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.

so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you’re a leader. but they’re better than the alternative. that’s the whole point.

i’ve mostly given up on expecting/trying to make coffee taste good. at this point i just eat the roasted beans and carry on with my day. it’s also more efficient since you lose a fair amount of caffeine through the brewing process. at this point i only have like 8-15 beans a day.

i still go to a cafe from time to time if i want a nice cappuccino or something, but i don’t bother with any of it at home.

edit: i should mention that roasted coffee beans can taste pretty good if they’re been roasted properly (and even better if eaten within a week of roasting). and you can get a pretty decent bean roaster for like 200$, and then after that a 3 lb. bag of unroasted beans costs like 30$. the 200$ upfront charge is pretty expensive, but it ends up paying for itself pretty quickly since you save an insane amount of money from buying unroasted coffee beans. when eating the roasted beans, a 3 lb. bag can last about 6 months to a year. so thats about 30$ to 60$ a year spent on coffee. even when i was brewing coffee, i found that the roaster paid for itself in about 6 months. not to mention that it’s not that hard to learn how to roast coffee beans, and everything tastes much better when using freshly roasted beans.

the person that you’re replying to said something that’s true about the USA. they didn’t say anything about other countries.

for another example, i can say “if you’re in the USA, then the current year is 2024” and that statement will be true. it is also true in every other country (for the moment), but that’s besides the point.

my bike doesn’t have a central pedal. how does it stay up right?

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code

i hope i don’t end up with the -4000 mAh battery if i buy the phone

if you learn how to solve zeno’s problem in the first book, it may be possible to solve 100% of your problems in the second book

i also don’t love the new default of unskippable animations for trivial things. no, i don’t want to see the same animation every time i go to pick up a plant, craft an item, skin an animal, etc. i’m going to skip the activities if i can’t skip the animations.

i have a similar disdain for inventory/shop menus that don’t let you sell/move/craft things in bulk

well, according to the congressional budget office,

In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion

and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.

it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.

that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

and

A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.

“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?

that sounds like a better choice to be honest. i haven’t used signal much and i didn’t know they supported that sort of thing

telegram has “secret chats” that let you set a self destruct timer for all messages sent in those chats. i don’t know of many other alternatives. and even telegram isn’t a drop in replacement, but it could work, depending on what you’re looking for

authoritarianism is when no twitter

yep, this is a lemmy.ml post alright

they should nationalize intel if they really care about chip independence

i thought this kind of technology was still decades away

i think it depends on what you mean by “accurately”.

from the perspective of someone living on the sphere, a geodesic looks like a straight line, in the sense that if you walk along a geodesic you’ll always be facing the “same direction”. (e.g., if you walk across the equator you’ll end up where you started, facing the exact same direction.)

but you’re right that from the perspective of euclidean geometry, (i.e. if you’re looking at the earth from a satellite), then it’s not a straight line.

one other thing to note is that you can make the “perspective of someone living on the sphere” thing into a rigorous argument. it’s possible to use some advanced tricks to cook up a definition of something that’s basically like “what someone living on the sphere thinks the derivative is”. and from the perspective of someone on the sphere, the “derivative” of a geodesic is 0. so in this sense, the geodesics do have “constant slope”. but there is a ton of hand waving here since the details are super complicated and messy.

this definition of the “derivative” that i mentioned is something that turns out to be very important in things like the theory of general relativity, so it’s not entirely just an arbitrary construction. the relevant concepts are “affine connection” and “parallel transport”, and they’re discussed a little bit on the wikipedia page for geodesics.

it’s a bit of a “spirit of the law vs letter of the law” kind of thing.

technically speaking, you can’t have a straight line on a sphere. but, a very important property of straight lines is that they serve as the shortest paths between two points. (i.e., the shortest path between A and B is given by the line from A to B.) while it doesn’t make sense to talk about “straight lines” on a sphere, it does make sense to talk about “shortest paths” on a sphere, and that’s the “spirit of the law” approach.

the “shortest paths” are called geodesics, and on the sphere, these correspond to the largest circles that can be drawn on the surface of the sphere. (e.g., the equator is a geodesic.)

i’m not really sure if the line in question is a geodesic, though