ignirtoq

It’s a lot harder to perpetuate historical knowledge when you don’t get support from the educational system. The government sets educational standards and subject matter, so it’s not surprising they de-emphasize the record of their own actions against the public they are teaching.

Universities are more independent (but definitely not completely, and they come with their own set of problems), so students there tend to be more exposed to topics like this. But then you get political movements villianizing universities.

Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.

The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.

Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.

Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.

Directional EMP is absolutely possible, but generating a predictable, controllable EMP without a nuclear device is hard. Especially if you want the device generating it to be used more than once.

I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

The walled garden (micro services in an isolated network) is the first line of defense. In case a malicious actor finds a way into that network, the second line of defense would be to authenticate the service-service traffic, so the micro services reject direct requests from clients they aren’t expecting.

Before blaming me for not reading the article, maybe read my whole comment? I listed 2 effects. Yes, mean versus median is one. The other is a cognitive bias related to how humans estimate percentages.

Medians showing the same effect but reduced is exactly what I would expect when you account for one of the two phenomena but not the other.

This is mostly an example of a kind of survey bias I’m having trouble finding the name for plus a counterintuitive effect of averaging.

For the bias, when people are asked to estimate a percentage, they tend to estimate by large fractions of the whole, like by quarters, fifths, or tenths. This means you’ll see survey estimates closer to 50% than the real value, with the effect more pronounced for real values closer to 100% or 0%.

For the averaging phenomenon, when looking at the averaged responses across all questions of a survey, you can quite easily get a collection that wouldn’t make sense as a set of responses for “the average” (that is, the typical) person. You can have 3 different responders who each think California, Texas, or Florida has more people than they actually do, and then when you average those responses it looks like all responders think all three of those states have more people than they do, even when no one response was biased that way.

With these two together, this survey makes the average (statistical mean) American look much less informed than the typical (statistical median) American.

Of course it’s not about immigration. If it were about immigration, they’d be in Texas and Florida. You know, states with large numbers of immigrants. Minnesota has a tiny fraction of the number of immigrants as those states, and it’s physically large. Very inefficient use of person-power for actually doing their stated job.

Yeah, I can understand that. I’m not in that space, so I wasn’t aware. A similar craze happened for removing gluten from one’s diet about 10-15 years ago, and after the hype died down a lot of the new options it spawned stuck around, which was great for people with celiac disease. Hopefully there will be a similar silver lining once this hype passes.

I want to start by saying I generally agree with the theme of the article that the average American already gets enough protein without needing to specifically target it in fast food. However, I think this is not entirely accurate:

Overall recommendations have consistently hovered between 50-70 grams [of protein] per day, depending on weight.

That sounds low to me. I’ve seen nutritionist recommended minimums in the 50-70 range depending on weight, height, gender, and age, but recommended targets are higher. Especially for older men who are at higher risk of muscle loss with age, these recommended targets can be above 90 grams.

Edit: Getting several down votes, so let’s add some sources.

0.8g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 55g per day for a 150 lb person, is a minimum, not an average: https://doi.org/10.3945/an.116.013821

Aging men may need to consume as much as 2g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 135g for a 150 lb man: https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10030360

It’s projection. He believes because he’s President of the US, he can make any American organization, public or private, do what he wants, and he’s had moderate success with that. So now he believes all countries operate like that, and any claim otherwise is a lie meant to protect that power.

It’s a classic characteristic of narcissists. They are physically incapable of understanding that people can think differently from then, and that things can work differently than they believe.

Nadella is adamant that these kinds of boosts that AI provides will justify AI and carry the industry, stressing less spectacular and more practical applications of the tech.

This is a huge about-face on the earlier proclamation. I really wonder what changed his mind from “AI will radically transform every industry” to “it doesn’t need to be used to discover the ‘magical molecule,’ but provide some other tangible, less extraordinary benefit to developing the product.”

Sure, everyone here has seen the writing on the wall for years, but until now his paycheck has depended on him not seeing it. I wonder if he’s getting internal pressure from some on the board of directors.

Oh good, then the federal government can turn over any evidence the Minnesota state investigators ask for since they don’t need it, right? Right?

The code block I wrote is a statement followed by an if. What I meant be “backwards” was the order of conditions, not that the statement came after the if. It’s exactly what you asked for.

Also remember that anything can be hard for you; no one else gets to decide that. Folding laundry hard? Yep. Getting out of bed on time hard? You know it. Doing hard things is a major accomplishment, so pat yourself on the back every time. If it becomes easier, great! If it never does, then you deserve just as much self praise each time as the first time.

“The claim is that recruiting is up, but there is also dread that the gung-ho types that ICE and the Border Patrol are bringing in have a propensity towards confrontation and even violence.”

No fucking kidding. Half the right already believes we’re in an active civil war. With how Trump has been throwing ICE around, who do you think is volunteering? This is going to get a lot worse. We have 10 months to go before even midterms, and he’s already threatened to cancel that election.

Python, though the logic would be backwards:

milk_gallons = 6 if eggs > 0 else 1

We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study.

Great for the science, not great for the realistic recommendations. Sure, some people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are just easier, but many people eat ultraprocessed foods because they are unable to access healthier options. Either they are too expensive (either in monetary cost or the time commitment to prepare the food) or (I expect moreso the case for older people) they are physically unable to prepare it. If we’re going to recommend older Americans eat less ultraprocessed foods, we need realistic options for them to switch to.

That’s what I meant by “private contacts.” They don’t outsource every single possible federal job, otherwise there would be no executive branch left. So the public sector jobs are highly efficient, and the waste has been outsourced to the private contracts where it’s more obfuscated.

We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be “big government,” even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So 🤷.

"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,” Mitchell said in an interview with local news. “I didn’t think they’d fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. That’s not waste—that’s the actual work.”

It’s all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But it’s never actually been about “waste,” and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.

The waste is in private contracts that don’t fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didn’t go for those.