• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • For example, carbon dating took discoveries including counting tree rings to determine a tree’s age, the origins of all the radiation on Earth – spoiler: it was the Earth itself, but also cosmic rays which was the important bit, nuclear half-lives and creating a chart of specifically useful half-lives for historical dating, the discovery of a rare isotope of carbon which can only be made by cosmic rays (carbon-14) as a near perfect clock for human timescales, how to build a sensor that can read faint carbon-14 radioactivity while filtering out all the radioactive noise from the environment, making another chart of expected radioactive readings based on geographical location including the depths of the ocean, and of course not to mention all of the archeological data used to calibrate all of the charts and devices used in the process.



  • Being excited about being wrong because either way it’s information

    This literally is the basis of science that I think a lot of people misunderstand. Science doesn’t prove anything conclusively. What scientists try to do is disprove the leading theory and when they can’t, it adds to the pile of evidence that increases the likelyhood of the leading theory being correct. Even things that we’re very, very, very sure are correct are still like 99.99999999999…% confirmed.

    A good example that’s often used to show how it’s more important to try to disprove a theory rather than trying to prove it is the existence of black swans. It was long thought that all swans were white and every time someone saw a white swan, that idea was reinforced. But when someone actually went out of their way to go looking for a black swan, they found a bunch of them!





  • Star Trek really has 2 different genres, there’s action/adventure and there’s real hard sci-fi where philosophy is at the forefront. Voyager generally appeals more to the action/adventure fans, whereas the previous iterations appeared like the entire series was heading in a more philosophical direction with TOS to TNG to DS9 increasing in their thoughtfulness. VOY was seen as a huge backslide to people who were tuning in largely for the philosophical aspect of the show.

    Considering there was and still are very few popular philosophical and thought provoking shows that challenge the viewer’s world view and biases, I think it’s fair to be upset that the new direction of the show is to dumb down everything and focus more on the action.

    Of course, that’s not to say that Voyager was completely devoid of any philosophical debate, but I don’t think anyone can make the case that it’s equally as intelligent as TNG and DS9.




  • LTS just means Long Term Support in case you weren’t aware. It means no new development is happening, but security exploits will be patched as soon as they arise.

    If you just want stability, LTS is the way to go. If you want all the cutting edge bells and whistles and are okay with potentially some instability (but probably not much) then use the latest version.

    If your device isn’t connected to the internet during general use then I wouldn’t worry too much about updating anything. Security fixes aren’t important if there’s no way to connect to your device.


  • Looks like an article paid for by Epic.

    Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:

    My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

    There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.

    As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

    Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

    They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.


  • I don’t really get the appeal of strongly typed languages. Can’t you just use try/catch blocks, and/or use functional programming and return early if the data structure of whatever you’re working with isn’t what you expected?

    I guess it can help older code easier to maintain because the expected data structure is right there, but you could also just include it in a comment above the function.

    I personally find TS slows down initial production of a project and raises so many unnecessary errors.

    Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing? Because I don’t really get the appeal. I mean, I do on some level, but I don’t really understand why so many people are absolutely obsessed with TS.




  • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.iotoScience Memes@mander.xyzHuh??
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    54
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    They’re talking about determining the origin of a sound. They’re saying if a sound originates from anywhere on the line of the cone shape it becomes impossible to decipher where it originated accurately. Humans actually have decent vertical echolocation, but just like dogs do when they’re trying to vertically echolocate we can also just face the approximate sound origin and tilt our heads to improve echolocation accuracy because our brains use the difference in elevation between our left and right ears to pinpoint the sound’s location.