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2 yr. ago

  • Would have made for a pretty crazy story though 😅

    I got to wondering what happened to David Hahn, and it turns out he died of an OD in 2016. He was apparently doing a lot of coke and was 'paranoid about people who he claimed "had the ability to 'shock' his genitals with their minds"', and around 2007 he decided it'd be a great idea to steal a bunch of smoke detectors for, well, something.

    So his real story didn't end nearly as happily as I'd hoped

  • Heh, unfortunately there's no fighting linguistic evolution. I'm a descriptivist so I can happily skip those battles – ie. I think a language is defined by a description of how it's used, compared to prescriptivists who think that eg. grammars and vocabularies prescribe how a language should be used.

  • Yeah that makes sense, and I guess it figures that they didn't originally pick plutonium just for shits and giggles

  • Regulations be damned.

    I guess when it comes to plutonium the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't want to take any chances – it's still frickin' plutonium after all. But yeah, having a pacemaker that'll essentially work the rest of the patient's life sounds pretty damn impressive, although I really don't know what the state of the art is.

    But if we do want to sew radionuclides into people (because why not), maybe the same could be done with one that's a bit less spicy? I'd imagine that with modern technology you could get away with using something that wouldn't give you the same amount of power, but that also wouldn't be… well, plutonium.

  • Ha, I never actually paid attention to that. I think the fact that I'm not a native English speaker could be why "dampener" never sounded weird to me.

    Although looks like the Oxford English Dictionary says both have the meaning "thing or person that has a restraining or subduing effect", so I guess they'd both be correct in that sense?

  • Heh, I think you have much more faith in people than I do

  • Why is there more matter than antimatter?

  • Ha, I didn't know there's a name for that, but it's definitely what I assume they're going to do. My initial reaction was to wonder what they'll now present as the "reasonable" option to WEI.

    Considering they're rolling it out in Android, maybe they'll just wait a moment and then integrate it into desktop Chrome as well, just without any of the fanfare?

  • Because everybody has to know that they're mommy's special little munchkin who doesn't use Gnome

  • And don't forget Miles O'Brien, union man. Or Quark's employees forming a union for that matter

  • And, frankly, without conservatives in general. They're an existential threat, starting from the fact that they're opposed to doing anything about climate change (well anything that doesn't make it worse, anyhow), not to mention that a nontrivial percentage of them would love to see me and others like me murdered because of our gender identity

  • Shit, the EU's really on a roll with these draconian laws. There's also the "chat control" bullshit that'll wreck end-to-end encryption (see eg https://mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol for a list of sources)

  • Sure! ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform (associated with intelligenceplatformd) has a bunch with graph.db being the social graph, but with others like behaviors.db and eventLog.db also likely being relevant, and I think ontology.db was the one where they kept more information on the tags available for the social graph. ~/Library/Application\ Support/Knowledge/knowledgeC.db (associated with Spotlight's knowledgeconstructiond, which I think used to be called knowledged in earlier versions) has the other stuff I mentioned.

    There's also some system-level things in eg. /var/db/knowledgegraphd/ but I haven't bothered looking into those yet because it'd require disabling SIP.

  • Well, it's not like Apple doesn't also collect pretty hair-raising information on you. Go digging through some of the sqlite databases on your machine and you'll find eg. a social graph that even supports labels for things like political affiliations (I think this db was the one used by their ominously named "intelligence platform" service). Another db (which I think was for the knowledged daemon) has an incredibly detailed log of everything you do on your computer and phone, including eg. web URLs and millisecond granularity events on when you interact with your devices. Whether that social graph or all that other stuff ever leaves your devices is unknown (although eg. the knowledged stuff definitely does since I can see events for my phone on my laptop), but I wouldn't count on it not being sent to Apple – regardless of what they claim.

    And yeah, sure, this is all to make "customer experience" better, but do you seriously believe that's all they will be used for?

    Edit: and just as a side note, I'm not basing these claims on stuff I read online, but on actually having looked at the contents of those databases myself

  • No no, that's ketamine, you're thinking of the horse dewormer ivermectin.

    And yes yes I know it's used for humans as well, but the reich-wingers were getting it from veterinary suppliers since you can't get the human version without a prescription. The idiots didn't come to think that the dose used for horses is much bigger than what's used for humans so they took ridiculously high doses, shat out their gut lining and thought that was a sign it was helping.

  • I'd withhold judgement before we see whether they vote their idiot back in next year, and there's a scarily high probability of that happening.

  • I seriously doubt Rust has the best ecosystem for web backend development, and I seriously doubt anybody claiming that knows what they're talking about

  • Yeah, I'd tend to agree. Lemmy's codebase is pretty atrocious and it looks like the main devs really don't know Rust well enough, and honestly they don't seem to be very good at developing a service like this. There's just no reason to go with Rust for a web service project like Lemmy (despite what Rust cultists will undoubtedly soon come to tell me), it limits the amount of people who can work on it due to not being as commonly used in this particular field, and it's honestly baffling how they managed to use Rust and make the service as slow as it is – speaks volumes of how shitty the design is, and that they're doing something fairly stupid with their database.