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Meteorology Gatekeeping
  • I assume this is two statements: one without the parentheses, and one where each parenthesized word replaces the word before it. This is a compact, but borderline unreadable way to write two statements with the same structure. I hate it.

    Edit: it makes a lot more sense in a live lecture, where the lecturer writes down the first sentence, then says aloud the second sentence while only replacing the necessary words on the board.

  • Sea Creature Party
  • In the tree of life, flounders are a sub-sub-...-sub-species of bilaterally symmetrical animals: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Holozoa=5246131?otthome=%40_ozid%3D1&highlight=path%3A%40Apionichthys_finis%3D3640785&highlight=path%3A%40Bilateria%3D117569#x2913,y-2310,w8.2796

    Edit: let me preemptively be a pedant to myself and say that "sub-...-species" is wrong because "bilaterally symmetrical animals" is not a species. Flounder is itself a species AFAIK, not a sub-species of anything. It is a descendant of the common ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical animals. There, now surely no one will find anything to be pedantic about :D

  • #godot #GodotEngine
  • I believe there's a setting for whether it's global or per-window. Personally I prefer global, because I can't keep track of more than one state and I absolutely hate the experience of typing something and getting a different language than you expect.

  • #godot #GodotEngine
  • Multilingual users have multiple keyboard layouts, usually switching with Alt+Shift or similar key combo. If you're multitasking you might not realize you're on the wrong keyboard layout. So say you're chatting with someone in Russian, then you alt+tab to your source code and you spot a typo - you wrote my_var_xopy instead of my_var_copy. You delete the x and type in c. You forget this happened and you never realized the keyboard layout was wrong.

    That c that you typed is now actually с, Cyrillic Es.

    What do you say, is that realistic enough?

  • #godot #GodotEngine
  • Oh, that I agree with. But then there's the mess of Unicode updates, and if you're using an old version of the compiler that was built with an old version of Unicode, it might not recognize every character you use...

  • #godot #GodotEngine
  • Sanity is subjective here. There are reasons to disallow non-ASCII characters, for example to prevent identical-looking characters from causing sneaky bugs in the code, like this but unintentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack (and yes, don't you worry, this absolutely can happen unintentionally).

  • Are they no longer making colored volumes of One Piece?

    The digitally colored manga was releasing at a relatively steady pace, with at least one release per year since it started in 2012, but after volume 99 in 2022 there's nothing. Does anyone know if they just stopped completely? Seems strange to stop just before volume 100.

    0
    AI Ruined My Year - Robert Miles

    You might know Robert Miles from his appearances in Computerphile. When it comes to AI safety, his videos are the best explainers out there. In this video, he talks about the developments of the past year (since his last video) and how AI safety plays into it.

    For example, he shows how GPT 4 shows understanding of "theory of other minds" where GPT 3.5 did not. This is where the AI can keep track of what other people know and don't know. He explains the Sally-Anne test used to show this.

    He covers an experiment where GPT-4 used TaskRabbit to get a human to complete a CAPTCHA, and when the human questioned whether it was actually a robot, GPT-4 decided to lie and said that it needs help because it's blind.

    He talks about how many researchers, including high-profile ones, are trying to slow down or stop the development of AI models until the safety research can catch up and ensure that the risks associated with it are mitigated.

    And he talks about how suddenly what he's been doing became really important, where before it was mostly a fun and interesting hobby. He now has an influential role in how this plays out and he talks about how scary that is.

    If you're interested at all in this topic, I can't recommend this video enough.

    16
    A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband

    A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband. As she's about to say hello to him, she notices the man is filthy: his clothes have stains from spilt food and drinks, his face and hands are dark with mud and grime.

    "What happened to you?!" she asks, skipping the hello.

    "Oh, it's nothing, don't worry about it..."

    "What do you mean don't worry about it? You're dirty like a pig! At least go home and shower!!"

    "No, I can't... There's something I have to do. Sorry, honey, I'll see you later tonight."

    "Well at least tell me how you got so muddy!"

    "I really can't tell you. It's nothing, I promise."

