burningquestion

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

burningquestion, (edited )

They compared a basket of streaming services to an average-priced cable package, which loosely makes sense. Individual streaming services are usually only a fraction of the content of a cable package, so if you want to compare prices, comparing the price of a comparable-size bundle of goods is a good place to start.

It all varies from market to market, they used a national average. Their numbers wouldn’t hold up in my locale.

burningquestion, (edited )

The relief is targeted at people who enrolled in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which allow student loan debts to be forgiven by the federal government once payments have been made for 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan.

But because of well-documented errors in tracking payments, many borrowers enrolled in IDR plans have been left paying well beyond their payment end dates, with no forgiveness in sight.

Let’s read that again. No changes in policy are happening, the Biden administration is literally just applying the literal basic terms of the already-on-the-books-and-already-lawful repayment plan to nearly a million people who were supposed to have their debts forgiven already.

burningquestion,

More interesting to me is that a full fern life cycle takes two generations to play out. A diploid (two sets of each chromosome) fern throws off spores, and the spores grow into haploid (one set of each chromosome) plantlets. The haploid plantlets fertilize each other, and boom, the offsping are diploid ferns.

burningquestion,

Imagine getting pulled over and being asked if you have a license to be carrying so many potatoes all at once.

burningquestion,

Do you have any proof you’re not a chatbot?

burningquestion,

Our future AI overlord is currently a malfunctioning AutoGPT instance

burningquestion, (edited )

Idk, it was pretty predictable and it’s still not clear to me why writers who seemingly can’t do better than blatantly rip off Alien deserve to be at the helm.

Get Stephen Baxter and IDK Arkady Martine on the writing team as consultants ASAP because this show needs help. People deserve more interesting sci fi than this. Arkady Martine wrote a more interesting and thought provoking Star Trek style story than whatever this Gorn arc is shaping up to be.

burningquestion, (edited )

They’ve been building up an impending Gorn conflict since early in season 1 and this is like the third or so episode that has centered on them. It’s an arc, unless we think the story gets reset to zero every season?

burningquestion, (edited )

I’m just sitting here biting my nails wondering if they’re going to kill Pelia now so they can make Scotty chief engineer as fast as possible.

burningquestion,

Or things like your offsite provider taking a shit and corrupting your backups without realizing, meaning when your local backup goes kaput your 2nd backup has already silently failed. That exact thing hitting one of their off-site providers was what convinced one of my clients to let me fix their backup procedures (or at least try)

burningquestion,

Well, if you’d like to reduce your risk of losing data to a minimum, you should still test your backups anyways. Shit happens, even to the good people at Backblaze sometimes.

burningquestion, (edited )

“One day, in the deleted scenes, you will see there’s an alternate version of that, which is opera,” Goldsman tells TVLine. “But [co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers] and I were very much married to the boy band thing.”

I mean, the opera version was 100% what I was expecting, although I guess in retrospect there was no specific reason to suspect that. The boy band version was, however, the funniest/best version possible

burningquestion, (edited )

Calling customer service is so weird. I have to pretend like I don’t know the customer service person hates me, and the customer service person has to pretend they’re my best friend. We all know it’s a sham, and really I don’t need them to care as long as they can hear me out and repeat corporate’s policy on whatever I asked, but it makes the people with money happy and they wouldn’t have it any other way, so we all keep pretending.

burningquestion,

To be fair, though, I only call customer service when I have a corner case that can’t be answered online and 9 times out of 10 I have to lovingly explain about four or five times what I’m even trying to ask because the customer service person is too busy groaning in their head because they assumed I asked something in the FAQ, cutting me off to answer questions I didn’t ask that don’t remotely help, etc etc.

burningquestion,

It’s totally insane that employers expect me to believe you, poorly paid customer service worker, actually care about what I have going on and aren’t just going through the motions to pay your bills.

I respect the shit out of anyone who can put that show on. I certainly can’t do it.

What are some physics-based arguments against hard determinism?

