Ok, I might as well go first: I wish I could draw. Not at the level where I could make photorealistic portraits, but I’ve always been envious of those who are able to scetch something together in a few minutes that perfectly captures what they want to convey. Sometimes words aren’t enough to express what I want to say, and...
I think this response is great, because, while I’m on the other side of the fence (theoretical chemist that sucks at anything artistry related) I think it’s a common misconception that math/science/engineering isn’t creative.
I find that misconception both with people struggling to learn it, and often with people teaching it. The reason I bring it up is that, in my experience, the “hard” sciences become both more fun and easy to learn, and more easy to teach, when creativity is encouraged. For my own part, I’m wildly chaotic in the way I solve problems, and my notes are typically a jumbled mess of drawings and scribbles. For my students part, I’ve seen stuff loosen for a lot of people when they’re encouraged to just let their thoughts flow out on their paper, rather than thinking everything through five times first.
By all means: There’s a difference between math and art, but I think a lot of maths teachers and students could have a better time if they allowed themselves to think more artistically, especially those that are well inclined to it.
This may be old advice, and I can’t speak for music or languages (where I myself have the same issue) but for woodworking and programming this is my experience: Once I get some idea for something I want to build, that becomes the goal of the project, not learning the skill itself. It could be carving a small model boat, or writing a sudoku solver, but at least for my part, once I get caught up in some project, I have a hard time letting it go. That’s as opposed to if I sit down and try to systematically learn a skill.
Some suggestions for projects off the top of my head:
Some kind of simple encryption/decryption method.
A nice wooden box to put something nice in (possibly without visible metal parts)
A sudoku solver
Model car (maybe with wheels and movable doors)
A little “river steamer” with a rubber-band driven “propeller” (don’t know what the wheel on the back of a river steamer is called)
A “peg solitaire” solver (because I was really frustrated at not being able to solve it)
The point is just to find something else that interests you, that can motivate you to learn the skill you want :) good luck!
To be fair, I’m a decent programmer: I spend a significant portion of my workdays programming all kinds of things. Writing a program to generate sudoku’s with a unique solution, without copy pasting a bunch of algorithms, but actually making it all up yourself definitely sounds non-trivial to me.
(Read: That sounds like a really hard beginner project, and you should be proud for even trying, and you shouldn’t give up :) )
It’s been a discussion in Norway for a long time. Particularly interesting to me is the fact that high-school students in Norway typically appear to be equal to or above their peers, while the top university students seem to be world class, so somehow they seem to catch up in later studies.
This bursts at the end are fucking terrifying, I can’t imagine anything unarmored could survive being on the receiving end of that. I also can’t understand why we haven’t seen the same ammunition in use during any Ukrainian assaults?
Jesus Christ! Does anyone have any idea what could have happened to result in so many people lying dispersed in a treeline? If they were in a position that was overrun I would believe that more would have escaped, and that they would be more dug in, while if they were attacking I would think they would be more spread out.
I’m not getting over how beautiful it is to see how powerful unions can be when they really need to. I’ve read articles with union leaders explicitly saying that they can and will tighten the screw on Tesla until they fold. I believe a major aluminium extrusion plant recently decided to stop production of profiles for Tesla.
Recently in Norway, one of the major unions were asked if they were going to stop unloading teslas at Norwegian harbours, and simply said “we’re talking to our Swedish counterparts, they’ll let us know if they need us. If Tesla tries to import vehicles to Sweden via Norwegian harbours, which they are not currently, we won’t touch the cars.”
I can imagine this spreading if Tesla doesn’t fold, and it would be a sight to see a bunch of international Scandinavian / European Union organisations collectively decide to fuck up Tesla.
The unions see a healthy environment and healthy cooperation with businesses as far more valuable than a few individual jobs at an individual plant. If your strike burns the factory to the ground, you lose jobs, the point is that not all conditions are worth working under.
maybe even more importantly: Tesla will need to get their aluminium profiles from somewhere, so while that specific plant may lose a contract, some other plant will pick it up, and the jobs will be there instead. Companies lose contracts all the time, for all kinds of reasons, losing one over workers rights sounds like one of the better options.
Of course, it’s sad for the individuals that see consequences, but sad in the sense that this should never have happened, and would never had happened if Tesla wasn’t so dense.
