Would just as soon recommend Debian or Linux Mint now.

KDE Neon also doesn’t have a snap Firefox, it comes out of the box with a Mozilla PPA Firefox (despite being Ubuntu based).

It’s about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend’s data in particular.

And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.

Also, what your friend said is that they basically don’t care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc…) because they themselves aren’t affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that’s that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.

And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I’m also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won’t change anything for society. But do they vote?

You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That’s how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That’s how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that’s how people won’t get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.

And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn’t an x, then they came for y, but I wasn’t a y, then they came for z, but I wasn’t a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.

Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.

And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They’re not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that’s all.

That’s what Bhutan does. It’s enshrined into their constitution as the goal of governance, as GNH, and it takes precedence over GDP.

It’s not without its problems tho, but it is a noble approach, worthy of pursuing imo.

And that’s cool and all, but good luck with that endeavour if people can’t even seem to agree to tweak their electoral system a bit. The UK, of all places, tends to be very revolution averse when it comes to politics.

Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.

The downside is it needs human intervention. It’s hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.

It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space… which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can’t work for small random websites in an automated fashion.

It might, and that’s a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y’know, that whole distributed consensus thing… lol… an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely…

Basically , I’m all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren’t possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.

bbemmy.ml

lebby.ml

Indeed. However, they are also very slow (usually around 30 km/h) and more importantly very slow to change that speed (cargo ships starts braking 5-10 km before port). The ships’ engines aren’t doing a ton of work themselves either, per unit of time.

Work per time is power in physics. A ship like this has an engine of about 100 000 horse power per google, which is about 400 cars’ worth of power. And 10th of that is about 40 cars. Which matches thereabouts a huge sail in a strong wind at large altitude in the open ocean like this, I think. Back of the envelope math checks out.

Ooo, a general purpose lemmy instance with no politics allowed, and a catchy name. Interesting.

Depends on the country.

“The average is calculated by adding up all of the individual values and dividing this total by the number of observations. The median is calculated by taking the “middle” value, the value for which half of the observations are larger and half are smaller.”

So for example, in a country with 99% poor people, and 1% insanely rich people, the median person’s wealth is actually really small (like the poor people), but the average person’s wealth is kinda big (except a person with that mid-ground wealth doesn’t actually exist in the country).

In the case of voters, this means that in a country of highly polarized views and power, so of imbalanced sides, the median and average voter can be very different. One is what the people want, the other is what the power wants.

"The median voter theorem is a proposition relating to ranked preference voting put forward by Duncan Black in 1948.[1] It states that if voters and policies are distributed along a one-dimensional spectrum, with voters ranking alternatives in order of proximity, then any voting method which satisfies the Condorcet criterion will elect the candidate closest to the median voter. In particular, a majority vote between two options will do so. A loosely related assertion had been made earlier (in 1929) by Harold Hotelling.[3] It is not a true theorem and is more properly known as the median voter theory or median voter model. It says that in a representative democracy, politicians will converge to the viewpoint of the median voter.[4] "

Emphasis mine.

…but do not seem to bear any tangible meaning. Like, what is force, work/energy, field, matter?

Contrary to what some people might expect from physics, it’s a lot more philosophical, than just tangible. These terms are in some ways more philosophical than material, and I guess that’ s the part that’s confusing you.

I guess in general, with physics you’re dealing with a different set of philosophical categories than with maths, it’s less abstract logic and sets, and is more about actions and reactions.

And in the words of people more eloquent than me, physics is a story written in the language of maths, that’s their difference, as well. It’s like grammar vs a screenplay. Technically, they’re both linguistics, but very very different at the same time.

On those notes, force is just defined as an “influence that can change the motion of an object”, sort of like in common every day parlance. Force is a thing that makes changes in the world. Energy is the ability to create those forces.

Field is something that fully permeates 3D space and exists there with its changeable local properties. It’s what enables the existence of matter in space. Matter is an “excitation”, a value lump, a value spike, in that field in a specific location. Think of it like a math graph with a small bunch of values in a specific part of it, matter in a field. And so on…

…mystical/mythical (dark matter, anti matter…

I don’t think these two are particularly mystical. Dark matter is just a phrase we invented for the fact we notice the gravity of a lot of matter when observing the way the galaxies rotate, but we don’t see any of that matter. Therefore we conclude, there must be some matter that has mass/gravity but can’t be seen, i.e. doesn’t interact with electromagnetic waves. That’s all, nothing spooky, just instead of protons, electrons etc… it’s a different type of matter.

Similar with antimatter. Matter atoms are made from massive “positively” charged protons and small-massed “negatively” charged electrons. Antimatter is the opposite, made from massive “negatively” charged antiprotons and small-massed “positively” charged positrons. That’s it, it’s like chemistry or whatever. Different lego blocks. It’s just that matter and antimatter, once they collide, go boom and turn into photons and stuff so basically all the matter we have around us is regular matter because there was more of it in the early days of yore.

