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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. … But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. … Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn’t grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

    I’m less convinced that it is happening here though, but I’m certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.



  • People downvote for a very wide variety of reasons, many of which don’t really have anything to do with the story. For for example, someone might downvote because they don’t like posts that are just screenshots from reddit. Or maybe they don’t like the brands mentioned in the story. Or maybe they’ve seen it before and don’t want to see it again. Or maybe they’re just in a bad mood and are voting harshly. Or maybe it is about the story, and they think its creepy. Or maybe it reminds them of a bad memory.

    In any case, it should never be surprising when a post gets some downvotes. The more people who see it, the more likely it is that someone will have some issue with it.

    (And of course, complaining about downvotes almost always results in downvotes.)



  • Privatization seems like a really bad idea to me. Helium is non-renewable resource. Privatization is about being ‘efficient’ at maximising profits. Do you think the people / companies that own the helium reserves are going to be interested in keeping helium available for centuries in the future? I’d say probably not.

    For a profit based company, the only motivation to preserve the helium for future use is that maybe it will be worth a lot more money in the future. But there are two big problems with that. Firstly, the timescale is likely to be too long for the profit to be of interest. And secondly, the main reason the price would go up is scarcity; and that scarcity will come sooner if the helium is wasted in the short term. (Unless one company actually has a monopoly on helium, in which case they can create artificial scarcity by just not selling it. But that would obviously be bad for other reasons.)


  • I’m not sure why you’re saying its clocks that are wrong rather than the other stuff. Currently we have x = r cos(𝜃) and y = r sin(𝜃), and that’s what makes anti-clockwise rotations mathematically natural. But if we instead just used x = r sin(𝜃) and y = r cos(𝜃) then clockwise would be the natural positive rotation. And in that case, the unit circle would start at the top and go around clockwise… like we do for compass bearing (and clocks of course). So perhaps that would be better than changing what clocks do.



  • There’s no way hippos have the long-distance endurance of humans. Pretty much everything is faster than humans at sprinting, but for endurance running, humans are next level. (Not me of course, I’m not really fit enough to be called human in this context.)









  • I suppose the loss they are referring to is that they fumbled and dropped their cool mystique at a critical moment. How can you put a price on that? …

    Or perhaps they are talking about an accumulated loss. They’re basically out there flipping and fumbling coins all day - and after the latest one they’ve lost the equivalent of $30000 in total.