Cocodapuf @ Cocodapuf @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I mean, yeah. True. But to push back a little, driving at the actual speed of traffic is often safer than driving the official speed limit.

The real world and written law don't always line up, the speed limit is one of those areas.

Job applications for one thing. When we were young, recruiters had to physically read the letters and/or places hiring had to physically see you in person.

Now hiring agencies just use automated tools (even before AI) and you get ghosted constantly.

Yeah, job applications haven't changed that much.

It was still a dismissive black box, it's just that the process was more manual. Instead of AI tools throwing your application away, someone skimmed it looking for a particular bullet point, if they don't find it in 10 seconds your resume is tossed in the bin. Whether it was AI or a manager, either way you're probably not getting a call back to let you know they tossed your application.

Comparing to book burnings is only a false equivalence, as you're not destroying information, you're destroying locks that require special keys, unlike FOSS.

I'm totally with you on this. It's not book burning because this generation doesn't own anything to burn in the first place. You don't buy a movie, you "buy" a license to stream that movie for a period of time. Tragic.

I think a lot of us empathize with the protesters. I don't actually see any posts saying "this is dumb".

I am still confused though. I mean I understand protesting Trump, ICE, and the government in general. I can't control that, so protest is one of my only courses of action. But with technology... we can just not use it. I think I haven't used Facebook in over 15 years, I've never used Twitter. And I'm happier for it, they're right, that works. I use a smartphone, but I limit the kind of apps I want to put on it. If I find that something, a phone, app, website, whatever, is impacting my life, keeping me from dealing with daily responsibilities, I know it's a problem, so I'll stop using it. My point is, I do have control over my tech use, so why rally about it? After all, all the protests in the world won't give you better self control, that's a skill you need to build.

Fuck yes. Especially printers.

But my IT guy advice on the matter is this: ink jet is a scam, don't buy one, ever; don't accept one for free. If you print a lot, get a laser printer for home, if you only print a few times a year, get a laser printer for home.

Well I mean, how else do you protect yourself from the demons that cause Syphilis?

(The shadow govt never should have summoned them in the first place)

Unintentional sick burn on Saturn.

Hah, if satellites were actually that large... It still wouldn't actually be a problem. It's really hard to grasp just how far things are apart up in geostationary orbit, there is a truly immense amount is space. There's plenty of elbow room for thousands of Rhode Islands floating around up there, no reason to worry about collisions.

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There's a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.

Just keep this guy away from teens...

Also maybe childproof that cabinet under your sink if RFK visits, I just worry that he'll get confused and... who knows.

I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.

But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.

Well sure, if the electricity is powering something you already need and the waste heat is beneficial, then awesome, I guess that's free heat. But it's actually pretty rare that people need to be using that much electricity for anything as consistently as you would need for heating a home. And if you don't actually need to be using that electricity, there's really no way around the fact that electric heating is really pretty expensive.

I guess if you are stuck with electric heating as your only option and a heat pump is out of your price range, then mining crypto could be a nice way to offset the cost of electric heating... But then the equipment costs would add up and you'd probably be better off with a heat pump anyway.

If home improvement and DIY were actual categories for the Nobel Prize, i'd be running out of places to put all my Nobel prizes.

I'd probably have to put in a new shelf. Maybe use some nice cherry planks...

Well that's all true, we don't actually know what the real filters are, are we already past them, or are they still ahead of us? Certainly people have speculated about this for a long time, and I won't pretend to have any more real answers than anyone else. But honestly, I'd have a hard time believing that the really rare event, that the great filter lays somewhere between the development of the brain and the development of the kind of intelligence humans have. It just seems like a relatively small jump (relative to all the other hurdles) between many of the smarter animals on earth and human beings. For example, many species use tools a whole lot actually. Only a few other species actually make tools or alter them to a large degree, but you know, give it 10 million years and see if that changes. Likewise, many species have languages, some species even give themselves names, so they can intentionally address other individuals in their social group.

If you don't mind a bit of total speculation on my part, in my opinion, the explanation to the Fermi paradox is actually pretty simple, there really is no paradox. Intelligent life is probably relatively common in the universe, the reason we don't see aliens all over the place is that intelligent life thrives too well for that. Once a species is capable of traveling other stars, it's just a matter of time before they settle most of their galaxy, like within a million years (which is very quick on evolutionary scales). We're just the first intelligent life in this galaxy, we can assume this because if there were others, they'd already have colonies right here on earth, because it's a great planet.

To double back on the great filter though, my best guess about which events might be truly rare, my money is on Eukaryotic life and mitochondria. That feels like a real freak accident, as well as an absolutely vital requirement for complex life.

Well, I'm not sure you've considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it's done, I don't think there's any undoing it. There aren't many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I'm confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that's all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I'd estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10--200 million years, over and over again.

On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.

A reminder that all packets are delivered on a "best effort" basis, and some packets will be simply dropped en route.

So... I think we're all on the same page that it's clearly unethical for the feds to be doing this to people. Taking people out of their homes in the night, even not fully dressed, that horrible. And to be clear, it's ICE doing that under Trump's orders.

That said, what you wrote above, that all sounds pretty unhinged. I mean, u-haul is not doing this, they rent vehicles. You might as well be angry at Ford, for making the vehicles. You might as well get angry at Walmart or Amazon fire selling them zip ties.

How?

Literally, how can they possibly do that? How can you be certain the person you're renting to isn't a law enforcement officer? Background checks? Would it be fair to block these people from ever renting a moving van (like for when they're moving)? If they did bar law enforcement from using their vehicles, and a federal agency brings them up on charges for obstructing justice, how could they possibly fight that claim?

Yeah, I had a similar thought. I mean nothing is set in stone with color coding, but there are some pretty clear norms.

These are exactly the kind of concerns citizens should have in a free democracy because that's how you keep your democracy free.

I do hear you, and I know, and I agree... It's just that I always expected to fight against the slow creep of totalitarianism. I expected to have to look out for veiled threats, or hidden signs of tyranny. I never expected to face overt, blatant totalitarianism. I never expected the US president to openly endorse white nationalist organizations. I never expected so much of the public to be on board with what are so clearly unethical policies, with an administration that closely mimics the rise of the Nazi party...

If politics is a tug of war, I expected to have to constantly pull in the right direction, I didn't expect the other side to light the rope on fire.

I expect you're quite worried about this situation but try not to be so dismissive of others, please.

That's fair, I can see how starting my comment like that must have been really annoying. Sorry for that.