I don’t believe free will is real. I’m not a deep physics person (and relatively bad at math), but with my undergrad understanding of chemistry, classical mechanics, and electromagnetism, it seems most rational that we are creatures entirely controlled by our environments and what we ingest and inhale....

burningquestion, (edited )

Quantum mechanics presents the most meaningful challenge to determinism because unlike chaos theory it asserts that reality really is indeterminate. Physicists have been wrestling with this problem since quantum mechanics was formulated. Even Einstein tried to prove quantum indeterminacy was false, but he shrank from the implications of his own solutions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory

Spoiler: there’s no strong evidence for most hidden variable theories. There has been a revival of interest in some deterministic re-interpretations of quantum mechanics over the last few years (recommend Lee Smolin, he has a book and some talks on Youtube re this discussion), but right now, the prevailing theory is that reality really is just fundamentally indeterminate. Hey, I hate it, makes my skin crawl, but that’s most likely the way it is based on the science.

EDIT – I’m not a strong advocate for free will in the abstract, but I do think the basic worldview underpinning certain forms of hard determinism has been superseded by a non-deterministic view in physics.

EDIT – for greater precision/clarity

burningquestion,

I have nothing to say except this is very cool and I’m keeping an eye on it! Thanks for sharing!

Looking for beginner friendly free or cheaper solutions for a chatbot

Hello all, you all seem to be well versed in this stuff and I can’t seem to find many ai or chatbot communities at all. Anyway, I’ve just been using the free, outdated gpt3.5 on the openai site and it really opened my eyes to how useful of a tool it is. I mean it helps me with everything, especially computer related and...

burningquestion,

If you’re just looking to mess around, Bard isn’t half bad. Okay, it’s pretty terrible, but it can do Internet searches and has a Python interpreter built in, so you can do stuff with Bard you can’t do with GPT-3.5

What are you Reading? (August 2023) (lemmy.world)

I’ve put together a collage of some books from last months What are you Reading? post. It’s mostly random, but the more discussion something gets the more it stands out to me. Going forward I’m going to make a new post every month to talk about what people are reading....

burningquestion,

Between books right now, but I can’t recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz enough. A depressing, albeit highly necessary, classic.

burningquestion,

Hey what do originalists think about the power of judicial review? What do they think about that section of the Constitution and the Framers’ intent behind delegating that power to the Supreme Court?

Oh wait…

burningquestion, (edited )

:) :) :)

edit: to cut to the chase, judicial review is not in the Constitution (go ahead, go find it), was not intended by the Framers, and was a power claimed by the court over a decade after it was set up, in Marbury v. Madison

Amending the Constitution to fix the problems with a court that’s been arrogating extra powers to itself from the beginning hardly seems workable.

From an originalist standpoint, the only consistent stance on judicial review seems to be that it shouldn’t exist. If we hew to the original ideas of the Founders and the plain text of the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s powers are at best poorly defined and not clearly enforceable.

burningquestion, (edited )

I’m probably alone in this but I preferred the Klingons in Discovery. It’s implausible that so many alien life forms would converge on looking like humans, and while the Klingons in Discovery are all obviously humanoid, at least they look more like aliens.

It doesn’t exactly bug me that costume technology wasn’t as far along in earlier Treks – just that if pressed, yeah, alien looking aliens are more preferable to me than a guy in a sash, or a guy in a sash with some forehead ridges, as campy and enjoyable as that can be.

I will admit, I am slightly disappointed that the show’s writers left the door open for there to be TNG/DS9/VOY era style Klingons, because if they had just redesigned them without qualification, the outrage when a redesigned Worf eventually showed up would have been epic. But were the fans ready to be asked to question Jadzia’s choice in partners again, a mere twenty years after DS9?

burningquestion,

I totally get it, I’m an outlier in that regard I guess. 30 years of forehead ridges wasn’t enough to make me not want to see the third redesign.

