• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

    If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.


  • All models are approximations of reality, thus they are ideas humans make in the context of their social situation. Norms and attitudes impact what we research, how we interpret data, and what we end up believing.

    While the aim of science is to get closer to the truth the end result is going to approach but never reach perfect accuracy. With gender we see the social norms all through the expression of gender in different ages, generations, socioeconomic statuses, cultures, and countries. With sex we see a flattening of what is present into a strict binary with exceptions rather than what is actually present, a range of different karyotypes, sensitivities to hormones, levels of hormone production, interactions in regulatory genes, and differing morphologies. Gender is a diverse spectrum, but so is sex, and the reason we teach the XX XY version is the same as how we teach mathematic ideas. Basic stuff first, then expanding on that idea, then going further until we have the capacity to really understand the basics, like the multiple page proof that 1+1=2. Yes, basic biology says male and female, but intermediate talks about the diverse presentations of sex.



  • If you are looking for some less garish designs for cases the Fractal Design North is one great looking option, and also some of the mini-itx form factor cases look really nice too, not too far off from some of the ones you mentioned.

    That said, you absolutely can add a graphics card to some of the corporate machines, but some are much harder than others. I have not done one recently but honestly I would look for someone else’s build and replicate it as exactly as possible. I have had weird issues with corporate gear before around connectors, weird pinouts, very limited PSUs, and strange limitations on the PCIe port supporting some cards but not others (HP and a generic network card crashing my system randomly). If you find that someone else has done that specific box with a specific card then you should be ok, but if you have to deviate try to make sure that you match closely what they had, such as whether the graphics card has extra power or is PCIe only or if they have to use one of the corporate style graphics cards because gaming cards won’t work.


  • Indeed, it was a really clear case of election interference through the falsification of business records. It is a good result and now we just have to wait and see how people react. Will he beat Biden in the election? Will he be clearly rejected? I hope things end with him not being in office, but no matter what happens he cannot pardon himself for state crimes and if he wins the election and New York sentences him to prison time then there will be a novel set of issues to resolve from there. Ideally he loses, is sentenced to prison, and spends the remainder of his life offline.


  • To be fair, it would only have taken one jury to hang it and worrying about that makes sense. Happily thus has worked out in favour of justice, but it was not a given and people were right to fear that outcome. Hopefully we will see the predicted change in likely voting outcomes from unaffiliated voters and thus can be the end of MAGA over the next couple of election cycles.


  • In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

    If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

    So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.



  • In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.

    The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.

    Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.




  • It looks like it is downsampling the video or streaming after converting to another codec. Some codecs are fine for decoding on the server but the app may not support them so the server converts them. Some files are of higher quality than what the server is configured to deliver so it downsamples to stream it.

    Check the configuration and look for anything to do with codecs, hardware decoding, streaming quality, and so on. It may also be on the app, so if you can access a different interface then test that to narrow down the issue.


  • 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.



  • People learned different values for g for a number of reasons, but as far as I understand local variability is not one of them. The primary root cause seems to be accuracy of the measurement over time and the age of textbooks/course material.

    Over time we have gotten better at measuring the true value of g through advances in technology and this has caused the taught value to shift a little. The value when initially measured had fairly large error margins, meaning that we were sure it was near a specific value but not sure of the exact value. As the tools improved we have reduced the uncertainty, getting to a more accurate and also more precise value, meaning more digits after the decimal as well as higher confidence in each digit. We have also changed what we mean by g over time, bringing it in line with the metric system and basing it on fundamental values and constants. From my understanding the most recent method relies on how much the repulsive force of an electromagnet with a specific number of culombs passing through is overcome by gravity at a specific distance from the center of the mass of Earth, so a little more removed from backyard science than measuring if things drop at the same speed at the top of a mountain and sea level.

    Part 2 is the differences in how recent your material is. In my primary school in a relatively affluent area of an affluent country we had textbooks from the last 10 years. My partner went to a school in the same country but a worse area about 5km away from mine. Their school had textbooks literally 20 years old. In that time the measurements had changed, understandings had changed, and they were therefore taught things that were untrue. These sorts of differences based on geography reproduce the impacts of racism and inequality from the past into the future.


  • 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.