Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • No, I would simply give them a box of condoms or whatever.

    If they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it, and as a parent, you’re way better off with your kids comfortable not hiding it because if there’s complications you can intervene quickly. If the condom broke, you want the kid to come to you so you can get plan B and not have to deal with an abortion a couple weeks or even months later. It’s also way better they get caught doing it at home vs in a car and now be on the sex offender registry.

    What you’re describing is abstinance and is common in religious families, and well know for being ineffective. Plus as you’ve described, it completely falls apart when bisexuality is involved, and it makes even less sense if it’s physically impossible to even get pregnant.

    The same extends to alcohol, drugs, porn, whatever evil vice people are worried. If your kid’s gonna do drugs, you want them to feel comfortable calling you if they have a bad trip, and also feel comfortable giving you the drugs so you can get them to the hospital and they can quickly identify what you’re on and give the necessary medications.

    They’re gonna learn about all that eventually, better they learn it from you. Punishment and “you’ll understand when you’re grown up” doesn’t work. If they’re old enough to ask, they’re old enough for the answers too.


  • At the subatomic scale, things are less particule-like and more wave-like.

    The most famous visualization of this is the double-slit experiment: there’s a source of light, two slits and a wall. There should be two lines right? Nope, you get a wave interference pattern. So which slit did the electron take? Both at the same time, it seems. You can know which path it likely took, but in reality the photon could have taken a detour Taco Bell faster than the speed of light for all we know, as long as the end result doesn’t it’s physically totally fine.

    The crazy part of the experiment is that in order measure which slit the photon actually went through, it would have to interfere with your detector. And because it interacted with your detector, the uncertainty collapses and the whole interference pattern disappears. The measurement causes side effects that affect where it possibly could have gone through. You thus only see paths where it did go through your detector.

    The universe seems to prefer the path of least action. All possible paths are evaluated at the same time, including ones that would violate the speed of light. You won’t catch the universe doing it, but you can observe that photons and electrons make it places they physically shouldn’t be able to, but mathematically, they can and do in the real world. Do they even actually travel any given path? We don’t know, we know it went from A to B with no idea where it was in-between or how fast it went.

    To circle back to your coding example: the particule is a class with getters, but the getters don’t read a property, it makes up the value on the fly. So particule.spin, particule.location and particule.speed would return you the values, but they would be inconsistent. It only materializes on demand when probed, and you can’t get two of them at the same time. When you check you only get one possible value it can have, but you check again and it’s a different value. In C that would be a volatile variable.

    That’s why in atoms you end up with a blurry electron cloud. At this scale, it’s a wave of probable positions, it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

    A quantum state is basically that. It’s not a defined state, it’s an equation of all possible states and how probable it is to be in a given state. The only guarantee you have is that all the state will physically make sense if you measure it, so if you measure the spin of an entangled particule, to stay consistent, the other one will take the opposite state because you can’t catch the universe in a lie. But until you observe that state, it’s both at the same time.

    PBS Space Time is a great channel on YouTube for this.


  • Worth noting that those sites typically use Cloudflare as a way to hide their real servers, both for average users (so you can’t attack the server directly) and law enforcement. You have to get Cloudflare to cooperate and that requires valid court orders from the right countries.

    It’s also a useful double-edged sword: if Cloudflare refuses to cooperate, there’s not much you can do because if you block Cloudflare you also block a ton of legitimate websites, so it forces law enforcement to do a lot of collateral damage. Spain did it, and they ended up blocking a lot of legitimate traffic, upsetting a lot of people. Without Cloudflare they’d just block the pirate site’s IPs and DNS and be done with it.

    The double-edge part is your traffic all goes through Cloudflare, so if they comply and shut you down, you’re shut down until you move to another provider.


  • It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.

    In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn’t have to provide so it’s basically free: you’d use that energy anyway.

    Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.

    I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it’s way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.


  • If you don’t want to be monogamous, don’t, just be polyamorous and date other polyamorous people. It’s a really bad excuse for cheating when there’s plenty of relationship arrangements where this isn’t a problem. There’s no need to deceive unwilling people and cheat on them when you can find partners who think the same as you and you don’t need to cheat on in the first place. You’re still dealing with other people with feelings on the end.

    I’d have to really go out of my way to cheat on my wife when the only rule is to have safe sex (or be safe in general).




  • The language itself has gotten a bit better. It’s not amazing but it’s decent for a scripting language, and very fast compared to most scripting languages. TypeScript can also really help a lot there, it’s pretty good.

    It’s mostly the web APIs and the ecosystem that’s kinda meh, mostly due to its history.

    But what you dislike has nothing to do with JavaScript but just big corpo having way too many developers iterating way too fast and creating a bloated mess of a project with a million third-party dependencies from npm. I’m not even making this up, I’ve legit seen a 10MB unit test file make it into the production bundle in a real product I consulted on.

    You don’t have to use React or Svelte or any of the modern bloated stuff nor any of the common libraries. You can write plain HTML and CSS and a sprinkle of JavaScript and get really good results. It’s just seen as “bad practice” because it doesn’t “webscale”, but if you’re a single developer it’s perfectly adequate. And the reality is short of WebAssembly, you’re stuck with JS anyway, and WASM is its own can of worms.

