Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)S

sylver_dragon

@ sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

Posts
5
Comments
682
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • When will AI bubble pop?

    Jump

  • Never try to catch a falling knife.

  • Cloudflare CEO explains exactly what caused global outage

    Jump

  • Poll: Democrats have biggest advantage for control of Congress in 8 years

    Jump

  • This is great, but the Senate seats up for election in 2026 make the Democrats winning a majority really, really tough. The current Senate is 53 Republicans, 43 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucus with Democrats. This means that the Democrats need to net +4 seats to gain control of the Senate. Sure, it's possible but the map doesn't look good.

    For example, the Democrats best pickup opportunity is likely Susan Collins's seat in Maine. Despite Maine leaning Democrat in statewide elections, this is a rodeo Collins knows very, very well. Democrats have been trying to knock her off for several cycles and yet she's still here. Maybe this will be the year. But, if this is the best opportunity for Democrats, we aren't off to a good start.

    North Carolina is an open seat, which helps some. But, the State has consistently voted Republican in Statewide elections (and went for Trump by ~3 points in 2024). A large enough blue wave could overcome that, but it's already an uphill battle. And things only get worse from here.

    Next up is Ohio, which Trump won by ~11 points. We aren't talking super-hard MAGA land there, but Democrat friendly, it ain't. This is the state which gave us Vice President JD Vance as a Senator. The election here is for the remainder of Vance's term. Hope may spring eternal, but there is a really sketchy looking reality hiding around the next corner with a sock full of pennies.

    That takes us on to Iowa. This state was Trump +13 in 2024. Sure, some farmers may be pissed off about the tariffs, but enough to put a Democrat in the Senate? This seems to fall into the "time to put the bong down and reconnect with reality" territory. I mean, it's always possible. With a really well calibrated Democratic candidate, the GOP picking a really flawed candidate and really poor economic conditions, maybe. But I wouldn't be betting the farm on Democrats picking this one up.

    And then we need to consider defense. Jon Ossof is up for re-election in Georgia. Georgia went for Trump by ~2 points. Not a large margin, but enough that Osoff isn't a shoe-in. And Michigan (Trump +1) is an open seat election. The previous Senator (Gary Peters) was a Democrat, so there is certainly hope, but again this isn't a certain thing. If either of those seats are lost, Democrats are then looking at Texas (Trump +14. Also, it's fucking Texas).

    I'm all for a Democratic Congress. But their chances in the Senate look pretty bleak.

  • If I wish to explore the world of hacking, where do l begin ? I mean, it has to be with my own machine, correct ???

    Jump

  • Pennies Are Trash Now | The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies.

    Jump

  • They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn't producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It's really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.

  • Are there ways to boost/strengthen the immune system without triggering inflammatory pathways?

    Jump

  • also dealing with a chronically higher baseline level of inflammation

    Have you been tested for gluten intolerance and/or Celiac Disease? Chronic inflammation is one of the markers. It's a very simple blood test, though it seems to be something doctors don't always bother to check for. Talk to your doctor about the test.

  • Does this really work?

    Jump

  • For the ones they own or have a contract with, probably. However, there are two problems with that.

    1. It will do fuck all for the AI models which are just scraping the internet and which have no contractual agreements with the blog (e.g. all the big ones).
    2. It's a fixing a problem the blog hosting platform created. They likely have a data sharing agreement with some organizations to make the scraping easy for those organizations (e.g. direct content database access). So, they are like the mob, offering you "protection" so long as you pay them not to break your shit.

  • Would you rather be able to speak to animals or speak any human language you want?

    Jump

  • While some of the more intelligent animals could be interesting to see just how far they could go, most animals are going to mostly be vocalizing for the purposes of procreation. The wonderful sounds of the forest are millions of bugs and animals screaming, "hey, wanna fuck?" as loud as possible. Other vocalizations will be similarly utilitarian like, "look out, predator", "holy fuck this hurts" or "back off!" Not exactly stimulating conversation.

  • Norway’s Hidden Bus Backdoor: China’s Remote Control Sparks Cybersecurity Crisis

    Jump

  • The remote access devices can be a good thing. The issue is one of control. Given the software driven nature and complexity of devices, bugs are inevitable. Having a way for the manufacturer to distribute those updates remotely is a good thing as it lowers costs, and makes it more likely the updates get deployed. That said, the ability to enable and disable that remote access system needs to be in the hands of the customer, not the manufacturer.

    As an example, many years ago I worked for a company which manufactured physical access control systems (think those stinking badges and readers at office buildings). And we had two scenarios come up which illustrate the issue quite well. In the first case, the hardware which controlled the individual doors had a bug which caused the doors to fail unlocked. And based on the age of the hardware the only way to update the firmware was to physically go to the device and replace an EEPROM. I spent a very long day wandering a customer's site climbing a ladder over and over again. This was slow, expensive and just generally not a great experience for anyone involved. In the second case, there were database issues with a customer's server. At that time, these systems weren't internet connected so that route for support didn't exist. However, we shipped each system with a modem and remote access software. So, the customer hooked up the modem, gave us a number to dial in and we fixed the problem fairly quickly. The customer then unplugged the modem and went about breaking the system again.

    Having a way for the manufacturer to connect and support the system is important. They just shouldn't have free run of the system at all times. The customer should also be told about the remote support system before buying the system and be able to turn it off. Sure, it's possible to have reasonably secure remote logins on the internet (see: SSH or VPN), but it's far more secure to just not have the service exposed at all. How many routers have been hacked because the manufacturers decided to create and leave in backdoors?

  • The last guillotine execution in France was in... 1977.