I hope they redesign them again in twenty years.

burningquestion,

I know, I just pretend that episode never happened because it was a terrible explanation of something that was best ignored

burningquestion,

I actually said it was implausible, not unexplained. The explanation in The Chase isn’t plausible, even by Star Trek standards. Like I said, IMHO it would have been better if they’d refused to explain it (since it’s an artifact of the limitations of costume design and nothing else, really) and just iteratively redesigned everything every once in a while. No reason not to.

burningquestion,

Like any new format it’s going to take time for everybody’s software to support it, that’s all.

burningquestion,

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with massive duplication of communities, but exclusive home on Lemmy? Really? When there’s literally already an entire instance dedicated to Trek?

burningquestion,

It was funny, I enjoyed it. I don’t understand why it’s not just standard protocol to confine all time travelers to the brig behind an opaque and soundproof force field until they can be sent home, but whatever. Lots of laughs.

burningquestion, (edited )

I have a theory about that. In the Voyager episode Relativity we actually get to see the bridge of one of these 28th century timeships that are one of the “temporal enforcers.” Throughout the episode, they calculate the likely temporal disturbances caused by various courses of action and constantly adjust the level and kind of intervention needed on that basis. Their goal is to always minimize the overall temporal disturbance. My assumption is that any temporal incursion – sorry, time travel shenanigans – gets reviewed, but they are only acted on if the temporal disturbance becomes significant.

burningquestion,

Lobbying is corruption plus paperwork

burningquestion,

There’s a speed standard in the USA and it mandates 25 down and 3 up? Could someone tell my ISP?

burningquestion,

Current favored theory about his Twitter takeover is that he was just fucking around with the stock price, as he is wont to do (this is the guy that was forced to step down as the head of Tesla because he manipulated the stock price as a joke), and the Twitter board and SEC called his bluff. He’s been backed into a corner and is now trying to drag it to bankruptcy so he can get out of the mess he made.

burningquestion,

Idk, as a socialist I look at it as a broadly genuine effort to create socialism that came before its time in a fairly unfavorable place which then failed precisely because the conditions weren’t really favorable.

It merits study, I don’t hate everything I see from the USSR (free healthcare, free higher education, heavily subsidized rents, and a policy of full employment don’t all seem like bad things) but more look to it as a historical example and less as a model.

In some ways I think it could be compared to the French revolution – it’s not that the French Revolution and its collapse into Bonapartism proved that abolishing feudalism and establishing a freer social order was fundamentally impossible, it just proved that the conditions weren’t in place in France in the 1790’s.

burningquestion, (edited )

I hated them when I first watched them (in theaters!) but they’ve grown on me over the years. The story involves a lot of world building/historical exposition and the movies had a hard time balancing staying true to the original story and making it intelligible for an audience of non-nerds unprepared to pore over 3000 odd years of fake fantasy history just to understand what the hell is going on on screen. I mean, they did pretty good, but if you’re new to LOTR you’ll probably want a Tolkien encyclopedia on hand or something.

burningquestion,

Fellowship of the ring is known to be especially slow out of all of them! I tend to enjoy the novel version of Return of the King best.

burningquestion,

Yes sorry in English the first one is called “The Fellowship of the Ring,” and the third one is “The Return of the King.”

burningquestion, (edited )

You’re begging the question by assuming Microsoft’s market position hasn’t been artificially inflated with anti-competitive measures.

When you already have a dominant position in one market – say, office productivity software or operating systems – leveraging it to push another product below cost to effectively take over another market actually would (and in the past, literally has) put MS in hot water with US antitrust regulators, so it’s not that hard to imagine that, depending on how they did it, this might also run afoul of antitrust regulations.

The crux here would seem to be whether MS is really “hiding the true cost of Teams from enterprise customers.” They’re likely breaking the law if they are.

Illinois Supreme Court upholds end to cash bail; new system begins Sept. 18 (www.cbsnews.com)

In a 5-2 ruling Tuesday morning, the state’s highest court overturned a ruling by a Kankakee County judge that the law ending cash bail was unconstitutional. The end to cash bail will now go into effect across the entire state on Sept. 18, according to the Illinois Supreme Court ruling.

burningquestion, (edited )

No, if you skip hearings for a criminal charge they can issue a warrant for your arrest, throw your ass in jail more or less anywhere they find you in the States, fine you, hit you with another set of criminal charges, and refuse to release you because by that point you’re by definition a flight risk.

