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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • To refer back to the original post, you are taking things too literally, and in doing so, missing meaning that is present in the symbols. As a rough analogy, DXT1 GPU texture compression has two modes. Both start by storing two colours, then they diverge. They both store a number from zero to three per pixel, but in one mode, zero to three all mean interpolating between the two endpoint colours, and in the other mode, zero to two are for interpolation, and three means that the pixel is transparent. There’s no bit explicitly storing which mode’s being used, but the information is there. The two stored colours should also be interpreted as two numbers, and if the higher one is first, then you use the first mode, and if the higher one is second, then you use the second mode. If the colours were interpreted too literally, they’d only be seen as colours, but an implementation can see that there was a choice to put the colours in a particular order, and read into that. There’s no abiguity, people just need to know about the rule and apply it.

    For communicating with the public, there are enough people that are barely literate that asking the simplest version of a question is going to cover more of the population than one that adds all the necessary qualification to ensure someone that takes everything literally knows it’s a hypothetical.


    • it wasn’t my argument
    • the question has an implicit in a hypothetical scenario where you were having a conversation where it would be relevant aspect that most people would recognise even though the words don’t literally include it, and if you did literally want to ask them whether they’d start such a conversation out of the blue, you’d have to add extra words to say so. The literal interpretation would be an absurd thing to ask about, and people subconsciously recognise that, so don’t consider it.

  • Neurotypical people wouldn’t feel that there was any guesswork, as all the context and details are already covered by the words in the sentence, the situation the sentence is being said in, or the subtext of that sentence being the one they chose to say. You wouldn’t be disambiguating anything, just redundantly restating things.


  • That’s a proprietary software problem rather than a being connected to the internet problem. One of the send-a-notification-when-it’s-done devices I set up took about as much effort as setting the right time on a phone alarm about ten times because the device’s firmware was open source with no companies’ bullshit involved, so all I had to do was navigate to the right page in Home Assistant and pick the right phone from a dropdown and the right even for the notification to trigger on from a dropdown. That’s not wildly different from picking the right time from a dropdown on a phone.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFuture
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    17 days ago

    Again, that’s specific to it being proprietary software. I’ve got some devices in my home that are connected to the local network (but not the internet), and have configured Home Assistant (which I’ve got running on an old desktop PC) to send a notification to my phone when it detects that those devices report that they’re finished with what they do. That’ll keep working until I turn off the Home Assistant server or replace the devices.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFuture
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    17 days ago

    That’s more effort per wash instead of being something that only needs setting up one and then will work forever. Also, it’s common for post-90s appliances to include sensors and vary the cycle time based on how dirty the water gets. Except for the data privacy and security concerns, which are mainly because it’s proprietary software rather than inherent in Internet-connected devices, there’s no advantage to using your phone timer over getting a notification.



  • Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time

    spoiler

    the protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone

    when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It’s not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it’s a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.





  • Lots of people new to Linux get recommended Debian-derived distros, and so end up with distro packages that are a long way from bleeding edge. If they’ve just come from Windows, they’d have been using the latest release of everything they use, as most software projects don’t even announce a release until their Windows binaries are ready, and many auto-update. That means that a lot of people have being presented with versions of things they stopped using two to four years ago as their first Linux experience, and obviously they don’t see that as good enough. Most people don’t want to run versions of things that old, especially now there’s so much stuff to package that downstream packagers can’t feasibly backport every bug fix to older versions of every piece of software, so running an old version gets you old bugs rather than a balance of avoiding new bugs at the expense of new features.




  • The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldGaysadilla
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    2 months ago

    Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.