• 10 Posts
  • 70 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle



  • 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?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    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.






  • 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.





  • The issue will have to be litigated, but… A lawyer once told me that there aren’t really “lawsuits” so much as “factsuits.” The actual judgment in a trial comes more down to the facts at issue than the laws at issue. This sure looks an awful lot like IBM strong arming people into not exercising their rights under the license agreement that IBM chose to distribute under. If it is ever litigated, it isn’t hard to imagine the judgment going against IBM.





  • Fun question, but it leads to other questions…

    First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you’re asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

    This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

    If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn’t be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant’s permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

    The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.