rowinxavier @ rowinxavier @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.

For the software side I would recommend Linux Mint as a great simple starter distro with good support and a nice community. The overall design paradigm is about maintaining familiarity while also making sane defaults and simplifying processes. Because it is Ubuntu based it is also easy to get documentation and support because what works for Ubuntu also works for Mint.

For hardware it really depends on your budget and locality as well as use case. Laptops vary much more country to country than you may think, so it may be worth thinking about what is local to you. For example, I live in Australia so System76 is a bad choice here, same with SlimBook (I think that is the name, European KDE laptop that advertises with that French(?) YouTuber, they don't ship here.

Also, when looking at laptops the RAM configuration is important. If you have two RAM slots but only one RAM stick you will have really slow memory access. This will bottleneck for both the CPU and GPU if you are using both at the same time, say during gaming or doing AI work. Swapping out the single stick for a matching pair or just adding one more stick that matches what it already has will let both ports work together, making everything faster. Also when I say matching I mean in terms of size and speed. If you put 3200MHz and 2400MHz in the system at the same time the 3200MHz won't just down tune to match, they will both go slower as far as I am aware. Best to match not only the speed but if possible the brand and ideally model, there are lots of little differences between RAM sticks and honestly it has never been worth the trouble in my experience to have mismatched sticks, I just replace with a matching pair.

Damn autocorrect, yes, absolutely, thanks for that

Before the more modern definition took hold propaganda was not a term that held any real negative connotations. It was really just like marketing or evangelising, a behavior or product which uses various methods to change opinions. The big problem is when you have political or corporate powers using these tools to change opinion about something in a way that degrades democracy or causes harm.

For example, oil companies stand to benefit from people being uncertain about the science, so when they engage in propaganda they are trying to inject doubt where there is none and to do so in a way that will benefit them in the short term. This will cause massive harm in the future, potentially leading to a significant number of wars and a staggerig death toll, but that is not part of their consideration.

Another example is alt med. When someone claims that their pill can make your brain work better and will also boost your sexual performance all while protecting you from the dangers they just told you about they obviously stand to benefit from you believing them. They create the need and then offer the solution. Alex Jones is a good example of this. He tells you that the global elite are planning nuclear war, then in the next ad break tells you about iodine for radiation exposure.

So why is propaganda frowned on? It is more like propaganda is the label we give to marketing or evangelising that we consider worthy of frowning. Someone in another countries may sort different things into evangelising, marketing, and propaganda categories but they will do so based on their understanding of the world and you will likely agree with most of their sorting. Almost everyone thinks that Nazis are bad and put their marketing in the propaganda bucket.

I did for many years. I don't have that as much now and the big change was ditching abusive family. I had a strong drive to solve problems and please people which was absolutely great for my parents and siblings. They used me a lot and got a lot of free labor out of me. Now that I don't see any of them any more I have a much tighter relationship between trying to do something and seeing a result. If it goes poorly it is probably because of something I did or an identifiable factor and I can own it. If it goes well I can recognise the role of luck and own my effort. Everything was so confusing and empty with those people creating drama and now I feel free.

Also, making sure I didn't have to abandon things because of other people's demands has been helpful. I have completed my first significant electronics project recently and it is very addictive. I would never have managed that before because someone would have been asking for progress updates and going on about how it wouldn't be a skill that made any money etc.

Yeah, they mean in terms of the limitations if silicone, specifically the gate sizes and other properties. If the whole chip is silicone then you are bound by those limitations, but by changing to carbon things can be smaller and more efficient, allowing better computation with less waste heat.

I have found money to be the best tool. I work as a delivery driver right this moment but I have been a removalist and a baker before, all three of which are very physically demanding roles. I have also worked in physically undemanding roles and just couldn't make myself do any intentional exercise consistently.

I am planning a switch into nursing over the next couple of years and my plan is to work full time in nursing with one or two shifts a week doing delivery or rubbish collection for the workout.

Also, rock climbing looks like fun, I am planning to try the local university gym for rock climbing, maybe a class or a social aspect will help.

