CapeWearingAeroplane @ CapeWearingAeroplane @sopuli.xyz

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Of course they're arming Taiwan: Did you see what happened to Hong Kong, after China had signed a deal with Britain to leave them alone? Just like Russia signed up to keep Ukraine safe when they have up their nukes.... They're going out of their way to make it clear that the only authoritarian facist you can trust to hold a deal is the one with a rifle down his throat.

How is Ukraine, a country that has spent 10 years fighting a low-intensity conflict on its own land in the Donbas, without strong military allies, and with an economy and political system that were just barely starting to see some stability, a "security concern" to Russia, a country that has soon thrown half a million men, and equipment worth several times Ukraines GDP at a war they can leave whenever they choose?

Ukraine never attacked anyone. They're literally fighting for their lives. If Russia would just leave them alone this would be over. They didn't have the capacity for aggression agains russia, but due to this war of Russias choosing, they've been forced to spend enormous amounts on scaling up their military.

I cannot stress enough how much this reads exactly like every bot-written tutorial ever. They spend pages beating around the bush and filling the site with useless word-salad, and if you ever have a slightly unconventional problem, you can be positive that it will not even be mentioned in the guide.

The amount of times someone has asked me why something doesn't work, and I've silently pointed to the sentence or paragraph next to the code snippet they've copied...

This is actually an awesome writing prompt: The older ghosts get updates from the younger ones, and send stories back from their own lives, like a long telephone wire..

I've seen this thing where people dislike inheritance a lot, and I have to admit that I kind of struggle with seeing the issue when it's used appropriately. I write a bunch of models that all share a large amount of core functionality, so of course I write an abstract base class in which a couple methods are overridden by derived models. I think it's beautiful in the way that I can say "This model will do X, Y, Z, as long as there exists an implementation of methods A, B, C, which have these signatures", then I can inherit that base class and implement A, B, and C for a bunch of different cases. In short, I think it's a very useful way to express the purpose of the code, without focusing on the implementation of specific details, and a very natural way of expressing that two classes are closely related models, with the same functionality, as expressed by the base class.

I honestly have a hard time seeing how not using inheritance would make such a code base cleaner, but please tell me, I would love to learn.

Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really "If there's something that's likely to hurt you because you aren't properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it's likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds."

If you have a fume hood that's good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.

As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?

In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I'm taking a restrictive approach in my advice.

For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)

Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.

In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren't. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)

I haven't seen to original 1930 film, but I thought the new one was good, and my impression is that it stayed true to the overarching message of the story in the book. However I've heard from others that it isn't as close to the book in its depiction as the first film.

Looking at a half circle and guessing that the "missing part" is a full circle is as much of a blind guess as you can get. You have exactly zero evidence that there is another half circle present. The missing part could be anything, from nothing to any shape that incorporates a half circle. And you would be guessing without any evidence whatsoever as to which of those things it is. That's blind guessing.

Extrapolating into regions without prior data with a non-predictive model is blind guessing. If it wasn't, the model would be predictive, which generative AI is not, is not intended to be, and has not been claimed to be.

I 100 % agree on your primary point. I still want to point out that a detail in a 4k picture that takes up a few pixels will likely be invisible to the naked eye unless you zoom. "Digital zoom" without interpolation is literally just that: Enlarging the picture so that you can see details that take up too few pixels for you to discern them clearly at normal scaling.

No computer algorithm can accurately reconstruct data that was never there in the first place.

What you are showing is (presumably) a modified visualisation of existing data. That is: given a photo which known lighting and lens distortion, we can use math to display the data (lighting, lens distortion, and input registered by the camera) in a plethora of different ways. You can invert all the colours if you like. It's still the same underlying data. Modifying how strongly certain hues are shown, or correcting for known distortion are just techniques to visualise the data in a clearer way.

"Generative AI" is essentially just non-predictive extrapolation based on some data set, which is a completely different ball game, as you're essentially making a blind guess at what could be there, based on an existing data set.

I may be wrong, but I've been told by a German that beer is by German law considered a staple food. I choose to believe this is true.

You'll survive for quite a while once you're below 6000 m. In free fall that would take you around 90 s, assuming a fall from 11000 m, and that it takes 200 m (5 s) of fall to reach terminal velocity of 200 km/h.

This is quite rough, but gives an appropriate order of magnitude. In those 90 s, you would be very likely to pass out and be guaranteed to get severe frost bite. We're talking major amputations levels of frost bite, as you would be moving at 200 km/h, exposed, in temperatures in the -50 C to -10 C range. I've seen people get frost bites moving at 40 km/h in -15 C for a couple of minutes with just a sliver of skin exposed.

So short answer: You might survive getting into the survivable range, but at the very least you will require intense and immediate medical attention upon landing. Seeing as there will be potentially a couple hundred people spread out over a large, possibly remote, area requiring this attention, it's unlikely that many, if any, would survive the ordeal, even if most people survived the initial 5000 m of fall into the survivable altitude range.

Note the crucial difference between writing this as an enumerated list, and writing it as a continuous sentence.

In the former case (used here) the "xyz is not" distributes such that each point on the list can be read as a complete sentence, giving your (correct) interpretation.

What seems to confuse a lot of people is that if you write "xyz is not A, B, and C", the "not" no longer distributes the same way, and (A, B, and C) is read as a single condition, giving the alternate (incorrect) interpretation.

You're missing the grammatical point of a itemised list though. Writing

abc is not

• condition 1,
• condition 2, and
• condition 3.

Reads as the "not" distributing so as to create the full sentence(es)

• abc is not condition 1,
• abc is not condition 2, and
• abc is not condition 3.

In other words, writing this as an itemised list makes it different from writing it as the sentence

abc is not condition 1, condition 2 and condition 3.

Hehe, I absolutely agree.. for reference, High Sierra is v10.13, released in 2017. I'm now running v13, released 2022. They moved from v10.15 to v11 in 2020, when the arm chips were released.

My old MacBook could probably run 10.15 just fine, but I don't have any good reason to update it, as it's only purpose now is to compile distributables for other old machines.

Also: I really dislike that they've been pushing non-backwards compatible major releases so hard since 2020. I'm not updating my OS because I can't be bothered to break shit, it shouldn't be like that..

I believe brew dropped support for a high Sierra just a couple years back (2022 I think) but as of now my 2012 MacBook Pro is still chugging along whenever I need to compile or test something for x86 and can't be bothered to cross-compile from my new MacBook :)

Exactly this: I remember meeting some Russians that had moved to Belgium a few years ago, and we got to talking about this topic. These were well educated young people, yet they told me the thing that surprised them the most when moving to Belgium was that people actually cared about elections, and that elections actually mattered. They had been completely convinced that elections in the west were just like the "elections" they were used to from Russia.