This is what it looks like when people are posting to maximise engagement rather than to share interesting thoughts.

The name use to be closer to the truth, but then money corrupted it - as it always does.

People downvote for a very wide variety of reasons, many of which don’t really have anything to do with the story. For for example, someone might downvote because they don’t like posts that are just screenshots from reddit. Or maybe they don’t like the brands mentioned in the story. Or maybe they’ve seen it before and don’t want to see it again. Or maybe they’re just in a bad mood and are voting harshly. Or maybe it is about the story, and they think its creepy. Or maybe it reminds them of a bad memory.

In any case, it should never be surprising when a post gets some downvotes. The more people who see it, the more likely it is that someone will have some issue with it.

(And of course, complaining about downvotes almost always results in downvotes.)

Nar, I don’t think that’s quite right. I reckon it’s more like nice looking cubicles (with normal walls) but also lots of cameras from all different angles.

Privatization seems like a really bad idea to me. Helium is non-renewable resource. Privatization is about being ‘efficient’ at maximising profits. Do you think the people / companies that own the helium reserves are going to be interested in keeping helium available for centuries in the future? I’d say probably not.

For a profit based company, the only motivation to preserve the helium for future use is that maybe it will be worth a lot more money in the future. But there are two big problems with that. Firstly, the timescale is likely to be too long for the profit to be of interest. And secondly, the main reason the price would go up is scarcity; and that scarcity will come sooner if the helium is wasted in the short term. (Unless one company actually has a monopoly on helium, in which case they can create artificial scarcity by just not selling it. But that would obviously be bad for other reasons.)

I’m not sure why you’re saying its clocks that are wrong rather than the other stuff. Currently we have x = r cos(𝜃) and y = r sin(𝜃), and that’s what makes anti-clockwise rotations mathematically natural. But if we instead just used x = r sin(𝜃) and y = r cos(𝜃) then clockwise would be the natural positive rotation. And in that case, the unit circle would start at the top and go around clockwise… like we do for compass bearing (and clocks of course). So perhaps that would be better than changing what clocks do.

I wouldn’t say ‘outperform’… Cell death is a deliberate and desirable feature. Without it, we’d be unable to repair damage.

There’s no way hippos have the long-distance endurance of humans. Pretty much everything is faster than humans at sprinting, but for endurance running, humans are next level. (Not me of course, I’m not really fit enough to be called human in this context.)

Yeah. They’ve done a good job. Strategically its so that Steam can’t easily be crushed under Microsoft’s enormous boot. So it’s a good forward-thinking commitment that everyone can benefit from. (Everyone except Microsoft, I suppose.)

‘monetized’

My latest favourite is missing: Note Taking Apps:

• xournal++

Joplin is good for organising text-based notes, so I’m not surprised to see that on your list. But xournal is a for mixed drawing / hand-writing / text, etc. So it’s a different use-case to Joplin. (It would be perfect if Joplin supported xournal notes; so that you could write with xournal and then organise with Joplin. … But that hasn’t yet come to pass.)

Probably misinformation. I didn’t think Proton was even around in 1896!

The person is talking about the dating pool they are exposed to. I don’t see this as a personal comment about any individual person. I certainly wouldn’t take it as a personal attack, and I don’t think anyone else should either.

I don’t see it as a put-down.

There is some misleading information in there. Probably better to just get straight to the point with the ‘standard’ https://joinmastodon.org/ link.

I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.

And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.

Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)

Yeah. I’ve been mourning the loss of Earth’s future for some time now. It’s very sad.

That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It’s a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.

I agree that it seems the obvious choice for a vegan is to not own a pet cat.

There are a few different physical systems that people are trying to build quantum computers with. Superconducting loops are one of the most promising ones, because of a halfway decent decoherence rate. And yeah, superconducts needing near 0K temperature to operate is a problem. It’s just hard to scale up while everything needs to be so cold. Room-temp superconductivity would be a huge advantage.

But even then, the decoherence rates are still too high for any long quantum computation. Last I heard, the best qubits are maybe barely getting to good enough errors rates that quantum error correction would be possible - which is great, but ‘possible’ and ‘practical’ still have a significant gap between them.

So in short, basically everything about the hardware needs to be better; and its just very very hard. Probably too hard to ever achieve the dream of having arbitrary quantum computation. (But there is always the possibility of some big new idea that makes everything work better.)

I wouldn’t read too much into it. Using “he” instead of “it” is a mistake that a person might make if English is not their first language. It’s pretty easy to imagine that someone working on a browser would not be interesting in messing around with the pronouns in their build instructions. They made an error, and they didn’t think the error was important (which in itself was another error). But it is fixed now. Surely no harm done. They were not actively trying to impede anyone’s progress or deny anyone’s rights, or even say anything negative about anyone at all. They simply made a mistake in their use of pronouns in their build instructions. The mistake is now fixed. And although its fair to take it as a ‘warning’ that maybe there are objectionable views lurking in there, it certainly is not evidence of such views. I really don’t think it’s fair to hang this mistake over them. I’m sure that pretty much everyone in this thread has made worse mistakes throughout their lives. I know I certainly have.