Cool, fair enough, I do have a little trouble with spelling and that is fine. Of course it could be software, learning difficulties, or just a bad day, but feel free to discard all the words I spelled correctly. Also, if you are in the US including the full stop in your quotation is typical but in the rest of the world you would keep the punctuation outside the quotes unless it is what you are quoting, otherwise the sentence doesn't have its own full stop.

I see what you are saying but I disagree. The changes that we would consider important for aspartame should happen over a reasonable period of time. If it takes 100 years to have an impact then we probably don't care because most people won't live that long. What we care about is whether it has an impact over meaningful lengths of time in a human life, say over a decade or two.

If I have tobacco every day for a year will I have cancer? Unlikely. But if I give a large number of people who are well randomised tobacco or tobacco substitute I will see changes in their outcomes in a short time, even as little as a year.

So for aspartame, we already know it is not a massive signal. If it were then people who find the taste acrid would be better off than those who do not. But is there a possible issue there? Sure, it is possible, but it will very likely be a mild issue over a long time at a high dose, not at small doses over a short time, so this study design is not fit for purpose and it should be ignored.

Mice lie, monkeys exaggurate.

This is a study on a small number of mice using a measure of anxiety which does not directly map to humans. Using mice for a study like this is fine for a pilot study but this has not clinical significance and can be safely ignored by the scientific press as well as the public. When we see a long term study which is double blinded in humans with reasonable doses, good controls, and hopefully some sort of mechanism of action then we can pay attention. Until then, aspartame has been linked to everything under the sun and yet nothing has been shown to be meaningful yet. It is one of the most well studied substances in the human diet and it seems to be at the very least mostly fine. Worry about lead in your water before you worry about this.

I don't take days off for Concerta 27mg + 18mg AM and Ritalin 20mg 6.5 hours later. I have tried and my first psychiatrist recommended it but it was awful and pointless. I recently was in hospital for a time due to endocarditis and had to stop for that period and wow, it was terrible. I am back on it and have no intention of stopping again.

I have my headphones in literally right now. I use my phone as my primary media system, so video sources like YouTube and Nebula and audio like music and podcasts. I listen with wired headphones for any time I am not physically very involved as they are higher quality and provide a much more enjoyable listening experience, but I will switch to Bluetooth headphones when being more physically active.

That said, I am a very high consumer of audio. I currently have 129 podcasts I am subscribed to (some no longer run, but most are weekly to monthly), along with a whole lot of audiobooks. I am currently at well over 2200 hours played in my podcast app this year and that excludes all the audiobooks and videos.

This guy is a bit of a quack TBH. He is a doctor, but of what? Medicine? That is what you would assume from his presentation, but no, he is not a medical doctor. He has also misrepresented data in the past and has a definite pattern of carefully selecting what he presents to support an antivax narrative.

His views before the pandemic were extremely low and his videos mainly focussed on educational material for nurses. Since the pandemic he has gone full antivax and boom, absolutely massive channel growth and monetization. He has a strong financial incentive to keep making videos whether or not there is any actual problem.

Something I have found is missing from both of these suggestions as well as every podcast app on device is transcoding to speed up so it is not sped up on the fly. For a lot of phones and other devices the task of playing back at 2x speed is enough to demand a higher power state than what is required to play a sped up file. For efficiency doing a single pass of speeding up the audio then playing back at that speed would use less power during the playback phase, allowing you to download and speed up all of your podcasts at home while on charge then listen for long periods without completely killing the battery. I have checked with a few if the open source devs and this is not a feature they see utility for so nobody intends to make it.

I am subscribed to 127 podcasts, so close to getting that elusive extra binary digit, but yeah, lots of different topics and quite a few who don't have anything new coming out but I keep for the back catalogue.

Broadly speaking I have a few major interests and associated groups of podcasts.

