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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner



  • not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

    with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

    with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

    with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

    so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

    the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

    and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8




  • kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

    dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work




  • a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing

    blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily

    if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see




  • as usual with this shit show of a conflict, it seems both sides are awful: hamas used the hospital as a command post which means israel has to be able to attack it, however attacking it with indiscriminate shelling is absolutely unacceptable

    both entities are completely unacceptable… debating which one is more so is outrageous, and if anyone “sides” with either one they’re morally corrupt, brainwashed, or too stupid to comprehend anything but binaries



  • i make porn

    i’ve spent thousands of dollars on camera equipment

    i post it online, in 4k, for free, and there’s no way to pay me for the content

    i do it because i like the exhibitionism (among other things)

    i do it because in the sex-positive communities i prefer to associate with, it’s like posting your day to facebook

    i do it because the camera pushes me to imagine new and interesting things to do

    i do it because it helps me meet people with similar tastes that aren’t flakey and are equally sex positive and non-judgemental

    there’s an enormous amateur community (that often becomes professional) that makes porn because they want to… money is a nice thing to help buy new gear for porn, but it’s not the primary concern






  • as aStonedSanata mentioned, different tech isn’t what we’re talking about: fibre shouldn’t be limited to the speeds of, say ADSL or cable to keep things neutral

    what we’re talking about here is, for example, netflix paying your ISP to prioritise traffic to their service over other services… this causes an enormous disadvantage to new startups, because they likely can’t afford to pay a similar fee or even enter into complex agreements with every carrier! in which case, netflix has a better service not because they’re better: just because they’re incumbent

    of course these kind of things happen all over the place, but it’s the exact failure of capitalist systems that governments should seek to patch with regulations (like net neutrality) because it’s not good for consumers, the economy, or innovation… which are all the very things that capitalism is meant to promote!