• 1 Post
  • 567 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.





  • From what I saw, the ‘call to murder’ was someone having kill all zionists in their username, and that only makes sense as a real call to violence if we’re supposed to take everyone’s username seriously and literally. That would be a very weird world to be in, as then we’d have to accept that we’re reading posts written by Star Trek characters come to life, inanimate objects, and various bodily fluids. Without evidence of something worth taking more seriously, at best this looks like the admin team doing something silly, and obviously certain groups of Lemmy users will interpret it less charitably and as the LW admin team being pro-genocide. Neither is a good look.


  • COVID was more infectious than things like flu, and people who avoided the vaccine typically also were more likely to break lockdown and social distancing rules, so the r value managed to be close to/above one just from unvaccinated people (or people whose vaccines were for earlier strains) passing the virus on to other unvaccinated people. Breakthough cases obviously make things worse, but when one unvaccinated person typically passes it on to at least one other unvaccinated person, even if vaccinated people never got COVID again, it would still have stuck around, and that’s not the vaccine’s fault. A virus won’t go away until the r value is below one in all subpopulations.

    The figures for effectiveness that were around 90% weren’t for getting the virus and passing it on, they were for getting enough of the virus to show symptoms, which for COVID, is more (hence why people kept spreading the virus and thinking they were fine). For a standard vaccine like an annual flu jab, that figure would only be around 70%. The figures that were around 99.99-100% were for effectiveness against serious infection needing breathing assistance. E.g. of the first 100,000 people in the AstraZeneca study, none of them needed breathing assistance from a COVID infection from the early strains that the initial version of that vaccine protected against. There’s never been a flu jab that effective.



  • You don’t hire the writers because they’re lazy, you hire them because they’re cheap and you want to minimise production costs because there are women in the film so you’re not expecting to sell any tickets except to people who’ve fallen for the social media marketing campaign you ran that said anyone who doesn’t watch the film is a misogynist. It’s just classic race-to-the-bottom profit seeking.


  • Your if it fully worked, the virus would have died out idea would only work if everyone in a population got vaccinated and that population didn’t have any contact with anywhere else where some people weren’t vaccinated. There weren’t any regions where everyone got vaccinated, so it’s not applicable to the real world.



  • Depending on the country, it’s pretty common for most milk production to be cows kept in extremely cramped conditions indoors with little to no space to move and fed processed grain instead of grass. It does make the milk taste worse, but it can be so much cheaper that customers don’t splurge on the more expensive milk, so don’t know what they’re missing. Even if you only ever see cows outdoors, you might also see low-welfare dairies and just assume they’re warehouses or factories and aren’t full of livestock, as a factory farm can look just like any other large industrial building.


  • 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.


  • Anything that’s not a true x isn’t x at all, it just resembles it. That’s why the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy is a fallacy. For example, ‘bugs’ that aren’t ‘true bugs’ aren’t bugs at all, they just look enough like bugs that laypeople would call them bugs despite being a different kind of insect (or if the layperson is being especially flexible with what they’re calling a bug, potentially not even an insect). Saying glass isn’t a ‘true solid’ is literally the same as saying it’s not a solid, but with the added implication that lots of people get it wrong. There’s also a common myth that glass is really a slow-moving liquid. You said something that is literally the exact opposite of the truth in a thread about scientific facts that sound up but are 100% real, and landed on something that gets commonly repeated as a surprising fact, so of course people are going to correct you.