I see your point, but how about a counter-point: Tesla didn’t originally choose the Swedish plant out of the goodness of their heart. They chose it because it made the most economic sense. If they choose a manufacturer somewhere else, they’re going to have to eat the long term costs associated with logistics, tolls, etc. that come along with importing those profiles from the US, China, or somewhere else. That makes them less competitive.
At the same time, the Swedish plant has available capacity, that they are burning to use for something, and which Teslas competitors may be happy to pick up. Choosing away the best economic option out of principle (which it looks like Tesla will be doing) is rarely a good business decision.
So, I learned in physics class at school in the UK that the value of acceleration due to gravity is a constant called g and that it was 9.81m/s^2. I knew that this value is not a true constant as it is affected by terrain and location. However I didn’t know that it can be so significantly different as to be 9.776 m/s^2 in...
I’m assuming they’re indicating that the mass below the apparatus increased in fall (when storage was filled) and decreased slowly through the winter, leading them to measure a changed graviational constant. A back of the napkin calculation shows that in order to change the measured gravitational constant by 1 %, by placing a point mass 1 m below the apparatus, that point mass would need to be about 15 000 tons. That’s not a huge number, and it’s not unlikely that their measuring equipment could measure the gravitational acceleration to much better precision than 1 %, I still think it sounds a bit unlikely.
Remember: If we place the point mass (or equivalently, centre of mass of the coal heap) 2 m below the apparatus instead of 1 m, we need 60 000 tons to get the same effect (because gravitational force scales as inverse distance squared). To me this sounds like a fun “wandering story”, that without being impossible definitely sounds unlikely.
For reference: The coal consumption of Luxembourg in 2016 was roughly 90 000 tons. Coal has a density of roughly 1500 kg / m3, so 15 000 tons of coal is about 10 000 m3, or a 21.5 m x 21.5 m x 21.5 m cube, or about four olympic swimming pools.
Edit: The above density calculations use the density of coal, not the (significantly lower) density of a coal heap, which contains a lot of air in-between the coal lumps. My guess on the density of a coal heap is in the range of ≈ 1000 kg / m3 (equivalent to guessing that a coal heap has a void fraction of ≈ 1 / 3.)
If you’re “tired of fighting” it still costs you little to nothing to support those fighting, or at least not speak condescendingly about the fight they are fighting. Something about your comment tells me you weren’t fighting much in the first place.
Honestly, this makes me feel good about my habit for peeling off / throwing away those little ad stickers and cards whenever I see them somewhere and people aren’t looking.
“I can reuse this old function if I just monkey-patch this other class to work with it, no one will have any issues understanding what’s going on”
Edit: Thought this was the programmerhumor community. For context: A monkey-patch is when you write code that changes the behaviour of some completely different code when it is running, thus making its inner workings completely incomprehensible to the poor programmer using or reading your code.
Not even “not so bad”, I would say that as a scripting language it’s fantastic. If I’m writing any actually complex code, then static typing is much easier to work with, but if you want to hack together some stuff, python is great.
It also interfaces extremely easily with C++ through pybind11, so for most of what I do, I end up writing the major code base in C++ and a lightweight wrapper in Python, because then you don’t have to think about anything when using the lib, just hack away in dynamically typed Python, and let your compiled C++ do the heavy lifting.
I believe it does “one pass” when it loads the code into ram, because syntax errors can be caught before anything runs. But I think the actual interpretation happens pretty much one line at a time :)
I spoke to some Russians I got to know about this actually (they moved west quite a while before the invasion, met them through work).
They said one of the things that shocked them both when they moved to Western Europe was that people actually cared about elections. The thing is: Everyone knows that Russian elections are rigged, while the government pretends they’re not. The Russian people see this and assume that everywhere else is the same. These Russians I met were young, intelligent people, but they had gone their whole life believing that everyone did elections the same way as them. When they heard of elections in other countries, they thought people were just as apathetic as them, because of course they’re rigged, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Thus: their legitimate shock when seeing people actually care about elections, and vote because they know/believe it matters.
This opened my eyes to an important reason the Russian government keeps up the “facade”: It’s essentially a brain washing/gaslighting tactic to make it seem like everyone else holding elections is also rigging it.