    The woman starts getting angry. "Listen to me. Either you tell me what's going on, or go home with me right now to wash yourself!! If not, I'm packing your things and kicking you out!"

    The husband thinks about it for a while, then makes a deep sigh and says: "Alright... I'll come clean."

    8
    Is there a movie with a significant portion of it shot through a telescope?

    Or a very very high zoom to get a similar effect.

    No real reason for this question, just a random wonder I had. Basically the effect this would have on perspective might be interesting, and I wonder if any movie used this kind of shot for more than a couple of seconds.

    9
    How does DNA decide the shape of the body?

    I know that DNA encodes proteins. Truthfully, everything besides that (including 'what are proteins') mostly wooshes over my head, but that's not relevant because whenever I search this question I never even find it addressed anywhere.

    The human body has, among other things, two hands each with five fingers, with a very particular bone structure. How are things like that encoded in DNA, and by what mechanisms does that DNA cause these features to be built the way they are? What makes two people have a different nose shape? Nearly everyone in my family has a mole on the left side of their face, how does that come about from DNA?

    I'm sure there are many steps involved, but I don't see how we go from creating proteins to reproducibly building a full organism with all the organs in the right places and the right shapes. Whenever I try to look this up, all of these intermediate steps are missing, so it basically seems like magic.

    As I said, any explanation will most likely go over my head and I won't be able to understand it fully, but I at least want to see an explanation. I'll do my best to understand it of course.

    29
    What are these? They keep turning up on my floors

    I'm in the middle east in case that helps narrow it down. Very hot few days probably have something to do with it.

    Where are they coming from? Are they hiding somewhere in my apartment? They seem to be flightless. They are all the same size and very small, here's one on my finger for scale: !

    5
    Proton Drive issues and woes

    Kind of an update from my previous post. The Proton Drive app on Android utterly failed to back up my photos and videos. I've now got a glimpse to a possible reason why.

    I realized that it was doing fine with photos and small videos but was struggling with large files, so as a temporary measure, I moved all the files bigger than 1GB to a different folder on my phone. I then had to wipe the app's data and log back in because it was just hanging or looping repeatedly otherwise. After logging back in, it successfully backed up all the remaining files over many hours. At least, I think it did - I'd have to go one by one to find out and I'm really not feeling too confident about it. But if it didn't get all of them, it got almost all of them.

    Then I added back in the files that were between 1GB and 2GB. It managed this fine. The app's data usage grew to about 4GB at some points but that is fine as it needs to create encrypted copies of the file it's backing up and it might be doing a few files in parallel. At the end, the data usage went back down to <1GB.

    Then I tried to add back the files between 2GB and 5GB. There were four of them: 2.25GB, 2.50GB, 3.86GB, and 4.12GB. Total size: approximately 12.73 GB. After setting the app running, its data usage grew to upwards of 60GB and I had to halt it. As before, there was no way to get the app to behave again after that besides wiping data and logging back in again. The "clear local cache" button in the app's settings did seemingly nothing. I moved the big files back to the temporary folder.

    Next I tried to move the files one at a time, starting from the smallest one. So one 2.25 GB video file. Turns out my phone shows base-10-based file sizes, so it's actually 2.091 GiB. The app misbehaves a little bit in vague ways that I didn't quite comprehend and can't explain, e.g. it got stuck at "3 files remaining" even though I only added 1 file, so I needed to wipe its memory again, but eventually it uploaded the dang file. I don't remember exactly how much data it used in the process, but the important thing is it worked. And then I looked at the file through the Proton Drive web interface and checked its details, where I saw what's in the picture:

    > Size: 2.09 GB > > Original size: -2049486257 bytes

    The original file size is stored as a 32-bit signed integer! Is this only in the web frontend, or is it also like that behind the scenes? What happens when the file size exceeds 4GiB? Does this only affect photos/videos or does it happens for the general-purpose Drive as well? Is this why big files have been failing for me?

    I'll keep you guys updated... And I hope these bugs are fixed. I still believe in Proton.

