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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.



  • We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.

    The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.

    Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyz"Theory" of Evolution (SMBC)
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    19 days ago

    So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.

    There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.

    No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.

    General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.

    Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).


  • Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.

    Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.



  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzHero
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    1 month ago

    Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzHero
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    1 month ago

    To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

    Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzgeoengineering
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    2 months ago

    I gotta imagine making the Sahara Desert habitable is a lot easier than making Mars habitable. The Sahara at least has breathable atmosphere, a 24 hour day, solar intensity that our plants are well adapted to using, and is relatively close to resupply from population centers on Earth.


  • The typical default configuration has the ISP providing DNS services (and even if you use an external DNS provider, the default configuration there is that the DNS traffic itself isn’t encrypted from the ISP’s ability to analyze).

    So even if you visit a site that is hosted on some big service, where the IP address might not reveal what you’re looking at (like visiting a site hosted or cached by Cloudflare or AWS), the DNS lookup might at least reveal the domain you’re visiting.

    Still, the domain itself doesn’t reveal the URL that follows the domain.

    So if you do a Google search for “weird sexual fetishes,” that might cause you to visit the URL:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+sexual+fetishes
    

    Your ISP can see that you visited the www.google.com domain, but can’t see what search you actually performed.

    There are different tricks and tips for keeping certain things private from certain observers, so splitting up the actual ISP from the DNS resolver from the website itself might be helpful and scattering pieces of information, but some of those pieces of information will inevitably have to be shared with someone.


  • I agree.

    I point out that pretty much everyone in that group experiences it, so even those who aren’t in that disadvantaged group should show some empathy towards the experiences of others, that we may never directly encounter ourselves. Part of that empathy, of course, is to provide support and structures for reducing the likelihood that these things happen, and mitigating them when they do happen.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzdegree in bamf
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    3 months ago

    these people actually exist

    The way it’s been explained to me is that so much of the negative interactions in life come from a tiny, tiny number of offenders who manage to be shitty to dozens and dozens of people. So anyone who has to interact with many different people will inevitably encounter that shitty interaction, while most of us normies would never actually behave in that way.

    Of the literally thousands of times I’ve interacted with a server or cashier, I’ve never yelled at one. But talk to any server or cashier, and they’ll all have stories of the customer who yelled at them. In other words, it can be simultaneously true that:

    • Almost all servers and cashiers get yelled at by customers.
    • Very, very, few customers actually yell at servers or cashiers.

    In other words, our lived experiences are very different, depending on which side of that interaction we might possibly be on.

    When I talk to women in male dominated fields, basically every single one of them has shitty stories about sexist mistreatment. It’s basically inevitable, because they are a woman who interacts with literally hundreds or thousands in their field. And even if I interact with hundreds or thousands of women in that same field, just because I don’t mistreat any of them doesn’t mean that my experienced sample is representative.




  • Things might be different by now, but when I was researching this I decided on the Yale x Nest.

    It’s more secure than a keyed lock in the following ways:

    • Can’t be picked (no physical keyhole).
    • Codes can be revoked or time-gated (for example, you can set the dog walker’s code to work only at the time of day they’re expected to come by).
    • Guest codes can be set to provide real-time notifications when used.
    • The lock keeps a detailed log of every time it’s used.
    • The lock can be set to automatically lock the door after a certain amount of time.

    It’s less secure than a physical traditional lock in the following ways:

    • Compromise of a keycode isn’t as obvious as losing a key, so you might not change a compromised keycode the same way you might change a lost key.
    • People can theoretically see a code being punched in, or intercept compromised communications to use it.
    • Compromised app or login could be used to assign new codes or remotely unlock

    It’s basically the same level of security in the following ways:

    • The deadbolt can still be defeated with the same physical weaknesses that a typical deadbolt has: blunt force, cutting with a saw, etc.
    • The windows and doors are probably just generally weak around your house, to where a determined burglar can get in no matter what lock you use.
    • Works like normal without power or network connection (just can’t be remotely unlocked or reprogrammed to add/revoke codes if not online)

    Overall, I’d say it’s more secure against real-world risk, where the weakest link tends to be the people you share your keys with.