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Opinion | The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
  • I’m not sure why that’s a conceptual hurdle. Electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light spectrum, is one of the primary methods in which we gather data about and interpret the universe. To say that the matter is “dark” is to say that it’s not detectable on the electromagnetic spectrum to us as we know it.

    It’s not an uncommon turn of phrase, it’s the same reasoning for the colloquial term “going dark” regarding radio communication silence.

    To say that it’s “invisible” or “clear” would imply the existence of some property causing it to be so. This would also imply the presence of interpretable data in order to term it as such, when in truth none exists. You could perhaps say “unknown” but then that’s truly arbitrary, “dark” at least implies the opposite of “light”, i.e. detectable and serves a conjectural purpose in that sense.

  • Stract| A search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results.
  • Weird, they do, but they redirect for me and the final URL is different than what you pasted.

    https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/

    https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html

    My best guess is that a DNS record is messed up on their end, and since I’ve been to those pages before relatively recently, the cname or A-record is still cached for me.

  • Stract| A search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results.
  • Hmm I just checked, they’re all live and their status page for each link has no outages. I would check any content blockers etc. that you have, I suspect it’s a problem on your end. They do use different domains for their blog, feedback, and help KB etc.

  • 66% of Americans want European-style vacation policies, like being OOO for the entire month of August
  • I think the point is that it’s possible, in theory, maybe depending on your employer. But you get close to that amount of vacation time in total. The majority of Americans don’t get more than two weeks for the entire year, and many get none at all, only sick time. Many Americans can’t even take just two consecutive weeks off any time of the year.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • This is also how it works in Connecticut. While it may not be perfect, I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. It has the effect of a being a progressive social policy this way in that it is available for those who don’t already have it. Someday it like it to be carte blanche to everyone, but states doing this way is a solid start.

  • Married in the U.S. by decade of birth
  • @marass

    You could also say that women who are not married by 30 have other priorities and marriage isn’t one of them. There seems to be a saturation point for each generation after which the uptick slows to a trickle. You could make the argument that fewer women in each successive generation are making marriage a “must” in life.

    I would bet you this data would be inverted for women with a college degree by given age, i.e. younger generations are achieving higher levels of education by 30, but it likely levels off gradually as well since not everyone attends college.

  • Biden to keep US Space Command in Colorado, reversing Trump decision
  • You’re thinking of the Space Force.

    SPACECOM is a unified command that has its origins in the 1980s. It is entirely necessary and handles real things including military satellites and missile defense.

  • Let's say the worst case scenario happens with kbin and Meta. What are some alternate sites/instances that would be more resilient to enshitification?
  • It’s true in Kbin in the sense that you can block instances as a user preference. You can also block any other domain as well, which means what a post links to. Theoretically you can block Facebook itself, Instagram, Imgur, etc.

  • Autodesk screws customers by turning lifetime licenses into subscriptions
  • You're right, and that model actually forced/encouraged development and innovation of the software. If they didn’t make it compelling, no one would buy the new version. Now with the subscription model, these companies don’t need to do anything more than putting a new shade of lipgloss on it every year, they have a captive audience. They can basically pull a Valve and just patch security flaws.

  • Kbin Mascot pt.3, updated from feedback and several potential designs. More feedback wanted :)
  • @minnieo

    Big fan of the Kbinaut one! Kbinaut has been the term that clicked with me.

  • New, Conservative Push To Weaken Child Labor Protections Is Gaining Steam
  • I’m not surprised at three of the four states, but New Jersey? WTH.

  • Can a rich person be a good person?
  • Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)

    I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.

    And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?

    Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the top of my head lol.

    Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?

    I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.

    Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.

  • Dude, where's my Kbin? - Apollo Town
  • I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.

    The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.

  • Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
  • I can understand what you’re saying, something about the pervading online community doesn’t fit for you. Can’t say I’m familiar because I can’t speak Dutch ;) German and English for me.

    Thanks for the answer!

  • Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
  • Whats wrong with Dutch posts?

    I actually like seeing the posts in other languages. Imagine what using traditional social media like Reddit was like for other countries? Why are English speakers suddenly unable to cope when the tables are turned? (In general, not saying that’s you!)

    Personally, I’d love some kind of built-in translation options. Tag the different language but allow an auto-translate user setting so everything can be switched to one’s native language.

    I love the idea of interacting with the parts of the world, or speakers, that don’t participate in English.

  • Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
  • Exactly, Digg was funny as well. Lemmy is even sillier than Kbin imo.

    (I personally love the name Kbin as a tech person)

  • Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
  • On your first line, agreed 100%.

    I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.

    I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.

    And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).

  • NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin
  • Unless Ernest changed this too and I missed it, boosts still work with the microblogging portion of the fediverse, such as Mastodon. Upvotes and downvotes only interact with the “threadiverse”.

    So my understanding is that boosts are now reflecting on threads as 2 upvotes, whereas on microblog posts they reflect as boosts and as 2 upvotes but only on the threadiverse sites.

    (Someone correct me if wrong please!)

  • Art @kbin.social SpacemanSpiff @kbin.social
    bigthink.com How AI learned to paint like Rembrandt

    The Rijksmuseum employed an AI to repaint lost parts of Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." Here's how they did it.

    How AI learned to paint like Rembrandt
    1
    bigthink.com We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago

    In one experiment, the Viking landers added water to Martian soil samples. That might have been a very bad idea.

    We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago
    3
    /kbin meta @kbin.social SpacemanSpiff @kbin.social
    What are badges for in Kbin?

    Hi all! Been trying to find the answer to this as a mod a few magazines.

    I’m familiar with the function of tags, but what are badges for/what do they do? I haven’t been able to glean this yet.

    4
    bigthink.com Could the expanding Universe truly be a mirage?

    A cute mathematical trick can "rescale" the Universe so that it isn't actually expanding. But can that "trick" survive all our cosmic tests?

    Could the expanding Universe truly be a mirage?
    0
    UK government considers preparing for scenario of unexpected collapse of Russian Federation
    www.pravda.com.ua UK government considers preparing for scenario of unexpected collapse of Russian Federation � The Time

    According to internal assessments within the UK government, the UK should prepare for the scenario of an unexpected collapse of the Russian Federation so that such events do not take London by surprise.

    UK government considers preparing for scenario of unexpected collapse of Russian Federation � The Time
    9
    James Cameron says the Titan passengers probably knew the submersible was in trouble

    The Titanic director has made 33 dives to the shipwreck and visited ocean depths in a submersible he built himself. He compares OceanGate to the Titanic in that both ignored safety warnings.

    42
    spacenews.com House FAA bill would give agency new space traffic management role

    A bill introduced in the House to reauthorize the FAA includes a provision directing the agency to get involved in space traffic management.

    House FAA bill would give agency new space traffic management role
    0
    www.theguardian.com US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

    Whistleblower former intelligence official says government possesses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin

    This is the highest profile organization yet that I've seen run this story.

    21
    www.theguardian.com US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles

    Whistleblower former intelligence official says government posseses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin

    This is the highest profile org yet that I’ve seen run this story.

    0
    SpacemanSpiff SpacemanSpiff @kbin.social

    Systems Engineer and Configuration Management Analyst.

    Postgrad degree is in computer science/cybersecurity, but my undergraduate is in archaeology. Someday, maybe, I’ll merge the two fields professionally!

    I love true science fiction, as well as all things aviation, outer space, and NASA-related.

    Also, Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip of all time! Check it out ;)

    Posts 12
    Comments 89