lvxferre

lvxferre , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I believe that less than it looks like.

While only 5% of the pilots are women, flight attendants receive basic training for emergency situations, such as when the pilot is incapacitated. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them could actually land a plane in a life-and-death situation, or at least find a passenger who can.

With buses the picture is a bit brighter. If I had to guess, 20% of the bus drivers around the world are female? And a missing driver doesn't automatically spells your death - the bus might be going slow due to traffic, and a lot of people are able to at least step on a brake.

EDIT: I'm genuinely curious about the downvotes. If I said something that is either factually wrong (false) or morally wrong (sexist, insensitive, etc.), feel free to point out, as I can't guess anything based on downvotes alone.

Alternatively, if the downvotes are due to a faulty reasoning, then please show the flaw.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

OC infographics, shared as pics. Include the URL of your Lemmy account, for authorship. If the infographic is interesting/cool/useful people will share it, indirectly promoting Lemmy.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

That sounds a lot like a weird spin on the Slashdot effect, caused by content mirroring. It seems that it could be handled by tweaking the ActivityPub protocol to have one instance requesting to generate a link preview, and the other instances copying the link preview instead of sending their own requests.

But frankly? I think that the current way that ActivityPub works is outright silly. Here's what it does currently:

• User is registered to instance A
• Since A federates with B, A mirrors content from B into A
• The backend is either specific to instance A (the site) or configured to use instance A (for a phone program)
• When the user interacts with content from B, actually it's the mirrored version of content from B that is hosted in A

In my opinion a better approach would be:

• User is registered to instance A
• Since A federates with B, B accepts login credentials from A
• The backend is instance-agnostic, so it's able to pull/send content from/to multiple instances at the same time
• When the user interacts with content from B, the backend retrieves content from B, and uses the user's A credentials to send content to B

Note that the second way would not create this "automated Slashdot effect" - only A would be pulling info from the site, and then users (regardless of their instance) would pull it from A.

Now, here's my question: why does the ActivityPub work like in that first way, instead of this second one?

lvxferre , 1 month ago

"A" Users would need to send requests to some server anyway, either A or B; that's only diverting the load from B to A, but it isn't alleviating or even sharing it.

Another issue with the current way that ActivityPub works is foul content, that needs to be removed. Remember when some muppet posted CP in LW?

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I'm aware of Nostr. In my opinion it splits better back- and front-end tasks than the AP does, even if the later does some things better (as the balance between safeness and censorship-resistance). It's still an interesting counterpoint to ActivityPub.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Got it - and that's a fair point. I wonder however if this problem couldn't be solved another way, specially because mirroring is itself a burden for the smaller instances.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

replication is a feature, not a design flaw!

In this case I'd argue that it's both. (A problematic feature? A useful bug? They're the same picture anyway.)

Because of your comment I can see the pros of the mirroring strategy, even if the cons are still there. I wonder if those pros couldn't be "snipped" and implemented into a Nostr-like network, or if the cons can't be ironed out from a Fediverse-like one.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Zero - I browse by subscribed. I probably have 100~200 comms subscribed to through this account, plus a dozen in my ani.social account.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Even the strategy being used by the botter is obvious. Scrape off post titles, feed them into a LLM prompted with something like "Output a funny and short reply for each of the following prompts. Do not output any text besides said reply.", then comment the output.

I tried it, and here's how it turned out:

Post title	Annual-List1897's answers	Gemini's answers
Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox (2024)	Ah, the dynamic duo! They're like a time-traveling dream team. Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in 2024?	Great Scott! They're still not in 2024?
Just leaving this here..	Oh, you're just dropping a mysterious statement and walking away, huh?	Don't worry, I'll try not to trip over it.
Pee Pee Island to Poo Poo Point road trip.	Sounds like a wild adventure!	Packing the Depends and air freshener?
ABC will air fewer "Monday Night Football" games during the 2024-25 season	Well, I guess that means fewer opportunities for people to fall asleep on the couch with the TV on after a long Monday!	ESPN execs right now: "Finally, some peace and quiet on Mondays."
Mysterious package sent to my wife (info in comments)	Well, well, well, a mysterious package for the misses, eh?	"Honey, is this your 'Oops, I accidentally signed us up for a lifetime supply of clown shoes' subscription?"