Religion As someone who lives in a supposedly Christian culture with lots of fascistic behaviour creeping into public life I listen to quite a few podcasts around religion. Some are more on the vehement and sardonic end, others more in the range of learning and understanding. The Puzzle In A Thunderstorm group put out a few great shows which are more on the "religion is bad and here is why" end of things, starting with The Scathing Atheist which does lots of current news, moving into God Awful Movies which looks at religious and just plain awful films and shows, and The Skepticrat which is much more politics focussed. That group also works with the team from Cognitive Dissonance on a show called Citation Needed which is basically a few people listening and responding to someone telling them about some weird thing from Wikipedia like a molassas flood or a particularly onerous historical figure. Lastly is Data Over Dogma, a great podcast with a scholar of religion from the LDS church (Mormon but don't call them that) and an atheist talking about Christianity from a modern social justice perspective and really looking at the scholarship around the associated religious texts. That one is really good and I have learned a lot listening to them.

Science Anything from the microbe.TV group is amazing, starting the TWiV (This Week in Virology) but moving through all the rest. They were great during the rise of covid but I was listening long before that and they really do break things down well and broaden your understanding of science in a meaningful way. The Naked Scientists have a great set of podcasts about general science topics and break things down to a layman level without losing all of the nuance. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is a great pop sci group, and Talk Nerdy To Me is another great show from one of the hosts.

Politics/history Cool Zone Media put out a few great shows including Behind The Bastards Whig is about history's greatest bastards, Cool People Which Do Cool Stuff which is basically the opposite, It Could Happen Here which covers current events and deep reporting on issues around politics and the state, and a few others. Cleanup on Aisle 45 is a great show about law and so on as relating to dealing with the aftermath of the Trump presidency.

News The Daily Beans is a great daily news show relating to US politics, while the Guardian puts out a few more local shows for other anglosphere countries.

General and mixed interest Serious Inquiries Only is a great show for exploring issues around science and politics with a fair and grounded left leaning bent. Where There's Woke is from the same team and is an exploration of the moral panics around woke controversies and honestly, wow, some of the bull that the right wing get upset about is so incredibly dishonest and the real story is so much more interesting.

There are a tonne more but I can't make an exhaustive list now, those are the ones that come to mind immediately.

If you have someone oppressing you and taking your territory eventually cutting you off from the outside world in what is often referred to as the largest open air prison in the world and you have the capacity for violence is it unreasonable to expect you will use it? If the oppressor then slams you, hurts you very badly, and lies about what they will do to the rest of the world are they really supportable?

To be clear, I think the leadership of both Hamas and the Israeli government are acting for their own interests to the exclusion of the interests of their people. Both are attacking civilians, both are committing war crimes, both are increasing the cycle of violence. One of them has the backing of the west in a significant way and is oppressing the other, stealing land and frequently killing civilians, the other is ineffectively fighting back. Both wrong, one more powerful and more genocidal, maybe you could not support either and support the people in both, the citizens who are just trying to survive.

I have a bum bag (Fanny pack, hip bag, waist bag) which had my wallet, headphones, emergency spoon, and keys. When I get in it is put in the landing strip, when I leave it goes on. I have not spent 20 minutes panic searching through pants pockets on the floor since getting it.

I have a rule of holding my keys in view while closing the door. Haven't had a single incident since. That said, that is a nifty way of doing it, I imagine my cat would play with the keys hanging out of the lock.

Making a memory requires intention and attention. Most people don't remember the drive to work, going to the toilet, or showering, but their way of interpreting the world includes a little summary step, a sort of "Yep, done that" for each task. They remember that they showered, but they don't remember showering. When they then try to recall showering they confabulate something reasonable, a sort of stand in for having a shower, but it isn't recorded that morning, it is just a kind of simulation of what showering is usually like when they have a shower at home, in the morning, on a workday etc.

Because you have fewer executive function slots you are using all of them to do your tasks, so you don't have spare slots to also make summaries. This is actually not a bad thing, I mean who really wants to have full video memory of every shower they have ever had, but it can look like memory issues if you have incorrect expectations. Most people don't remember most of what they say they remember, they remember a summary which compresses it and makes it much easier to store but not a full recollection of the event itself.

Project Hail Mary