DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on If a time traveller posts a video from future, it would probably be tagged as AI generated video 7 hours ago:
Causality is just determinists starting with “time travel is impossible” and finding a fancy name for it.
I don’t want to say they’re wrong, just that asserting casualty in a discussion about time travel being impossible is kinda like asserting Godwin’s Law in a discussion about whether or not Trump’s a nazi.
- Comment on YSK that if you hesitate between Ketchup and Mustard, you should pick Mustard. It's healthier. 1 day ago:
When the USA was civilized we required every food sold to the public to list its nutritional information.
calories-info.com/mustard-vs-ketchup/
100g of ketchup or mustard both have about 100 calories, with ketchup getting more of those calories from carbohydrates and much less from fat.
Even if you make your own ketchup or buy a no-sugar added brand, it still has a fair amount of carbohydrates. And a substantial amount of salt.
tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/2594364/…/1
Both are worth including if you’re calorie counting. (And don’t necessarily trust the per-serving size label, since if they set that low enough they can round down and claim a 100% fat cooking spray is 0 calories. We only used to be civilized.)
- Comment on Do you ever feel guilty for trying to sign up for government assistance programs? 4 days ago:
Don’t ever feel guilty for doing exactly what every last plutocrat and “entrepreneur” would do in your place.
(Do feel outraged that the richest country on earth still demands we work or beg if we don’t want to starve to death.)
- Comment on Discord walks back age verification fears for most users 4 days ago:
A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.
Off the top of my head:
- Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
- Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
- Follow best-practices for accessibility.
- Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 4 days ago:
Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.
To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.
The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.
You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.
If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.
It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.
If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.
- Comment on Is browser preference a personality flaw? AI job interview evaluation raises questions— AI said applicant's 'habitual' Chrome use could indicate a 'lack of adaptability' after screening interview 4 days ago:
Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.
- Comment on Discord walks back age verification fears for most users 4 days ago:
Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.
Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.
Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 4 days ago:
If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?
And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?
AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 5 days ago:
You are assuming good behavior on the part of a corporate giant grown out of a social media site literally founded to spy on its users. A company who is literally being sued for their claims that their chat app is meaningfully encrypted
indianexpress.com/…/whatsapp-lawsuit-encrypted-me…
Even if Meta isn’t currently including themselves as a hidden participant in every WhatsApp chat, you should assume that they can do so and act as if they will do so.
Odds are pretty good that their encryption usage is good enough for any lawful behavior you may engage in, but you shouldn’t trust Meta or any software they provide with anything that would destroy your life if it was revealed.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 5 days ago:
Meta using the name of a formerly independent company for their current pseudo-private messaging app does not mean said app meaningfully predates the one whose tech they use.
signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
(Please share if you have a link arguing the opposite.)
More importantly, the encryption in Whatsapp is closer to HTTPS than it is to PGP. It keeps anyone except Meta or the recipients from keeping a record of what you say, but you should absolutely assume Meta is recording what you say on WhatsApp.
(And you should also assume anyone you talk to is keeping a record as well.)
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 5 days ago:
Most of the people I know have largely abandoned personal email. Way back before everyone had a personal number it made sense to share your email with your friends, but nowadays ‘contact that goes directly to them’ is good enough for casual purposes.
(And as understand it, WhatsApp is a cancerous fork of Signal created by Meta as a response to people abandoning their social media site for private communication or discord. Plain carrier messages for casual communication, signal for avoiding third-party interception, and social media for folk you don’t trust with your phone number.)
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 6 days ago:
schroedinger’s cat is an intentionally absurd metaphor from when QM dorks were still arguing about spooky action at a distance.
Both the cat, the box, the vial of poison, and the cesium atom itself are all observers as far as a real QM wavefunction would care. But as i understand it, getting any utility out of the idea of real collapsing wave-functions requires treating at least the atom as if it wasn’t, and once we start including atomic scale things we might as well just include everything up to and including the cat.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 1 week ago:
While I certainly don’t want to argue about the wisdom of preventive measures towards petty crime or dangerous outcomes, i think it’s worth knowing that even trivially surpassed barriers can alter what recompense or punishment can be provided from a court of law.
For example: There was a big copyright infringement case against an AI company recently, which ended in a settlement of a few thousand dollars per registered work so infringed. Authors whose work wasn’t registered were not eligible for the same amount, because the law limits how much they can recover if a work’s copyright wasn’t registered.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 1 week ago:
Mass produced items are not all the same. They are merely similar, and can have whatever variations the bulk manufacturing process requires or allows.
Not every car made on the same assembly line on the same day had the same options, and near every cake baked in a mass bakery will have a distinct internal structure.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 1 week ago:
The utility of a lock is that it’s a clear permission barrier. If you don’t have the key and bypass the lock, it’s clear at least to you that you aren’t using a key. Which can be the difference between ordinary trespass and burglary.
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 1 week ago:
“it can’t be hidden variables because they’re not as even as this math says they should be!” really just seems to be the whole QM field agreeing to stop arguing about spooky action at a distance.
The distinction between wave-functions as real things that collapse at superluminal speed and the same as mere mathematical placeholders for deterministic local effects which occur without subjective time seems to be a semantic and philosophical one, similar to the “multiple realities” explanation of quantum uncertainty or the “11 dimensions” explanation for why gravity is weaker.
As a practical matter, the only thing that students and non-physicts should remember is that wavefunction collapse allows superluminal coordination but not superluminal communication.
- Comment on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it 1 week ago:
This isn’t a paradox. It’s the ordinary and expected outcome of you have a junior whose work you can never trust.
Regardless of what your profession is, if you have a source of “work input” that requires specific instruction for near every task and whose output must be carefully examined, then the part of your job which is reviewing drafted work would necessarily increase.
