silent_water [she/her]

it’s more “lacking organization” than “flat organization”. I’ve worked in both environments - the former is chaos and little, informal fiefdoms. the latter lets you get things done without a ton of oversight.

only until the br*t*sh

Some hindutva people have taken to calling people hijra

I was thinking of this one as well. it makes me unreasonably angry because it was once a celebrated position in society, pre-colonization.

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.

that seems… exploitable… hahaha. how long did it take before people were using it to send banned words around?

ohh interesting. that makes more sense than WoW where even a keyboard doesn’t have enough buttons.

isn’t that an MMO? trying to imagine playing WoW on a steam deck and losing my mind lmao

I want one too but I play so few games that I think it’s just pursuit-of-shiny-toy. if it weren’t linux, I’d already have talked myself out of it. but more linux games means I might actually play something other than Disco Elysium for the Nth time.

it made more sense when custom hardware for games could deliver more consistent results than what was possible from PCs. but that stopped being true in the 2010s so they just started buying the parts from the usual vendors. that’s also one of the reasons consoles got so much more expensive – they’re literally just PCs now and cost at least as much as.

I meant that it doesn’t actually have to emulate much. it just runs the game as if it were native, more similar to how wine works than old school emulators. with the older consoles, it has to translate the instructions from the original code into instructions for the PC hardware and insert software approximations of stuff the hardware does on the physical consoles. this invariably makes what used to take just a few instructions take multiple hundreds of clock cycles or worse.

but on the ps4, it’s just a “fancy”, underpowered desktop pc. (fancy, as in, they talked Intel/AMD into providing a custom version of their normal cpu/gpu that could run within the power/thermal budgets of the ps4 – so it runs slower than it would if you built the computer yourself.) it’s not easy to get the games themselves running as a developer for the emulator – you have to teach your computer how to read the executables and interpret them + provide system library equivalents, but you don’t have to fake entire pieces of hardware that don’t exist.

the ps5 is even further down this path… it’s just a low tier desktop PC running a custom OS built on top of one of the BSD’s (iirc). it’s why the ps5 -> PC ports come out so much faster than previous gens – don’t have to do all that much as a developer to get it working on PC. I’m honestly surprised we don’t have a functional “emulator” for it already.

ps4 might be easier because it’s pretty close to commodity hardware. there’s much less actual emulation that needs to happen. ps3 was weird and bespoke.

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.

yes, this is true. no, this isn’t why wages haven’t kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there’s more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn’t only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you’re just noticing Marx’s second law - the law of capital accumulation.

god he took me so many tries that watching someone attempt the fight made me realize I wore an extremely deep groove into my brain. my shoulder twitches every time you have to dodge two fucking years later.

does he actually input read, though? I remember baiting him with spacing to consistently get free hits and then dying because I got greedy and went in for just one more with a large club that locks you into a swing for an eternity. if you run to the far side of the arena from him, he does the slow, heavily telegraphed flying attack eventually so you dodge under him, let him do a combo in the wrong direction with just enough space that he can’t do the reverse claw/tail swipe thing, watch for his shoulders to relax, immediately jump attack and dodge again as soon as you connect, and break for the opposite side of the arena to rinse and repeat. he always looks like he’s open to one more swing and he will get you if you fall for it.

so I think what he does is entirely in relation to where you are relative to him? dunno though, I wouldn’t put it past them to cheat the difficulty. I’m really bad at reading tells and reacting fast enough so I had to come up with safe strats like that for every fight and just gave up on the game because fuck doing that much work to play a game.

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.