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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • It’s all gravity in the end. Or probably middle but I don’t know why gravity, so that’s as far as I can reduce it.

    Everything we see around us is just hydrogen trying to get closer to the middle of the biggest hydrogen party it can find in the general vicinity. And we were all once part of at least one massive party that eventually got a bit out of hand when we all tried to get so close together we bounced off of a neutron star before it collapsed into a black hole.





  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzlab toys
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    11 days ago

    I’ve wondered if mental state actually affects reality around us. Like some people who see paranormal shit are just more open to it or something while the presence of a skeptic prevents it from happening

    And people who just don’t have confidence that tech will work can cause random issues just by being present, but sometimes when a tech confident person comes to assist them, their confidence gets it to work properly.

    Maybe it has to do with particle/wave duality and the observer effect, and the simulation approximates things more when people aren’t paying as much attention or won’t likely investigate an issue closely after the fact, so the simulation gets sloppy because it’s approximating. But then when someone who will pay closer attention comes (or will come), the waves collapse into particles and it behaves as expected.

    Maybe those cases where a user claims something usually works when they do it a way that is clearly wrong to the more experienced observer, the approximation works out in their favour, but the collapse to particles makes it break like it was supposed to the whole time.

    Maybe Pauli understood some things about the technical equipment (and ropes?) that the others didn’t or was better at calibration and collapsed the wave more than usual.

    Though my guess for the chandelier is that someone first thought of the dropping it when he entered joke but then realized that saying they tried to do that and it failed would be even funnier plus save them a chandelier and be much easier and safer to pull off.




  • I don’t trust them either. But I can’t not trust them unless I trust you, which I don’t.

    This feels like a variation of that two guard riddle except the warning is “both guards lie all of the time” and the two guards still don’t agree.

    Which is resolved by the riddle itself being the lie. Applying that here means we should do the opposite and not (never trust anyone).

    Now which way does that not apply?

    • sometimes trust anyone
    • never distrust anyone
    • never trust noone
    • sometimes distrust anyone
    • never distrust noone
    • sometimes trust noone
    • sometimes distrust noone

  • Yeah, I think there is a lot of potential for code analysis. There’s a limited cross section of ways malware can do interesting things, but many permutations of ways to do that.

    So look for the interesting things, like:

    • accessing other programs’ address spaces
    • reading/writing files
    • deleting/moving files
    • sending/receiving network traffic
    • os system calls and console commands
    • interacting with hardware
    • spawning new processes
    • displaying things on the screen
    • accessing timing information

    Obviously there’s legitimate uses for each of these, so that’s just the first step.

    Next, analyze the data that is being used for that:

    • what’s the source?
    • what’s the destination?
    • what kind of transformations are being applied to the data?

    Then you can watch out for things like:

    • is it systematically going through directories and doing some operation to all files? (Maybe ransomware, data scrubbing, or just maliciously deleting stuff?)
    • is it grabbing data from somewhere and sending it somewhere else on the internet? (Stealing data?)
    • is it using timing information to build data? (Timing attacks to figure out kernel data that should be hidden?)
    • is it changing OS settings/setup?

    Then generate a report of everything it is doing and see if it aligns with what the code is supposed to do. Or you could even build some kind of permissions system around that with more sophistication than the basic “can this app access files? How about the internet?”

    Computer programs can be complex, but are ultimately made up of a series of simple operations and it’s possible to build an interpreter that can do those operations and then follow everything through to see exactly what is included in the massive amount of data it sends over the network so that you can tell your file sharing program is also for some reason sending /etc/passwords to a random address or listening for something to access a sequence of closed ports and then will do x, y, z, if that ever happens. Back doors could be obvious with the right analysis tools, especially if it’s being built from source code (though I believe it’s still possible with binaries, just maybe a bit harder).


  • I’m skeptical that there exists any leftist mainstream place that isn’t actually a right-wing place disguised as leftist.

    I’m also skeptical that all of those loud but irrational voices are genuine. Especially given Russia’s MO for online trolling where they push both sides of any issue to extremes to sow division. Not to say that I believe everyone on the left is rational and reasonable. But why would the tone be so different between “mainstream” and “non-mainstream” left places if the position you’re talking about is as ubiquitous to the left as you claim it is?



  • That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).



  • It would, similar to how the mass of each object does have an effect, even if negligible. But the question is if the radius of the bowling ball vs feather has a greater effect than the mass of the bowling ball vs the feather.

    You can adjust the value r in the universal gravitational equation by the radius of the bowling ball and compare the extremes (both plus and minus the radius) and the middle point to see the tidal effects.

    If the feather starts at the middle height of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would help the bowling ball. If it starts at the lowest point of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would hinder the bowling ball.

    But the magnitude of that effect depends on the distance from the center of the other mass.

    I think the main thing would be the ratio of the small mass vs big mass compared to the ratio of the small radius vs the big radius.

    Though, thinking of it more, since the bowling ball is a sphere (ignoring finger holes), the greater pull on the close side would be balanced by the lesser pull on the far side (assuming the difference between those two forces isn’t greater than the force holding the ball together), so now I think it doesn’t matter (up to that structural force and with the assumption that the finger holes aren’t significant).

    If they are falling into a small black hole, then it does become relevant because the bowling ball will get stringified more than the feather once the forces are extreme enough to break the structural bonds, but the math gets too complicated to wrap my mind around right now. If I had to guess, the bowling ball would start crossing the event horizon first, but the feather would finish crossing it first. And an outside observer would see even more stretched out images of both of them for a while after that, which would make actually measuring the sequence of events impossible.

    And who knows what happens inside, maybe each would become a galaxy in a nested universe.


  • I don’t think there is a finite number of monkeys that would be guaranteed to do so in the lifespan of the universe.

    Best we could do is calculate the expected number of monkeys it would take, assuming accurate probabilities, which I also don’t think is possible to determine.

    You can’t just take one divided by the number of possible characters that could be typed because monkeys can do many things other than typing away. A high portion of them would likely instead destroy the typewriter. In the infinite monkeys scenario, an infinite amount would destroy their typewriter in the middle of Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy.

    Plus the odds of it actually happening are going to be so astronomically low that if you filled the known universe with monkeys, you’d end up with monkey stars and black holes before any Shakespeare.

    It really only works as a thought experiment about the nature of infinity.

    Unless there’s an infinite multiverse, in which case we are in the universe where a monkey wrote out the complete works of Shakespeare. That monkey’s name? Shakespeare. (And yes, many clapped when he did so.)