This is especially true in engineering fields, where the things that can be abstracted into repeatable tasks usually are. Computers saved structural engineers from having to do all their math separately and higher-abstraction languages saved programmers from having to futz around in assembly, but neither of those had to be manually checked.
- Comment on "Luke, I am your *second* father" 1 week ago:
If nobody else, Obi-Wan. Although the exchange at the Lars household over dinner suggests that Owen and Beru didn’t exactly hide his father’s name from him. Since “Anakin” doesn’t appear at all in the script until after the twist, it’s likely that there wasn’t a firm name for him until ROTJ.
imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back.htm… imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-Return-of-the-Jedi.html
Luke definitely knew he had a father, though. And had an idea of who he was from the aunt and uncle who raised him, Obi-Wan, and even the rebel pilots.
- Comment on Some rich person could cause a lot of chaos by bailing everyone out of jail that they can 1 week ago:
There are also laws about who can post bail for you. My understanding is that they need to either have an actual relationship with you or be a licensed bondsman. Either be someone who can guilt you into going to court or who will hire a bounty hunter to haul you in.
(And bail bonds are unfair bullshit, but that’s a different thing.)
- Comment on PSA 2 weeks ago:
The first smell test for any survey is how would they possibly control for the non-response rate?
Putting out a billboard to ask something like “what’s kind of makeup should a cracked egg try first” will get a bunch of recommendations and advertisment copy. But it wouldn’t tell you much about how many males wearing makeup are trans, enby, drag, or just wearing a costume. And noting at all about how many trans girls even try makeup at all.
“Tell me your responses about how much HRT sucks” would, similarly, get you a dataset that’s highly distorted.
- Comment on Am I financially enabling child labor in 3rd world countries by buying second hand fast fashion? 2 weeks ago:
No matter how complex or inefficient the orphan grinding machine, if you buy something second-hand and the person you bought it from buys a replacement with your proceeds, you are contributing to that sale and thereby funding the orphan grinding machine.
- Comment on Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN 2 weeks ago:
While I don’t buy a lot of PC games, I did pick up Stellaris on GOG.
The weird second-class status I get when it comes to betas and mods is enough for anyone to scream. Especially since if I wanted to move to steam, I’d have to re-buy every add-on I want to play.
Add-on lock-in really is a thing. Even if it may be as much a lazy publisher as it is a greedy storefront.
- Comment on YSK the four rules of firearm safety 3 weeks ago:
I wonder how many lives would be saved if this was repeated enough to be made common knowledge.
Considering all of the times a child has accidentally discharged a firearm and killed someone, I don’t think it’s as many as the other rules.
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like "analog" stuff is more "tangible"? 3 weeks ago:
OneDrive is absurdly easy to not use. I feel confident saying that if you can’t figure out how to save an MS word file to a non-onedrive folder you should definitely leave it on. A single backup on a cloud service with a local cache is better than a single backup on one physical drive that will eventually fail.
If it’s important, you want at least three backups in two different formats with one physically removed from the others. A copy you save to a thumb stick, a copy you save to OneDrive, and one you print out. (Or, conversely, the physical copy you bought, one electronic copy local, and one copy of that electronic version saved to iCloud or what have you.)
- Comment on How long would it take a black Hole to fully absorb a person from event horizon to center of the earth style? 4 weeks ago:
Not a physicist – they know the math.
Just a sci-fi enthusiast who got really annoyed by a trilogy that didn’t understand what the “delta” in “delta-v” meant and so the space ships spent a lot of time getting to a very high orbital speed before each fight.
- Comment on How long would it take a black Hole to fully absorb a person from event horizon to center of the earth style? 4 weeks ago:
Time dilation is your subjective acceleration veering into more “time” than “space”.
If you somehow were in a flat universe with parallel velocity to an object several light-years away, and somehow managed to accelerate towards it at 1 g, you’d impact at the time on your watch that pure Newtonian physics says you would.
The subjective clocks of the place you’re hitting would measure your travel time as a lot longer, however. But it wouldnt be infinite at all – a relatively small multiple of “several” years, in fact.
(Before the relativistic impact recused both you and them to an energetic plasma, that is.)
- Comment on Can someone please ELI5 the legal issue with genericized trademarks? 4 weeks ago:
A trademark is a distinct way to refer to a business. The whole set of legal rights and privileges that this weird form of intellectual property gets are to make sure that when somebody talks about " dome guys tacos" they’re definitely talking about my tacos and not yours or some other persons.
If I let dumb guys tacos become a generic term that I don’t say hey, that’s not talking about my tacos anymore. Don’t do that then I’ve let my trademark become generic. This is unlikely to happen to actual tacos but if I had come up with a brand new pseudo taco dish and I called it the DCT, and then every Mexican restaurant in the country copied it and also called it the DCT, then the idea has become genericized and I can’t. Then at the end of it start trying to collect money from other people for calling the thing I invented and failed to produce by the name that has been attached to it.
This is of course entirely apart from the menu of how to create a DCT, we should be covered by copyright, or the specific set of instructions on how to create a DCT, which hypothetically I could get a patent on. (Although I don’t think they award patents for food.)
- Comment on The singular they is actually such a natural part of the English language, the people complaining about it almost certainly use it without noticing 4 weeks ago:
Since both clauses are interdependent and incorrect on their own, the join here with merely a comma is entirely proper and not a comma slice
- Comment on Microsoft warns that China is winning AI race outside the west 4 weeks ago:
China is definitely stupid about something, but “let’s.join the current USA bubble” doesn’t seem to be it.
- Comment on Haste/Impatience should have been one of the deadly sins. 5 weeks ago:
The Christians who live by their principles generally are fairly discreet in doing so, both because that’s one of their principles and because they’re embarrassed by the ones who don’t.