Sure, it is not the same replies, as this would depend on the exact prompt and the LLM bot being used. But note how it gets really close in spirit.

And this shit is trivial to do. Even for a non-programmer like me. Reddit might not allow you API access, but sometimes a simple scrapper does the trick.

@Windex007 mentioned the "default" name pattern, note that if necessary those could be also generated.

lvxferre , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, the botter might have overdone it.

Another thing that I realised is that you could actually do this in a semi-auto way, without coding a single line of code - using a plain browser and an auto-clicker. EDIT: I'm not saying that autoclicker+browser is how people trying to bot Reddit "should" do it. I'm using it to highlight that botting Reddit is an extremely low-hanging fruit, to the point that you expect lots of bots there.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I follow a "rule of seven" with tabs: once I open the 8th tab, I check the other 7 to see if

• I don't need it any more - close it down
• I'll need it in a near future - keep it open
• I'll need it in a far future - bookmark it, close it down

Seven is small enough to keep track of them, but large enough to be flexible.

lvxferre OP , 1 month ago

Even when cleaned, she still refuses it. I think that she smells "the annoying kid used this box, now it's ruined forever!". The only solution is to clean the litterbox with alcohol, retire it from usage for a few days (so she forgets about it), and then reintroduce as if it was a "new" litterbox.

As such I don't think that the auto-cleaning box would help either.

lvxferre OP , 1 month ago

I'll let you know if I find a solution. Your situation reminds me my sister's cat though - he "used" the litterbox halfway (his front paws inside, his back paws outside), and then did it on the floor next to the litterbox. Might be worth checking if that isn't what's happening. (She solved it with taller boxes)

lvxferre OP , 1 month ago

I'll give it a check. If this exists (and if it's available in Brazil, and reasonably priced) it would solve my problems really well. Thanks for the idea!

lvxferre OP , 1 month ago

Thank you guys for all those ideas! Sorry for the late reply.

A few highlights on ideas mentioned here:

• @0x0's idea of testing different litters might work. Frieda used to be a street cat, so she'd rather use dirt or grass (or finer litter), while Kika was always a home cat so she prefers more typical gravel-like litter.
• @atx_aquarian mentioned odour removers. I didn't try them, I used alcohol instead. Got to try it too.
• A lot of people mentioned smart systems that allow/deny entry for a cat based on the microchip. I gave those a check, and they're outright expensive here in Brazil. (Import taxes are specially harsh on electronics, plus cost of living is smaller than in Europe and CA/US so stuff like 100 euros or dollars is actually a big deal here.) I might want to try a poor man's version of that though, by not allowing Siegfrieda to access my bathroom at all, and placing Kika's litterbox there.

A relevant detail that I didn't mention is Kika's age - she's already 16, and cats get a bit stubborn when old (not that we humans are any different...). But I think that a mix of the solutions that you presented might work.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Give up and install SponsorBlock.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Some scientists say CO2 removal is simply a distraction from the urgency of the climate crisis and an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels.

Bingo~

lvxferre , 1 month ago

The article says that "some companies are experimenting with alkaline rocks". So it's the opposite.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

That's correct. And my point is that they aren't "further acidifying" the ocean, like Icalasari said; they're doing the exact opposite.

I'll use the opportunity for an info dump. You potentially know what I'm going to say, but it's for the sake of users in general.

Carbon dioxide dissolution in water can be simplified through the equation

CO₂(g) + 2H₂O(l) ⇌ H₃O⁺(aq) + HCO₃⁻(aq)
gaseous carbon dioxide + water generates (→) hydronium ("acidity") + bicarbonate, and vice versa (←).

It's a reversible reaction, as anyone opening a soda can knows (wait a bit and the gas GTFO and you're left with flat soda). However, you can "force" a reversible reaction to go more into one or another direction, by messing with the amounts of substances in each side of the equation:

• if you add more of the junk to one side, the reaction will go more towards the other side - to consume the stuff that you added
• if you remove junk from one side, the reaction will go more towards that side - to regenerate the junk that you removed

So it's like reactions go against whatever change you do. This is known as Le Chatelier's principle. In a simplified way, "if you change shit the reaction tries to revert your change".

