• 33 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.

    But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.


  • fiasco@possumpat.iotoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldHow much swap?
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn’t any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn’t enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.

    If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.

    Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I’m curious why, but unless you’re in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.

    Edit: Didn’t notice what community this was. Since it’s a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I’m pretty sure they’re easier to resize as conditions change.




  • Actually, I’d like to expand on this a bit. Setting aside the question of whether storytelling itself is necessary, though I believe it is, I think part of why so much modern writing is so soulless is the focus on getting from point A to point B. “Story beats,” they call them. Or we might call this the Pixar Algorithm.

    The software tooling around computer graphics is such that any major studio will produce stunning visuals. Whether they nail visual design or cinematography is still a question, but the fidelity of the graphics will be great. Do something tried and tested, and you’ll get a Marvel movie.

    Writing is something else, though, because writing well requires having something to say. It seems like nobody in Hollywood has anything to say anymore, so they try and paper over that fact with “cleverness.” But they aren’t very clever either.

    This is a round about way of saying, I think the “unnecessary” stuff, the stuff that doesn’t drive the story to the next beat, is where most of the soul of a story resides. The reason it’s so important to have something to say is, that gives you some direction on how to add relevance to the unnecessary parts. So all this stuff is tied pretty tightly together.

    This is also why my commentary on “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” was mostly talking about other, better episodes.








  • Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

    So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.

    It seems to me, the dangers are more like…

    Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

    It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

    Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

    Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.



  • It goes along with how they’ve stopped calling it a user interface and started calling it a user experience. Interface implies the computer is a tool that you use to do things, while experience implies that the things you can do are ready made according to, basically, usage scripts that were mapped out by designers and programmers.

    No sane person would talk about a user’s experience with a socket wrench, and that’s how you know socket wrenches are still useful.




  • Here’s a random interesting car fact. The accelerator pedal only controls how much air makes it to the engine; it opens and closes a flap in the air intake called the throttle body. The car has a sensor that records how much air is coming in, the mass airflow sensor, which is just a wire in the airstream. Electrical resistance in metals is proportional to temperature, and the air rushing by cools the wire. The car’s computer is then programmed to inject fuel according to the estimated amount of air coming in, which is double checked with oxygen sensors in the exhaust (which detect uncombusted air, i.e., too little fuel).