    Edit: the four files, added one by one, uploaded successfully. Now moving on to a 6.10GB file. This is bigger in bytes than 32 bits can represent. Wish me luck.

    Edit next day: the 6.10 GB file failed to upload. It's perpetually stuck at "1 item left" after giving it more than enough time overnight. The app is also taking up some 15GB of space - much more than it should. While uploading previous files, it gree to marginally larger than the file being uploaded. Now it's well over 2x that. So my conclusion is that Proton Drive for Android can't back up videos larger than 4GB, and fails catastrophically when attempting to do so.

    I'm already in contact with Proton support. I'm not sure I've quit convinced them of the severity of this bug yet (or multiple bugs) but they acknowledged that there are issues and suggested that the current beta version 2.4.0 of the app has mitigations regarding storage usage, and they gave me instructions for trying to access it.

    11
    Proton Drive camera backup skips big files

    I upgraded to Proton Unlimited today and I've set Proton Drive to back up my whole camera gallery, a few hundreds of GBs, so it will take a while. But I noticed that it skips large videos, e.g. it skipped a 9.8GB video file. Is this intended behavior? I can't find documentation of it anywhere and it seems to happen silently. I easily could have missed it, assumed that it backed up everything down to a certain date, and deleted the only copy of the videos.

    10
    How does Proton justify its free options?

    I joined Proton just a few days ago, and I'm paying for it so I can use my custom domain.

    I watched this interview and it raises a huge question for me (link includes timestamp): https://tilvids.com/w/q1mZzv6eq3iULLmGdV6w6M?start=6m20s

    In this interview, Andy Yen says about gmail et al "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Then, in nearly the same breath, he boasts that most Proton users don't pay, they use the basic service for free because that's all they need.

    So my question is: if there's no such thing as a free lunch (which there isn't), how come Proton can offer it?

    12
    Can I install Ubuntu 18 software on Ubuntu 22.04? (Technically Linux Mint 21.3)

    Hope these kinds of questions are allowed here. On this occasion I'm just looking for a straight answer.

    For a university course I need to install ROS - software for doing robotics stuff. Specifically, I need ROS 1 - which is no longer being updated, as ROS 2 is now the focus. The installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ros.org/Installation/Ubuntu

    The instructions from the course material say that only Ubuntu 18 would work, though the ROS wiki says Ubuntu 20.04 is the target. Either way, it doesn't seem to be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and therefore Linux Mint 21, which is what I'm running.

    The course instructions generally gives 3 options:

    1. Install ROS on a VirtualBox virtual machine
    2. Install on Windows using WSL
    3. Install on a real Ubuntu 18 system

    Right now I'm going to use VirtualBox to get started, but I'd really prefer to run it natively and I'm worried about performance. Is there a simple way to download and run software intended for Ubuntu 20.04 on Linux Mint 21.3?

    Edit: thank you all for the great suggestions! I got stuck on an unrelated problem (ran out of storage space) but I'm sure your suggestions will work once I fix that. Forgive me for not replying individually, you're all awesome and I don't have anything to add other than "thank you" :)

    12
    Podcast: 'Unapologetic,' young Palestinian-Israeli podcasters advocate for a third narrative
    religionnews.com In 'Unapologetic,' young Palestinian-Israeli podcasters advocate for a third narrative

    (RNS) —&nbsp;In the podcast, launched amid the Israel-Hamas War, the co-hosts imagine a role in the peace process that is particular to the Arab community in Israel.

    In 'Unapologetic,' young Palestinian-Israeli podcasters advocate for a third narrative

    Discovered this via Mastodon: https://leftodon.social/@ia42/111715430595737731

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5CT8QicPO31pe7AX0jA4Wp RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/ec05309c/podcast/rss

    >Interesting podcast that started after the October attack. For snippets: https://www.instagram.com/unapologetic3n/ > >Or https://www.youtube.com/@UnapologeticTheThirdNarrative/videos or if you don't have IG

    A perspective I seriously needed to hear. It's in English.

    1
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NE
    NeatNit @discuss.tchncs.de
    Posts 11
    Comments 780