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Posts
3
Comments
1,237
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • real phones with counterfeit parts resulting from third party repairs doesn’t seem that surprising given how restrictive apple is about providing authentic repair parts. i would not be surprised if this turns out to be another case of them shooting themselves in the foot because they got too greedy.

  • the whole “there are two sides to every issue” mantra that i hear so many people use in everyday life has got to be contributing to this. i think a lot of people view the “two sides thing” as a tautology, and that enables them to more easily “pick a side” on things, assuming that both sides always have some merit to them. and some people use it to avoid picking sides entirely, because if they make something seem complicated enough then they don’t have to actually say anything meaningful about it.

    i would really like to see that mantra disappear altogether, or at the very least have people stop using it as an excuse for not having a well founded opinion. it does seem like people don’t let it slide very much on lemmy though, which is nice.

  • getting a rabies shot in the US is a pain in the ass, but it’s definitely still worth doing. (speaking from experience)

    when i got the first shot, they gave me like 3-4 other shots too, but it was for a cat bite so mileage may vary on that part. i went to the ER for the first shot because you need to get it within 24 hours. at the ER, i found out that the ER was the only place i could get it (at least where i was, not sure if that is true nationwide). and i had to go back to the ER 3 times for follow up shots, each on a specific day. and each time i had to wait 3-4 hours for a 5 minute shot.

    absolutely still worth doing though. the rabies numbers are crazy. 100% chance to die if you have rabies and no vaccine. 0% chance to die with the vaccine.

    i also found out that there are pre-exposure and post-exposure rabies vaccines, and the pre-exposure ones only require 3 shots and can be gotten at a pharmacy, but the post-exposure ones require an ER visit. (again, this might vary from state to state)

  • i gave up on gentoo when the updates started making my laptop so hot that i had to point my bedroom fan at it in college. i was thinking of doing LFS but by that point gentoo was turning into such a headache and i wanted something simpler. i switched to arch afterwards, but now i mainly just use macos and let tim handle all that stuff for me. although i’m tempted to try arch again when im done with grad school and have more time

  • in practice, a lot of problems/equations can be approximated with so-called “linear equations”. a linear equation is something that can involve any number of variables, but no variable has any exponent other than 1. for example, 2x + 6y + 5z = 8 is a linear equation. (this is a generalization of the case when there are two variables, and you have an equation like 2x + 3y = 9. in this case, you can rearrange this equation into slope intercept form and get the standard equation of a line, hence the name linear.)

    again, in practice, it’s very common to deal with multiple linear equations at the same time. say, 2x + 3y = 9, and x + y = 0. to solve such all equations simultaneously (in the 2 variable case) means finding x and y that satisfy both equations. and in the 2 variable case, it basically means finding a point where two lines intersect (if possible).

    you can do some kind of advanced math to show that linear systems of equations correspond to matrices. this is “nice” because matrices are extremely easy for computers to deal with, and we also have a lot of theorems that talk about how matrices behave.

    so, to summarize, we’ve reduced a real world problem into something involving matrices, with the hope of maybe having a computer solve it. in practice, many matrices can be “diagonalized”, which basically means you can factor it as a product of matrices satisfying some certain conditions, but i’m glossing over those details because it can be messy if you don’t know much linear algebra. you can think of it as kind of like factorizing a number into primes. it isn’t really the same thing, but it can be a helpful analogy maybe. (primes are easier to work with, and sometimes it’s helpful to view any number as just a bunch of primes multiplied together.)

    the main advantage of diagonal matrices is that they’re very easy to work with (compared to matrices, which are already “nice” to work with). in practice, this is important because a lot of formulas, algorithms, etc only work for (or are most efficient on) diagonal matrices.

    i hope this helps, it’s a bit hard to get into the details without making things needlessly complicated (a common problem for things involving matrices), but i tried to do my best to focus on the underlying concepts/real world use cases.

  • sunk cost fallacy has got to be carrying trump a bit this election. it’s probably easier for some people to tune him out than to admit they’ve been wrong about him for the past however many years.

    it seems to me like one of his greatest “strengths” was capturing the “i don’t care about politics” crowd. and for a decent chunk of those people, it’s maybe not so much about the politics as it is an alternative for something like professional wrestling or something. it’s about the spectacle and showmanship.

    at least that’s what i keep telling myself. (i find it slightly more comforting than the alternative.) but don’t get me wrong, he definitely also has a ton of nazis supporting him.

  • i'm not yet sold on this "old vs new" thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn't been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn't even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.

    my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)

    but i could be mistaken about this, and i'm open to changing my mind on it.