silent_water [she/her]

yeah, I was lucky to have already taken Classical Mechanics prior to Quantum Mechanics (it wasn’t a prereq so most of my classmates jumped straight into QM), so the math was all perfectly sensible. but the second any prof started trying to use English to interpret the math, I started having these moments where I’d have to sit back and think about the words coming out of their mouths, and sitting with how it was all actually gibberish. Feynman’s “shut up and calculate” started to feel incredibly valid really fast, whereas prior to QM, I was under the impression that physics was natural philosophy. it’s not and QM was the breaking point, at least for me, personally.

they don’t actually spin but they’re little bar magnets as if they do. if you charge a sphere and spin it, you’ll generate exactly the same kind of bar magnet, but they don’t actually spin. and just like bar magnets, like repels like. but they’re neither bar magnets nor spinning. why don’t they spin? because they’re point masses, which don’t have any extent. but actually, you can’t really observe them as point masses because they’re waves.

^^ this was the exact point at which I said quantum mechanics wasn’t for me and I’m done with physics, after completing most of a degree. it sort of all makes sense but at the same time it completely doesn’t. it all makes sense as pure math but the second you try to make sense of the math, sense goes out the window.

yup, you got it. comms are communities, which is why it’s /c/comm_name on lemmy. an unfederated/local-only comm is only visible through the instance that hosts it. you can access it without logging in but only via the hosting instance.

e.g. people from other instances don’t need access to the instance feedback comm and shouldn’t be able to participate in internal discussions about instance policies.

local-only comms landed in Lemmy so our comms for marginalized folks don’t have to deal with the influx of people randomly driving by with soft bigotry. we also got controls for whether DMs are federated or not, which also helps.

there are exactly 4 division algebras (over the field of real numbers): the real numbers, the complex numbers, the quaternions, and the octonians. you can’t add any more complex parts because you lost associativity with the octonians. I’m not entirely sure how the first domino leads to the last, though.

no, it’s not a hypervisor. it’s a a bit of hardware with access to the network stack that allows firmware updates and monitoring (in the “is the computer on/overheating” sense - it gives access to the low level sensors). it’s supposed to be disabled if you don’t pay money to turn it on (ie enterprise customers) but there’s no way to really know because the motherboard chipsets don’t expose access to it. it /shouldn’t/ be able to function because the motherboard needs to cooperate in order to make it function but we don’t really know what the chipsets/bios do/don’t implement. so it’s a theoretical attack vector by the USG.

the AMD version of the same is much more limited and doesn’t even exist on consumer chips, if you don’t buy workstation or server hardware. and if you do buy those, the motherboard exposes the control functions with documentation on which network interfaces it’s able to use. it’s also frequently open spec these days so you can run your own FOSS management firmware. very handy if you e.g. need to access the bios when the video card won’t turn on or your overclock is busto.

Intel is basically just stupid and too lazy to only include the extra silicon in chips where it’s actually possible to use it. and too greedy to open up the specs to make it possible to control it yourself on chips where it can be used. don’t give Intel money. AMD appears to be all in on open source specs and actively contributes to the open firmware/open source bios initiatives so it’s likely that it will become standard on their hardware over the next 5ish years (their code sucks ass so it’s very hard for projects to merge/debug quickly so it’s a slow effort lol).

the x86 instruction set is public. implementing it breaks copyright law, if you aren’t AMD or Intel. it has to be public or compilers/interpreters/assembly code couldn’t exist.

they extended one set of assembly instructions with a bit of another. instruction sets are determined by the hardware and are called the architecture. RISCV is an extensible architecture meaning you can add in additional instructions without breaking compatibility with programs targeting the architecture.

China also appears to be improving on this in real time, though official policy still lags behind e.g. Cuba.

idk, I just know that the old instance already have problems with power users and reifying that will make the problem worse.

I think this was always an intended feature (I’ve certainly been hearing about it for years as something people want/devs want to add), in addition to a user tagging system (i.e. users adding tags to their own usernames (e.g. pronoun tags). the main difference, though, was that it was something the poster or mods/admins could add and not something for the userbase at large to vote on. I think making it a voting system allows abuse. like consider a large group of transphobes adding tags to posts in trans comms, for instance.

a trusted user system is it’s own can of worms.

no, we don’t have downvotes on hexbear and this is what they looked like when we did. it means bad post.

nah, it was a politically conscious choice to set up something like reddit, outside the control of capital and the state. the devs have written about it.

nah, they’re just good at posting. up your game.

unfortunately other data is not encouraging , the number of servers is both down since the exodus and in the recent month.

this is normal. we’ll go through a lot of similar waves. people start servers, realize they’re a lot of work, and then abandon them. servers that foster a healthy community will survive. hexbear’s worst cycle involved losing the entire administrative team just weeks after a large percentage of the website left. don’t sweat the growing pains - work together to learn, grow, and change.

oh interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. thanks!

scaling sort thing? do you have a link describing what you mean?

the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans, suppressed decolonization movements, then partitioned it to form Israel. during the formation of the Israeli state, Palestinians were slaughtered and driven out of their homes in an event known as the Nakba - which translates as “The Catastrophe”. since then, there have been a series of wars resulting in the slow but steady encroachment of the Israeli state - look ip maps of the region over the decades - and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. in such an atmosphere, nothing but mutual hate is possible.

lol the US security apparatus is bad but it’s not that bad. you might get put on a watchlist though.

nothing shitty about it. controlling nukes ends the occupation. Palestine is the greatest concentration camp on earth. there is no price too high to pay to end that. it must end.