To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

0.1% chance would be huge. That kind of probability is an unacceptable risk even just for a personal injury, let alone the destruction of all life on earth.

In some countries, zero is neither positive nor negative. But in others, it is both positive and negative. So saying the set of natural number is the same as non-negative [integers] doesn’t really help. (Also, obviously not everyone would even agree that with that definition regardless of whether zero is negative.)

Hence the username, I guess. :p

It’s pretty easy to imagine fusion being great - but it’s still just in our imaginations. No one has yet been able to build a working fusion power plant. There has been progress over the decades that people have tried, but its still a way to go yet. So although we can imagine that it could produce clean and plentiful energy, we just comparing sci-fi tech to current tech. The future reality might not be so great, and the current reality is that fusion power isn’t possible at all.

To illustrate my point, lets imagine solar power from a ‘theoretical’ point of view, like fusion is described. Solar power uses no fuel; gets its power from sunlight. There is enough energy coming from the sun to meet the whole world’s energy needs with just reality small amount of area. Solar power produces no waste biproducts… So if we just imagine the benefits of solar power, it sounds pretty much perfect. In in reality though, although solar is very good, it is still far from perfect. Construction, maintenance, and disposal of the panels are where the costs are. And so to compare to fusion, we’d need to know what it would take to build, maintain, and disposal of the fusion power plants. Currently we can’t do it at all - so the costs are basically infinite. But even if our tech improves to the point where it is possible… it’s hard to imagine it will be easy or cheap - especially because there will be radioactive waste. (Radioactive waste not from the fuel, but from the walls and shielding of the reactor, as it absorbs high-energy particles produced by the operation of the power plant.)

Over the years, Microsoft has been quietly taking away control from the users.

There’s been a transition from normal settings that you can do whatever you want with, to “yes / remind me later” settings that Microsoft uses to badger you until you submit, to finally just no setting at all - just quiet compulsory data collection and surveillance; with various bits of mysterious software that you can’t uninstall or disable or halt - because you’re not the admin - Microsoft is.

It wasn’t always this way.

Right. And for people who try to argue that they shouldn’t be forced to choose between people they like like, or whatever, it’s important to understand that it is only mandatory to get your name ticked off the list. You don’t actually have to submit a valid vote. You can choose to just turn in a blank ballot paper, or write “fuck you” or whatever you like. There are no laws against that.

So the ‘mandatory voting’ just makes it mandatory to put in the small amount of effort required to show up; but doesn’t force you to express an opinion. (Of course, I’d say that you should submit a valid vote. But you don’t have to.)

The examples I gave were that the expansion of brackets would be done differently if the order of operations was “PESADM”; and I also drew your attention to the fact that reverse polish notation exists, in which there are no brackets at all and the order of operation is entirely determined by the order that operators appear, with no hierarchy of operations. As for your appeal to authority, let me just say that your level of qualification on this topic is not above mine. It adds no weight whatsoever to your argument.

I just glanced at your post history to get a sense of why you were so engaged in this. I was a bit startled to see that you’ve been on a bit of a posting spree in this thread, which I point out to you is a 3 month old post on a ‘memes’ channel. I see you’ve taken issue with a lot of what people have said here. My suggestion to you now is that there probably won’t be a lot of engagement in this thread from this point on. So perhaps you should just ponder what is said, and prepare yourself again for next time this comes up. Perhaps you can start by seeing if you can get a consensus amongst fellow experts in a maths channel or something, because at the moment it seems like you’re on your own.

Hey man, if you want to resort to some weird appeal to authority argument despite having clear examples against what you are saying - go for it. You can choose to die on that hill if you want to.

I believe you’re conflating the rules of maths with the notation we use to represent mathematical concepts. We can choose whatever notation we like to mean anything we like. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from choosing to interpret a+b×c as (a+b)×c rather than a+(b×c). We don’t even have to write it like that at all. We could write a,b,c×+. (And sometimes people do write it like that.) Notation is just a way to communicate. It represents the maths, but it is not itself the maths. Some notation is more convenient or more intuitive than others. × before + is a very convenient choice, because it easier to express mathematical truths clearly and concisely - but nevertheless, it is still just a choice.

Obviously more letters would make the mnemonic worse, not better. I was making a joke.

As for the brackets ‘the rules around expanding brackets’ are only meaningful in the assumed context of our order of operations. For example, if we instead all agreed that addition should be before multiplication, then a×(b+c) would “expand” to a×b+c, because the addition is before multiplication anyway and the brackets do nothing.

We could study what various apes do, and try to use that to guess at possible human behaviour - or we could literally just look at human behaviour directly. Surely the direct observations of what humans do is going to give us a more accurate and useful model of human behaviour compared to observations of other species.

I first tried Linux around two decades ago, and it felt clunky to me - so I didn’t stick with it. I tried again around one decade ago; and it was a lot better, but I still didn’t quite have enough reason to keep using it yet. … But now, finally, I tried again several months ago - and I’m definitely sticking with it. I’m currently using Mint.

There are still some thing that I think are worse in Mint compared to Windows. But there is a lot of stuff that’s much better. It’s more than enough that I don’t expect to ever switch back to Windows again. The main thing is avoiding all the anti-features of Windows, such as the constant nagging to switch to Edge or activate their search bar; and the ads & other cruft in the start menu; and the constant little popups and ‘reminders’ about new stuff; and the lack of control in when updates are installed; and the ubiquitous harvesting of personal information, including ‘telemetry’ of which apps you run and when.

For me, one of the last straws was when I clicked on a help link from Windows settings, and it automatically opened in Edge, and Edge then automatically imported my browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox and automatically uploaded it to my Microsoft account. I was horrified that it would do something like that without any interaction whatsoever. I didn’t even think Edge had access to my Microsoft account until then, because I deliberately avoid using one to sign in, or for any other reason - the only reason it exists is because I used OneNote. I wanted the account to be isolated to just the app I used it for; not to automatically be grabbed by the whole OS and then used to collect my browsing history.

So yeah. I’d spent years of maintaining an ever-growing list of little system tweaks that I used to keep as junk off Windows as possible. But I’ve had enough. It’s too much. It’s not even close to being worth it. Linux has some minor problems, and some things take a bit of getting use to. But at least it isn’t systematically hostile.

A nice thing about GOG is that you can choose whether or not you use their launcher. You can use GOG Galaxy, and it will download game updates and sync saves. or you can just not use it; and just launch the games directly. Or you can put shortcuts to the gog games into steam and launch them from there. Or you can launch your steam games from galaxy if you like. … I appreciate that kind of stuff a lot, because although I think Steam does a good job, I’m very wary of lock-in and companies becoming too powerful.

(And of course, for real indie games, itch.io is the place to go.)

I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.

We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.

Ah, but if you use the rules BODMSA (or PEDMSA) then you can follow the letter order strictly, ignoring the equal precedence left-to-right rule, and you still get the correct answer. Therefore clearly we should start teaching BODMSA in primary schools. Or perhaps BFEDMSA. (Brackets, named Functions, Exponentiation, Division, Multiplication, Subtraction, Addition). I’m sure that would remove all confusion and stop all arguments. … Or perhaps we need another letter to clarify whether implicit multiplication with a coefficient and no symbol is different to explicit multiplication… BFEIDMSA or BFEDIMSA. Shall we vote on it?

You’re unlikely to be in conversation with hundreds of millions of people at a time; or even thousands of people. Conversations happen with just a handful of people. So those platforms with billions of people perhaps allow for some ultra-niche subgroups, but otherwise are just providing a lot of low-value noise with the additional people.

Yeah. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Steam, and there’s a lot of high-value stuff. The mod workshop is great. Linux support is top-tier. There’s a lot of good stuff. The only major bad thing from my point of view is lock-in. Having a vast library of games tied to one account isn’t great. And having publishers and mod-makers etc essentially forced to rely on that platform is not good. Steam itself is good - but consolidation of power is generally a bad thing.

For that reason, most of my new games have been coming from GOG over the last couple of years. GOG’s DRM free policy means there’s basically no lock-in effect. That’s a major strength, even if some of their other features aren’t as strong as Steam.

‘Average user’ just means all traits proportionally blended together, right? Lemmy users are not a huge part of the internet, but our contribution to the ‘average’ is just a big as any other person; and our opinions and knowledge and behaviour does matter. Some might argue that the opinions of tech-focused people matter more because they are more likely to influence other people about tech decisions.

So yeah, we’re a niche group - but the discussion and sharing of ideas is important.