Whale can really go both ways, you have to prepare it right, then it’s really good, but if you’re not careful it’s very easy to make it dry and chewy, which it shouldn’t be.
I use a GUI (GitKraken) to easily visualise the different branches I’m working on, the state of my local vs. the remote etc. I sometimes use the gui to resolve merge conflicts. 99 % of my gut usage is command line based.
GUI’s definitely have a space, but that space is specifically doing the thing the command line is bad at: Visualising stuff.
Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological...
I don’t see how maintaining the status quo can be seen as a “victory that makes them push for more”? That argument is much easier to push the other way:
If someone can play a sport based on undergoing X treatment, isn’t that discriminatory against those that can’t afford treatment but still identify a certain way? What about XYZ women’s only spaces, should we allow anyone that proclaims self-identifying a certain way into those spaces?
That’s the same “victory to make them push for more” just flipped.
Thinking like this just works against those of us trying to fight racism. Racism is, at its core founded in a belief that some people are inherently more valuable than others, based on ethnicity/how they look.
A factual statement about a group of people can be true or false, but in order to be racist it must also (explicitly or implicitly) say something about those peoples worth.
Saying “group A has lower IQ than group B” can be factually correct, and part in an analysis into why, and how the differences can be evened out. Saying “group X is dumber than group Y” can also be factually correct, but can be said in a context and with an implication that this makes them less valuable as people. Purely based on the statements themselves you can’t tell if either is racist. You need to look at the implications, context, and intentions behind the statement.
One of the horrors of slavery was, in fact, the forced “breeding” of slaves. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick. That doesn’t mean the statement “group X was bred differently from group Y” inherently racist. The racism comes in if that statement is said with the implication that the people in question were subhuman, or otherwise less (or more) valuable as people.
A good example that another commenter mentioned is the Ashkenazi Jews, which systematically eradicated a genetic disorder by tracking who should not have children. Saying “they bred the disease out of the population” may be imprecise and a poor choice of words, but it is not racist. It is a factually correct (albeit poorly phrased) statement about an impressive medical feat that has (presumably) improved a lot of lives.
In order to fight racism you need to be more nuanced than what you are being when you say that “statement X is racist, regardless of the intention behind it”. A statement being poorly phrased can lead to it being misinterpreted, not to it being racist.
There are a bunch of restrictions in F1, which largely make it harder to make fast cars. But think of it the other way around: Those restrictions make the engineering harder, and all teams have the same restrictions. That means you have to optimise even more within the limitations you have, because you’re not allowed to make some of the “easy” optimisations like cutting weight by removing the roll cage.
The most likely argument I see is that Trump severely strained diplomatic bonds both between North America and Europe and also within North America and Europe. Additionally, he heralded in a new degree of isolationist policy and created doubt about the resilience of NATO. Furthermore, he tried to blackmail the Ukrainian government.
In summary: Not his fault directly but his politics led to a situation where Russia/Putin saw it as likely that they could invade without facing significant backlash from Europe + North America. That probably would have worked out as well if Ukraine had folded within the first couple of weeks. The argument is essentially that by convincing Russia that they could get Ukraine without significant consequences, his administration contributed to the invasion happening.
Make of that argument what you will. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say “Trumps fault”, but reasonable to think that another administration might have been able to deter the invasion.
I would love the child of a Surfacebook with a Framework laptop; or A bare keyboard attached to a screen, that I could plug my phone (possibly running Phosh) and use it as a hardware for a laptop experience
Hey, good news! The newer MacBooks (since like 2 years ago) have rolled back the Touch Bar, gotten back the ol’ reliable scissors switches and MagSafe chargers, as well as having enough ports to plug stuff in.
As for arm vs. intel, I’m a huge fan of the arm chips. My largest issue with them is that I need to cross compile for intel chips if I’m distributing an executable or a compiled library.
I just love the feeling of union collectives banding together. Reminds me of a situation in Norway a couple years back where doctors wanted to strike: Now they’re essential workers, and can legally be prevented from striking by the government, so the union collective said “lol get fucked” and put a shitload of engineers from the offshore industry on strike instead. The doctors pretty quickly got what they wanted, and everybody got to see why we have to work together across sectors.
I really don’t see the hassle… just pick one (e.g. pip/venv) and learn it in like half a day. It took college student me literally a couple hours to figure out how I could distribute a package to my peers that included compiled C++ code using pypi. The hardest part was figuring out how to cross compile the C++ lib. If you think it’s that hard to understand I really don’t know what to tell you…
This actually makes for a great sci-fi writing prompt! TLDR: I started writing cause I was bored, and stuff got out of hand.
Long ago, humanity discovered the element Obscurium with the innate ability of capturing and holding lightning. Ancient sculptors discovered a series of runes that, when carved into slabs of the element, allowed them to manipulate the lightning. Cults of Wizards developed, focused on creating ever more complex spells with the runes. Different cults saw beauty in different classes of spells: The Sages developed practices to imbue the stones with memory, and developed complex architectures to store and retrieve any information at a whim, giving them the power of shaping humanities collective memory. The battle hardened Order of Warlocks trained for years to become proficient in manipulating enormous amounts of data, creating spells that could solve any practical problem in seconds. It is said that some warlocks even claimed capable of imbuing the stones with an artificial soul. The more proletarian Order of Sorcerers believed the magic of the stones should be available to all, and created interactive artworks that allowed the non-initiated to communicate with the stones, and feel some of their power.
While these cults gained much power, they remained beholden to two small groupings. One was a group of Hermit scroll compilers, who dedicated their lives to the discovery of new runes, and the creation of translation scrolls that translated wizards’ spells into the language of the runes. These were loosely organised in the Order of Scrolls. The other was the Order of Sculpting Monks, whose monasteries were the only places where lightning could be harvested, and runes could be carved into the stones with the required precision.
For many years after the discovery of Obscurium, humanity prospered. The conflict beholden “Nation States” of old gradually dissolved as the global Orders gained power and kept each other in balance. The first major conflict occurred when a monastery of the Sculpting Monks broke with established doctrine. For years, the Monks had worked to carve ever more complex and specialised runes into their slabs, but the monastery of the far eastern island of Taketomi had begun simplifying their slabs, creating dense meshes of simple runes. These dense meshes gave the slabs fascinating Azure-Red-Magenta colour patterns, giving them the name ARM’s.
The global head of the Order of Sculptors, seated at the Monastery of Intelaken called this out as heresy, and claimed “These Simpleton slabs will be forgotten in the archives of the Sages”. However, soon some of the Hermit scroll Compilers had written translation scrolls for the new ARM’s, and even promoted them to the wizard cults as GNU’s (Genuinely Necessary Utilities). The wizards discovered that the new, simplified slabs required far less energy, allowing them to perform more powerful spells before reaching exhaustion.
Seeing this, the Intelaken Monastery proclaimed the Monks of Taketomi as excommunicated. They used their vast monetary funds, and were capable of the nigh impossible task of bribing a few of the Hermits of the Order of Scrolls to write scrolls dedicated only to their slabs, and only providing the scrolls to paying wizards, thereby breaking their oath to provide humanity with Free, Outstanding Scroll Stuff.
With tensions rising, the Wizarding cults began to fracture, unable to decide who to support. Some wizards saw the magic of the stones as their birthright, and supported the provision of scrolls to only a select few. Others, especially many members of the Order of Sorcerers, fought to make the power of Obscurium available to all. However, the Order of Sorcerers knew that their true power was in creating intuitive and beautiful structures that made it possible to use the spells developed by the Warlocks and Sages, and that alone, their power was fleeting. They also knew that laymen were largely unaware of this, and as tensions were rising they began to seek allies among the laymen to support them in the conflict they saw on the horizon.
What the Sorcerers didn’t anticipate was that in the fracturing power-base of the global Orders, some of the “Nation States” of old, ruled by laymen, which had long since been replaced by the global Orders of Wizards, Hermits and Monks, began to re-emerge. With tensions at a peak, the re-emergent Nation State of Miklagarðr on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean launched a surprise attack on the Monastery of Taketomi. They had recruited a break-out band of Warlocks to infiltrate the archives of the Sages on Taketomi. The Warlocks attempted to extract the secret to the ARM’s, but were countered by powerful shuffling spells, making the archives unreadable to them. However, in the final moments before their destruction, the leader of the band, known only by his battle-name Strostrup the Bear, cast a corruption spell, destroying the archives.
With their archives destroyed, the Monks of Taketomi could no longer manufacture the GNU ARM’s, and chaos ensued…
Unironically: For in-house scripts and toolboxes where I want to set stuff like input directory, output directory etc. for the whole toolbox, and then just run the scripts. There are other easy solutions of course, but this makes it really quick and easy to just run the scripts when I need to.
I’ve grown up learning to type on my regional layout. Why would I go through the hassle of re-learning key placements when most laptops/keyboards sold in my country use the regional layout? I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where I’ve had to work on any other layout for more than a few minutes.
Is that small arms ammo cooking off in the vehicle that looked like a firework? Also: This is a huge amount of material being destroyed in one go, does anyone have a more accurate location?
Check out the part on “privileged combatants”. Specifically point 2:
(…) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance (…)
If you’re not in uniform- good luck convincing you captors that you are a POW, and cannot be prosecuted under local civilian law, which may or may not give you the death penalty for espionage.
You act like there would be less of a reaction if people ripped up, walked on, or in other ways desecrated the Quran. This isn’t about book burning, this is about a group of people not tolerating that on of their symbols is desecrated.
Imagine if we prosecuted people for burning flags or signs with slogans… but maybe you think that should be illegal as well?
what is a skill you wish you had, and why?
Ok, I might as well go first: I wish I could draw. Not at the level where I could make photorealistic portraits, but I’ve always been envious of those who are able to scetch something together in a few minutes that perfectly captures what they want to convey. Sometimes words aren’t enough to express what I want to say, and...
18+ Video from a Russian soldier walking through their trench. (streamable.com)
Mirror:...
As the PISA 2022 results were released a few days ago, how was the reaction in your country? (factsmaps.com)
Link to the results: www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/…/index.html?itemId=/…...
18+ The 47th Mechanized destroyed a Russian infantry group with FPV drones and a Bradley IFV near Stepove in the Avdiivka direction. (streamable.com)
Mirror:...
Copilot is starting to feel like a real programmer. (discuss.tchncs.de)
18+ Russian infantry losses near Avdiivka (streamable.com)
Mirror:...
Tesla's setback against Postnord - does not get the license plates (www.expressen.se)
It was a setback for Tesla in the Solna district court....
Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?
So, I learned in physics class at school in the UK that the value of acceleration due to gravity is a constant called g and that it was 9.81m/s^2. I knew that this value is not a true constant as it is affected by terrain and location. However I didn’t know that it can be so significantly different as to be 9.776 m/s^2 in...
Banksy on Advertising [Zen Pencils] (lemmy.sdf.org)
Japan is on its own wavelength. (lemmy.world)
would you write web app with this? (lemmy.world)
Danilov: Russia may begin full mobilization after 2024 presidential election (kyivindependent.com) Ukrainian
Frontline highways (streamable.com)
Mirrror:...
What is the most exotic meat you've eaten? How was your experience?
When do you think violence is justified? (kbin.social)
Self defense? Only on the battlefield? Only to achieve a ‘noble’ end?
I'm going to sit down and actually learn git this week (midwest.social)
Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological...
The Aliens did a little trolling (lemmy.world)
Who was worse, George W. Bush or Donald Trump?
Just watched the Boy Boy video on George Bush’s Masterclass, and they made me think about which U.S. President was actually worse.
Linux user (infosec.pub)
What is the device you want, but that does not exist?
I would love the child of a Surfacebook with a Framework laptop; or A bare keyboard attached to a screen, that I could plug my phone (possibly running Phosh) and use it as a hardware for a laptop experience
Tesla threatens to bring in strikebreakers as Swedish workers strike (www.thelocal.se)
If programming languages were weapons. Old but gold. (feddit.it)
Source: so old it’s lost
Package managers be like (linux.community)
Sorry Python but it is what it is.
Lel (suppo.fi)
What strange kind of wizardry is this? (feddit.de)
Does Hexbear mandate all users to specify their preferred pronouns?
The temptation is always there (lemmy.world)
Questions that arise in my head at four in the morning
he
5 BMPs, 2 supply trucks, and additional equipment were destroyed by Ukrainian SSO units, in the Zaporizhzia direction. (streamable.com)
Mirror: files.catbox.moe/vnm6ec.mp4...
deleted_by_author
Danish law banning public burning of Quran sparks outcry (www.lemonde.fr)