Now. The main concern is CO₂ in the atmosphere. We don't want it. To consume it through this reaction, we could remove acidity from the ocean. That's actually doable by dumping some alkaline substances there, because of another equilibrium:

H₃O⁺(aq) + OH⁻(aq) ⇌ 2H₂O(l)
hydronium ("acidity") + hydroxide ("alkalinity") generates water, and vice versa.

So by adding alkaline substances to the sea you could remove hydronium, and by removing hydronium you're encouraging the sea to gorge on even more carbon dioxide.

It sounds like an extremely bad idea though. Just like the two reactions that I mentioned interact with each other, there's a bazillion other reactions doing the same. Specially when we're talking about acidity/alkalinity (pH), it's hard to find something where pH does not influence the outcome!

So the consequences of "let's dump alkaline substances in the sea! What could go wrong?" might be extremely messy, and not so obvious from a first moment. Instead we're simply better off by avoiding to add even more CO₂ to the atmosphere.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Cory Doctorow, enshittification: "finally, they [platforms] abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves".

That is exactly what is happening here; AI is just an excuse, not the reason.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

As I mentioned in another thread, about the same subject: that's mostly for show, with zero practical impact on the population. They might jail someone but you'll get 10 new streamers in their place. Same deal with the alleged seizure of TV boxes, mine is still working fine.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.

I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google's euthanasia project:

• YouTube
• Google Search
• Chrome
• "core" Android system + Play Store (it counts as one)
• AdSense

The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can't fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).

Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it's simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Good catch on GMail - it's at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google ecosystem battery farm.

I'm not sure on GSuite.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Because we're actually biped rats?

Just kidding. Grapes have lots of tartaric acid and, accordingly to this link, tartaric acid causes kidney failure in dogs.

Then accordingly to this link only 15~20% of the tartaric acid consumed by humans is eliminated in the urine; most of it goes to the large intestine, and gets metabolised by bacteria. So I guess that, unlike dogs, we avoid the kidney failure by avoiding sending it to the kidneys.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

I taught my nephew and I wouldn't see a moral problem on teaching my hypothetical kids how to.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Hash as the food? If yes, any ideas? Most of my hashes have been rather boring: [potato|boiled yucca], carrots, bell peppers, [meat|eggs and cheese].

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Ah, got it. Sorry!

lvxferre , 2 months ago

This legend is from the 50s, I believe. The city is Curitiba.

A man and a woman danced through the night; and, after leaving the danceteria, it was cold outdoors, so he lent her his black cape. He takes her home and then leaves, only to realise too late that he forgot his black cape with her.

In the next day, he goes back to her home, to retrieve his black cape and flirt a bit. Her parents meet him; and they tell him that their daughter passed away years and years ago. They even show him a photo of her, and to his puzzlement the woman in the photo - allegedly dead for years - was identical to the one who danced with him, in the preceding day.

He asks her parents about her tomb. He goes to the cemetery, still a bit sceptic, but with some carnations to leave on her tomb "just in case". She was indeed buried where her parents indicated. And his black cape was there, neatly folded, over the tomb.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Sentence structure likely plays a role but, at the end of the day, it's just a spelling convention - people do it because they do it. And it's generally absent from the standard orthography of Portuguese and Italian, even if they're syntactically similar to Spanish (i.e. no German/English-like VSO for questions).

lvxferre , 3 months ago

That post made me go full nostalgia - I started on Linux with KDE 3.5, and Trinity preserves its "feel" rather well.

lvxferre , 3 months ago

It probably would for me too, if it didn't become my default DE.

...it's weird to think about it. When that trainwreck of the initial KDE 4 release kicked off, I switched to GNOME 2, so I didn't give Trinity a chance; but when the trainwreck of GNOME 3.0 kicked off, I simply couldn't be arsed - instead I kept using it as MATE.

lvxferre , 3 months ago

This is just a hypothesis, but I believe that one of the roots of the problem is a lower ability to retrieve information, caused by increased exposure to advertisement.

Regardless of the above, the problem is actually a big deal, once you consider things like meta-information (such as truth value and reliability of a claim) being also information; so if people don't get info on their own, it's easy to misinform them. So it isn't the muppet failing to see "this is a Lebbit story" and screeching at the "actress" of that video, it's also a similar muppet saying shit like "ivermectin cures covid" or "jet fuel is making the frogs gay".