    Jump

  • There’s rather a lot of reports of heads remaining concious for up to 30 seconds or so after being separated from their body.

    Given the rather precipitous drop in blood pressure going to the brain, this claim seems pretty dubious. Twitching and motion would certainly be possible as autonomic functions go haywire, but actual consciousness seems far fetched.

    At the same time

    A shotgun to the back of the head doesn’t have that issue, although it does make a bit more of a mess.

    If I had to choose, I'd probably pick this over the guillotine as well. Seems like a lot less setup time and general anticipation.Overall, inert gas axphixiation might be the better choice (assuming one is forced into it).

  • Retired WoW players, how does that part of your life shade your current life?

    Jump

  • The main thing I have from that time is several large boxes hanging about taking up shelf space and a burning hatred of MMOs. My wife and I got into WoW during late Vanilla. We stood in line at midnight to get the collector's edition box for WotLK and later again for Cataclysm (we weren't that far gone when The Burning Crusade released). Shortly after Cataclysm released, there was the Midsummer Fire Festival and as we were playing through it, we hit that wall where any more quests became locked behind "Do these daily quests 10,000 times to progress" and the whole suspension of disbelief just came crashing down. I had already hated daily quests and the grindy elements of the game, but at that moment I just said, "fuck this" and walked away from the game.

    I do look back fondly on some of the good times we had in the game. Certainly in Vanilla there was some amazing writing and world crafting. We met some good people and had a lot of fun over the years and I don't regret the time or money spent. However, one thing it taught me is just how pointless MMOs are. They are specifically designed to be endless treadmills. And this can be OK, so long as the treadmill itself is well designed and fun. But, so many of the elements exist just to eat time. Instead of being fun, they suck the fun out of the game and turn it into a job.

    We even tried a few other MMOs after that point (e.g. Star Wars) just because we wanted something to fill that niche in our gaming time. But invariably, there would be the grind mechanics which ruined the game for us. Or worse yet, pay to win mechanics where the game would literally dangle offers of "pay $X to shortcut this pointless grind" (ESO pops to mind for this). If the game is offering me ways to pay money to not play the game, then I'll take the easier route and not play the game at all, thank you very much.

    So ya, WoW taught me to hate MMOs and grinding in games. And that's good, I guess.

  • Skeletor is here to help

    Jump

  • Sadly, no. CSV files can deal with embedded commas via quoting or escaping. Given that most of the dumps are going to be put together and consumed via common libraries (e.g.python's csv module), that's all going to happen automagically.

  • Best way to image old drive and boot in vm?

    Jump

  • What you are trying to do is called P2V, for Physical to Virtual. VMWare used to have tools specifically for this. I haven't used them in a decade or more, but they likely still work. That should let you spin up the virtual system in VMWare Player (I'd test this before wiping the drive) and you can likely convert the resulting VM to other formats (e.g. VirtualBox). Again, test it out before wiping the drive, nothing sucks like discovering you lost data because you just had to rush things.

  • Mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation

    Jump

  • So, if the higher level universe works by magic, then the theory is fine.

    Sure, I'm making assumptions that any universe simulating our own would have finite energy and resources. Also that they would make a simulation that is at least close to their own (making theirs close to ours). Those seem like reasonable assumptions to make, otherwise we might as well just say that our universe is a pocket dimension made by magic and the whole thing becomes absurd pretty quick.

  • Mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation

    Jump

  • It would be interesting to see someone with the background to understand the arguments involved in the paper give it a good review.

    That said, I've never brought the simulation hypothesis on the simple grounds of compute resources. Part of the argument tends to be the idea of an infinite recursion of simulations, making the possible number of simulations infinite. This has one minor issue, where are all those simulations running? If the top level (call it U0 for Universe 0) is running a simulation (U1) and that simulation decides to run its own simulation (U2), where is U2 running? While the naive answer is U1, this cannot actually be true. U1 doesn't actually exist, everything it it doing is actually being run up in U0. Therefore, for U1 to think it's running U2, U0 needs to simulate U2 and pipe the results into U1. And this logic continues for every sub-simulation run. They must all be simulated by U0. And while U0 may have vast resources dedicated to their simulation, they do not have infinite resources and would have to limit the number of sub-simulation which could be run.

  • Microsoft's cloud admin portals appear to be down worldwide

    Jump

  • Microsoft's cloud admin portals appear to be down worldwide

    Jump

  • I'm a cyber major, but what should I minor in?

    Jump

  • Was going to say the same. I work in cybersecurity and while I have avoided the management track like the plague, I do recognize that it's a fairly reasonable progression for someone in any tech field. Even if you don't end up pursuing management, knowing how to speak to management will make your job in cybersecurity easier. Project management is also a worthwhile skill to pick up and that often comes from business school.

  • Removed

    What is the demographic of Lemmy?

    Jump

  • Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada

    As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I'm not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it's likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as "noise" in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report "VPN user" as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).

    All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.

  • Self-hosting @slrpnk.net
    sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

    Self-hosted blog options.

  • Lemmy.world Support @lemmy.world
    sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

    Request to take over c/virginia

  • 3DPrinting @lemmy.world
    sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

    Infill percentage versus stiffness

  • News @lemmy.world
    sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

    Winchester man reveals name of soldier who created massive peace sign in Vietnam at height of war

    www.winchesterstar.com /winchester_star/peace-out-winchester-man-reveals-name-of-soldier-who-created-massive-peace-sign-in-vietnam/article_fcfa789d-cf73-569a-9920-1df2eb32bead.html
  • 3DPrinting @lemmy.world
    sylver_dragon @lemmy.world

    Horribly inefficient party favors