… spacetime…

I guess this one might bit a tad mystical, in the sense that time and space are philosophical concepts. I actually feel tho that once they’re combined like this into spacetime they become a lot more tangible and mathematical/geometric and easier to digest. In some ways.

…I just don’t think Bell’s theorem has taken into account the entire possibility of hidden variables … I doubt myself on this one since Redditors downvoted this.

Well considering the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022 was just awarded two days ago to three scientists for establishing the violation of Bell’s inequalities, I’d say your judgment on trusting the more knowledgeable people on reddit was right. Unless you think you know more about the topic than Nobel laureates. ;)

How do you get any pleasure (lol) from all of these?

Some people enjoy chocolate, some enjoy vanilla, some enjoy strawberry. Some enjoy physics, some enjoy maths, some enjoy philosophy. We’re all different.

Also, any study references? I found Feymann’s Lecture on Caltech’s website a bit too wordy.

I actually think it’d be better for you to not dive straight into textbook style rigor, and instead watch some more fun physics youtubers once in a while, like the ol’ classics of Veritasium, Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, PBS Spacetime, Fermilab etc… to build that physics intuition and perspective you seem to missing here, first. There’s a treasure trove of accessible fun content there.

You can make mastodon have a somewhat more similar feel to lemmy, if you do the following:

Go to preferences > appearance and activate ”advanced web interface". Now if you do a search for a hashtag it will pop out a new column in the interface that you can now also pin, to stay. And in that column’s own settings you can now add multiple additional hashtags that will all display their results simultaneously in the same column.

So now it’s like as if you have a home feed of multiple hashtags, the feed is topic based, and not person based, and in that sense, more similar to lemmy. It gets very laggy tho if you add more than 5-ish tags, the backend code is not designed for that.

On your phone you can do the same, if you use Tusky. Just add a hashtags tab, and add multiple of them there. But not too many.

Lemmy, however, is the only one with upvote based sorting, and truly designed for the general reddit feel.

Just one. The traffic gets randomly routed through the nodes. Gather your stats over a single exit node and you’ve got your stats for the whole network. The longer you gather your stats over the node the closer they are to the precise stats for the whole network.

Just like you can poll 1000 random people and have a good, almost accurate, guess who’s the entire country gonna vote for.

If you’re trying to follow lemmy’s content from your mastodon account you should type “https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy” (without the quotes… and also omitting https:// should work as well, as well as typing “@asklemmy@lemmy.ml”, again, without the quotes) into the search field on mastodon, and it should pop up there, and you should be able to follow it. Repeat for any other lemmy community you might be interested in.

You won’t be able to post to the community, but you’ll be able to read it, and reply to posts and comments in the community, from your mastodon account.

This is one of those situations where the free market doesn’t give desirable results, and where a government could step in and give subsidies for this goal, assuming it were serious about decreasing GHG emissions.

There would be no profit for the state, beyond less climate change, but the shipping industry would profit, having to spend less fuel.

Does playing chess puzzles on lichess.org count? :D

they know precise statistics. How is that is simp asking himself?

They just need one exit node?

There are many reasons for and advantages to it!

The molten salts mixture is multi-purpose, it serves both as the coolant and contains the molten radioactive fuel in this type of reactor, compared to more conventional reactors that use solid uranium rods as fuel, and regular water as coolant.

Most of the dangers with conventional reactors stem from the high pressures of the coolant steam, as well as the build up of high pressure gases next to the fuel, which in the case of an unattended runaway reaction tend to break things and cause radioactive juices to splatter all over the place, in the ground and in the atmosphere. And then the uncooled fuel also melts through the protective barriers, with the same effects.

Salts, on the other hand, don’t evaporate at 100 degree Celsius, one atmospheric pressure, like water does, so they can get heated to much much higher temperatures at normal pressure. And considering they contain the fuel too, if they expand a bit, they pour out of the core into a safety container, and therefore separate most of the fuel away from itself, and therefore stop the radioactive runaway reaction.

The fact that the fuel is liquid also makes the fuel reprocessing and refueling easier (can even be done while it’s turned on), which is very important when dealing with all the radioactive intricacies. It even lets us use a different more abundant and in some ways cleaner fuel, thorium, instead of direct uranium, because it being liquid lets us turn it into uranium “on the fly” inside of the reactor itself, this is called “breeding” uranium, which simplifies the entire process immensely.

The big downside is, well, hot molten salts are extremely corrosive, as you can imagine. And that’s why we haven’t had reactors like this so far. This one is also experimental.

For more fun reading: 1, 2

Now that’s the kind of success story I want to hear more about!