Please try to understand something about the American criminal justice system before you comment on it.

Edit - while apparently you can often get bail back under the right circumstances, bail is generally so expensive that even with a bond most people can’t afford it. If bail is only affordable to rich people, it’s in practice a special privilege of the rich.

burningquestion, (edited )

Had to look it up to double check and edited my comment quite a while before you posted yours, so all I can say is, sure, I agree with you, not that I understand why you chose to respond to an earlier version of my comment. Or did you really spend fifteen minutes drafting a two sentence comment?

Although having seen court clerks play all kinds of nasty games with delivering court notices to defendants and the challenges many indigent defendants face, "you get your bail back if you never miss a single hearing is pretty slim comfort in the real world…

burningquestion,

Thanks for noticing I edited the comment a couple times.

Anyways, it took you fifteen minutes to check four or five results on Google? Okay.

burningquestion,

I think it’s weird and rude to downvote and correct someone like twenty minutes after they already corrected themselves.

burningquestion, (edited )

You were repeating common right-wing talking points about this in exactly the same concern trolling style that many right wing trolls use and have used on this exact topic of discussion. I just didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren’t exactly what you appeared to be and replied as though you were concern trolling. I still responded to your points.

Also, how much does it really change anything if you get bail back or not? Does it? How so, if so?

Additionally, I caught my mistake quickly and corrected it on my own. The people who are correcting me spent twenty minutes lovingly researching and crafting two sentence responses to an issue I caught on my own and fixed within a couple of minutes. I don’t know why you shouldn’t trust me based on needing to make a single correction. Based on this, you shouldn’t trust any human, living or dead, including the reporter who wrote the above article.

burningquestion, (edited )

Forgetting a single thing about a system I haven’t studied or interacted with in over fifteen years doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. You never forget or incorrectly remember anything?

Was I wrong in other parts of my comment? In what other ways did I betray a lack of understanding of the criminal justice system? Was my understanding overall better or worse than the person I was replying to? Did I really show a lower overall level of understanding than the right wing concern troll I was responding to?

Was my bit about bail even the main point of my comment?

In what ways should I do better in future? Never make mistakes? Not correct myself when I catch them? Not complain when other people pile on to correct me long after I’ve corrected myself? Not get annoyed when people who are clearly an order of magnitude slower than me take it on themselves to correct mistakes I’ve already fixed? Please help me be “better,” whatever that’s supposed to mean in this situation.

burningquestion,

Less so than a racist bot who thinks the criminal justice system needs bail in order to detain people, though lmfao

burningquestion, (edited )

It’s more that when you’re learning new material looking at the same concept from a variety of frames can help with memorization/comprehension.

I recall a lot of people struggled with sigma. It’s a step up in complexity from what a lot of people are used to by that point in their math education and rote memorization of the definition didn’t work well for a lot of people.

Also, some ways of looking at a concept are easier to learn than others.

burningquestion,

I’m so happy I’m able to harvest kale not only because it’s 2023 and I have to eat like a 17th century Dutch peasant, but, like the peasant, I can’t afford to go to market and buy some.

I remember when a bundle of kale at the store was like a dollar!

burningquestion, (edited )

I know. Most of the places I’ve been – and the recipes I’ve found for Detroit style – have the cheese on the bottom with a couple splashes of tomato sauce on top. I’ve only been to a Jet’s or Buddy’s once or twice and I guess I dont really recall where they put the sauce.

These were still nothing at all like a Chicago style, which I generally categorize as either a war crime or a lab experiment hybridizing pizza and casserole gone horribly wrong.

Regardless, even if cheese on bottom with sauce on top isn’t characteristic of Detroit style, it’s a remarkable innovation in pizza science. And I don’t mean that you should fill a deep dish casserole with dough, cheese and sausage and pour several pounds of tomato sauce on top like you need to load up on fats and protein to cope with the wind chill in Chicago

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines