[-] [email protected] 9 points 22 hours ago

Given the rumours surrounding the CEO of Twitter, and how he may have pushed for his account to be prioritised because the algorithm knocked it down for being blocked so much, this feature doesn't seem like it has long for the world, unless he makes them add an exception for him.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Assuming that they went out to look for it, and didn't just poke google with ("sqlite hacked my computer") until they found a phone number.

If they had gotten the phone number for a company called Super Queasy Lite and Easy/SQLitE instead of the developers, the company might well have received the calls instead.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's... it? You can get knighted for being "fairly good" at your job for half a decade, and then quitting?

Yes. Knighthood is generally up to the whims of the monarch. Although to make it there, it's generally expected you have an achievement significant enough to be befitting of one.

But from what I recall, there's little stopping his majesty from conferring a knighthood onto Chief Mouser Larry for his research into the napping suitability of 10 Downing Street's furniture, if he wanted to do that.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Is there a Wrong Dishonourable title?

[-] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago

I don't know, it kind of makes sense, since Kagi can tailor itself to a specific audience, whereas something big like Google will just make a generalised slop that is able to be used by anyone, but isn't to anyone's particular tastes.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It was an Australian Senator that said that in a comment about housing affordability for young people, about them being able to afford a deposit if they weren't so frivolous with money.

Ironically, totting that up, and assuming that they buy that every day ceaselessly, and that the cafe never closes, it's only 10 grand, and Australian housing prices are high enough that in most places, that's not even enough for a 5% deposit for a $500,000 home. You would only be half-way there.

You'd still not be able to afford the mortgage, even after buying said home.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

It can depend on your particular part of the tech-sphere. I barely saw anything about either of those, because I wasn't all that interested in AI things, and didn't really follow the kind of people who would talk about it. At most, it was a quick flash in the pan before it was overshadowed by other news.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

China is already trying quite hard with its Great Firewall. We don't need to make their job easier for them.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Crack enough eggs, and you won't have any left for the omelette.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Wrong battery. You're thinking the high-voltage EV battery, but in this case, it was the 12V lead-acid accessory battery that died. Normally, that would be charged from the high voltage battery, if the car was running.

In this case, it might just have been bad luck with a worn-out battery.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The toddler was strapped into the seat at the time, so chances are that they would not be able to find and open the door that way anyhow.

6
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

In our world, the police going to a spirit medium for the DL-6 case, and being ridiculed might be logical, since spirit channelling isn't a real thing, but in the world of Ace Attorney, it is.

Not only is it a known and established practice, with detectable physical effects, but the monarchy of at least one country is specifically sought out for their spirit-channelling powers by other governments, so that they can commune with the dead, and receive advice that way.

However, it also seems to be disbelieved, and ridiculed as a pseudoscience, despite that.

8
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.

72
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

You wouldn't start off an e-mail with "My Dear X", or "Dearest X", since that would be too personal for a professional email, so "To X" being more impersonal seems like it would make the letter more professional-sounding, compared to "Dear X".

12
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Doctor Who zips all the way up and down through time, popping in at any time and place. If you don't have a time machine to follow them around with, it should be impossible to keep track of which incarnation was where. And yet, the Doctor's enemies somehow manage to do just that, with the Daleks being accurate enough to determine he was on his last regeneration on Trenzalore.

5
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

One of the options for students enrolling into Hogwarts, if they come from a wizarding family, is that they have the option of using a hand-me-down wand. But short of wands being damaged beyond repair, we don't see many people replacing them, even though it happens enough that hand-me-downs are a valid option for new students.

So how long does one last? Does a wizard normally use one wand in their lifetime, or is it the kind of thing where an old, worn-out wand is fine for schoolwork, but you'd need something newer/better for adult life?

102
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?

It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).

15
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

You often see people in fitness mention going through a cut/bulk cycle, or mention one, with plans to follow up with the other. Why is it that cutting and bulking so often happen in cycles, rather than said person just doing both at once, until they hit their desired weight?

13
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

While we hear of the TARDIS having engines that are implicitly essential to it working, we've also see a TARDIS work without the rest of the machine.

"The Doctor's Wife" and "Inferno" show that a TARDIS is capable of operating as just the console, which would seem to imply that they're just a power source to allow the console to do its thing and move the whole ship around, or to allow for the pilot to do silly things like tow an entire planet one second out of phase.

24
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

One of the recent laws in Trek that gets looked at a bit, is the genetic engineering ban within the Federation. It appears to have been passed as a direct result of Earth's Eugenics Wars, to prevent a repeat, and seems to have been grandfathered into Federation law, owing to the hand Earth had in its creation.

But we also see that doing so came with major downsides. The pre-24th century version of the law applied a complete ban on any genetic modification of any kind, and a good faith attempt to keep to that resulted in the complete extinction of the Illyrians.

In Enterprise, Phlox specifically attributes the whole issue with the Eugenics Wars to humans going overboard with the idea of genetic engineering, as they are wont to do, trying to improve/perfect the human species, rather than using it for the more sensible goal of eliminating/curing genetic diseases.

Strange New Worlds raises the question of whether it was right for Earth to enshrine their own disasters with genetic engineering in Federation law like that, particularly given that a fair few aliens didn't have a problematic history with genetic engineering, and some, like the Illyrians, and the Denobulans, used it rather liberally, to no ill-effects.

At the same time, people being augmented with vast powers in Trek seems to inevitably go poorly. Gary Mitchell, Khan Noonien-Singh, and Charlie X all became megalomaniacs because of the vast amount of power that they were able to access, although both Gary and Charlie received their powers through external intervention, and it is unclear whether Khan was the exception to the rule, having been born with that power, and knowing how to use it properly. Similarly, the Klingon attempt at replicating the human augment programme was infamous, resulting in the loss of their famous forehead ridges, and threatening the species with extinction.

Was the Federation right to implement Earth's ban on genetic engineering, or is it an issue that seems mostly human/earth-centric, and them impressing the results of their mistakes on the Federation itself?

6
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

One of the ways that you can find out whether a child has magic or not, is to see whether they are able to use it subconsciously, such as by defenestrating them, and seeing if they stop themselves from being killed. But once they get their wands, that use of subconscious magic seems to stop entirely.

Logically, you would expect students to fire off similar magic when their lives were at risk, or their emotions ran particularly high. Is it a function of having the wand that stops it, or is it just a matter of that only happening for really young mages, and that they learn to control themselves as they enter childhood?

20
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

When we're introduced to the Stargate, it's in the early-mid 90s, so them needing a big, bulky computer system would make sense, but as the show progresses, we see Tau'ri computer technology develop, either conventionally in the form of laptops like what the Atlantis team use, or computer crystals like what they fitted onto their starships.

Through it all, however, the SGC continues to use the same computer with comparatively dated hardware. Why keep it, instead of upgrading it to something more modern? Especially since one of the main issues that the SGC kept facing was that their dialling computer was not sophisticated enough to respond to some of the status codes put out by the stargate, causing all kinds of unpredictable behaviour.

7
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Can humans eat it? Do they have food at all? What do they have as a staple foodstuff?

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T156

joined 1 year ago