    And even then, React isn’t that bad. There’s just one hell of a lot of very poorly written React apps, in big part because it will let you get away with it. It’s full of footguns loaded with blanks, but it’s really not aweful if you understand how it works under the hood and write good code. Some people are just lazy and import something and you literally load the same data in 5 different spots, twice if you have strict mode enabled. I’ve written apps that load instantly and respond instantly even on a low end phone, because I took the time to test it, identify the bottlenecks and optimize them all. JavaScript can be stupid fast if you design your app well. If you’re into the suckless philosophy, you can definitely make a suckless webapp.

    What you hate is true for most commercial software written in just about any language, be it C, C++, Java, C#. Bugs and faster response times don’t generate revenue, new features and special one-off event features generate much much more revenue, so minor bugs are never addressed for the most part. And of course all those features end up effectively being the 90% bloat you never use but still have to load as part of the app.


  • No, because it’s a balancing act. There’s fraud everywhere, it’s just how things are. It’s not worth spending more than it gets back in the name of moral purity.

    The allegations of widespread fraud usually have an ulterior motive other than cutting down fraud. It’s usually about the group of people needing the service as a whole and demonizing them with fraud allegations to cut down important social services. Nobody ever talks about banking fraud, stocks fraud, even when done by the literal president. It’s always poor people on welfare programs, food stamps, healthcare that are somehow “the problem”.

    I couldn’t care less about poor people not declaring the 10h of work they managed to find, it’s literally impossible to survive on food stamps and welfare without doing undeclared work and if you do declare it you just get penalized more than you earned. It’s a system designed for you to not escape out of.




  • Why is this always the argument that comes up? It’s like if foreign people came by thousands to post the 9/11 attacks on american media to test the free speech. Most would take it down, some might stay up, but it’s ultimately still very disrespectful and upsetting for a lot of people.

    You can enjoy a heavily moderated platform for what it’s good at. I use rednote for my cat, food and art content and enjoy the cultural exchange. There are better suited apps in general for free speech and political debate. I’m tired of politics invading every platform, so it’s been rather nice in that aspect. For what I want to use that app for, I’m perfectly fine with the CCP’s rules, even if I disagree with some aspects of the CCP.

    Free speech is important, but we don’t need it literally everywhere.


  • No FOSS clients, nobody’s got time to reverse engineer it as it happened so fast.

    As for privacy, well, it uses plain HTTP for at least all the media, so, not very private. It requests less permissions than Meta’s apps however, and only asks when the feature is needed (for example, the Nearby page requests GPS which makes sense). It does seem to like to paste my clipboard which is not very cool, no idea what it’s doing with it. I use a VPN for it.

    It’s still a chinese app under the control of the CCP. Personally, I’d rather China have my data than the US, because at least for China it’s useless whereas with the current administration in the US, who knows what they do with that data.

    As for the app itself, it’s pretty nice. Don’t expect free speech, but the rules also make it for a rather respectful and positive experience overall. For what it’s intended to be (share cats, recipes, makeup, and other entertainment content) it’s pretty good and a breath of fresh air compared to the non-stop political fighting on other platforms. That said it’s not as censored as some assume it is: if it’s presented tastefully you can usually get away with it. Respect and honesty gets you far on there whereas lies and aggression gets you banned. I’ve seen guns, LGBTQ, cars, religion, politics, comparing capitalism and communism. They’re talking about Elon’s nazi salute on there and all.

    The massive cultural exchange going on there is quite enjoyable. People from all sorts of countries are trying out new recipes and adapting them to their local taste. Turns out mandarin isn’t so bad to learn either. Very welcoming community. Rumors are it made the chinese government consider relaxing the great firewall. The sentiment is very anti-war as people from enemy countries are building online friendships.

    I approach it with caution, but I’ve been rather please with what I see.



  • That’s exactly what it’s for. Some of them have background music on them, to get it misclassified. Some also put a random face at the bottom with the same phrases every now and then to get it classified as a reaction video. I’ve also seen black lines in the middle of the screen. Sometimes the clip jumps forwards and backwards to make it harder to detect.

    I think the subway surfer thing was also originally intended for that, before it was found that it somehow also increases attention. The split between the videos also makes it harder to identify what it is, so maybe it’ll get classified as a minecraft clip instead of copyrighted movie.

    People go to insane length to post full movies and shows on YT Shorts/TikTok/Instagram. It’s like early YouTube again where you’d watch and episode over 50 parts.


  • It has its bads and a lot of the content is worthless trash, but it’s also a really good way to see what’s going on around the world from those people’s perspectives. You see a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to Reddit or Twitter.

    It’s a lot harder to be against Ukraine when you can see the horrors minutes after a Russian strike.

    The government hates it because they can’t control it. They’d rather people only see what the mainstream media says, and not the fact everyone sympathizes with Luigi.

    The free speech argument is genuine, despite how much I hate the shady practices of the platform.