This is obvious though — currently, you might test a drug on mice, then on primates, and finally on humans (as an example). It would be faster to skip the early bits and go straight to human testing.

…but that is very, very, very wrong. Science of course doesn’t care about right and wrong, nor does it care if you “believe” in it, which is the beautiful thing about science — so a scientifically sound experiment is a scientifically sound experiment regardless of ethical considerations. (Which does not mean we should be doing it of course!)

Now, taking a step back, maybe you’re right that, in the long run, throwing ethics out the window would actually slow things down, as it would (rightfully) cause backlash. But that’s getting into a whole “sociology of science” discussion.

I miss the days when that X font was only associated with Xorg…

This is all based, most likely, on Griffiths’ textbook. Quoting here from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1b97gt/magnetic_fields_do_no_work_but_magnetic_cranes/ :

The statement “magnetic fields do no work” is incorrect. Griffiths has mislead a generation of physics students on this. A correct version of the statement is that “magnetic fields do no work on objects with no magnetic moments” which is rather trivial. One could also correctly make the same statement about electric fields. However, electric monopoles are very common, so a situation in which there are no electric moments never occurs in normal circumstances.

tl;dr: use Jackson ;)

Or it’s rage baiting/humor 🤷

Unity centered around what?

Participation. Making things a tiny bit better when possible, and if not that, then minimizing damage.

Making things better nationally is hard. But locally, change can be efffected — my city (San Francisco) has ranked choice voting for local offices. It’s awesome, and I vote for who I want first. It’s small, but it’s a start.

Depends on the person — when the pandemic hit I was a grad student, we didn’t have kids, and our living situation was nice (tiny studio but it had a wonderful, if small, outdoor space). Scary times for sure, but life — at least the day to day — was…pretty good!

Now we have kids, and my god, I can’t imagine.

Jobs created toxic work environments.

…and so did Linus Torvalds* — he’s certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don’t approve of his way of interpersonal/professional style.

(I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)

*He’s supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.

Not sure if trolling or not, but googling around and it sounds like Sensory Processing Disorders can cause this level of passionate hatred towards bananas…

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

There’s also the very real issue of rail priority: https://www.marketplace.org/2024/09/10/amtrak-spars-with-freight-train-industry-over-rules-of-the-railroad/

Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It’s…complicated.

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.

But this is a weird thing to lie about — the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, “it’s ok to buy off brand cartridges,” then…well… that’s kinda weird.

Not saying you’re wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I’m just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.

Brother deny the claims: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.

Did the DNC’s strategy work? No? Then the Democrats were wrong.

So you’re saying that no matter what happens, it’s never my fault. Yay!

(/s)

The voters faced a trolly problem. While Trump was busy tying more and more people to the track, the Democrats left a few on the track, and the voters decided that they couldn’t stomach the choice, so they sat it out. And now we get this.

The Democrats have blood on their hands, sure, but so does every person who didn’t vote yet bemoans the Trump presidency.

For many things I completely agree.

That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.

Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.