrite the paths for you to make things work.
- Comment on Does different parts of the world use different standards for water pressure similar to voltages? 4 months ago:
What genius decided to denote the difference by using three shades of the exact same colour?
- Comment on Does different parts of the world use different standards for water pressure similar to voltages? 4 months ago:
Because 1 bar is almost atmospheric pressure. Oddly enough I’ve never seen anyone use kPa, weather forecasts often use hPa (instead of mbar) to report atmospheric pressure.
- Comment on Ranked Choice Voting - A Community for Discussion and Organizing to Implement Ranked Choice Voting 4 months ago:
Put simply you just give every candidate points out of 10 and then elect the one with the highest average.
Approval voting (not acceptance, my mistake), simplifies things a bit by only allowing none or all points. Which is the best if you want to vote tactically anyway.
It sidesteps a couple of the issues that Arrow’s impossibility theorem raises, and is easy enough to understand. Ranked choice is better than first past the post but still has the issue that adding an additional candidate can affect the end result in complex ways.
With approval voting most aspects are easy to understand. Adding or removing candidates trivially has no effect on the rest of the result. And while you can still vote tactically the only real tactic is where you put your cutoff, you should still vote for the option(s) you like best.
- Comment on Bill Gates says not to worry about AI's energy draw 4 months ago:
In a way AI refusing to recommend using so much computing power on LLMs could well be the first sign of actual intelligence.
- Comment on Ranked Choice Voting - A Community for Discussion and Organizing to Implement Ranked Choice Voting 4 months ago:
Why not acceptance/range voting?