Day ???/??? of downvoting every post with advertiser-friendly censorship in it.

I wouldn’t generally require people to “compile their findings into a report”, but in this case the messages are weirdly devoid of any checkable information and then the reddit user in question mysteriously lost a laptop full of findings, so, yeah, these claims are not compelling. I don’t think the reverse engineer in question was lying, per se, but I do think they were very wrong at first by random chance, the story gained traction, and then they were too embarrassed to admit they fucked up.

Sort of true, but the algorithm that Reddit-like platforms use is transparent and simple (it’s just based on likes and dislikes, and I think you can even look up the source for the sorting modes) and hence doesn’t directly try to feed you content that’d enrage you. I can just not read the posts about Musk and Trump, since I find most takes on the former bad and don’t care much about the latter. Meanwhile, on platforms like Twitter or Tiktok you are directly fed content out of some recommendation ML model trained on user engagement.

(There’s also subtler differences. For example, on Reddit/Lemmy/etc, if you hate a post you can dislike it, which will generally make it show up less to people. But on, say, Tumblr, not only are there no dislikes, but if you are really hate a post you can only respond to it by reposting it, therefore spreading it further among your followers! That’s an absolutely devious platform-design move that could have been invented directly by Satan himself.)

I see. No, I don’t think I have any specific questions at this point.

Is there some feature comparison of lemmy vs mbin vs other reddit-like platforms? There was some major reason why I didn’t like kbin, but I forgot why.

That’s true, though the simple solution is to not be on such platforms. You do not have to let them “shove it in your face until you can’t help it”.

…that’s not fascism and not genocide denialism. Comments like yours are exactly the reason why the words “fascist”, “genocide” and many others don’t mean anything anymore, instead being used as generic terms to insult one’s ideological opponents with.

What is happening with this image? The quality is low because OP lazily reposted it from some other secondary source, but what’s that yellow rectangle?

the Winnie the Pooh comments are racist though

That’s a strange assumption to make. “Because it’s forbidden in China” is a sufficient explanation of why people do this. For the exact same reason people will forever keep bringing up the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

It’s only Chaotic if you use it carelessly, OP, rather than to build your Lawful Evil Empire of Poop.

Teledoctor*, unless you’re planning to only use it on people if they convert to your religion.

Huh, that’s a fun thought. If the bird flu turns into a pandemic (there’s a prediction market that gives 16% for it, which is pants-shittingly terrifyingly high), we’ll get to see how the Trump administration deals with one. And that… can go various ways.

On one hand, there’s tons of anti-vaxxers in the Trump voting base and presumably this will affect the government, which is concerning. But on the other hand, one of the biggest problems in the COVID handling was when FDA stopped people from using already-created vaccines for idiotic bureaucracy considerations while people were literally dying by the million. That’s the sort of thing that could go a lot better with just one presidential decision speeding it up, and there’s a bunch of new people with power in the government now, like Elon Musk. Muskrat is a horrible person and kind of insane in some ways, but not stupid and I think he’d notice and act upon an opportunity like that. So I’m not totally pessimistic about how a new pandemic would go, either.

“The crusades are an example of capitalist oppression” sure is a hot take.

I can’t tell if this is a joke or real code

Yes.

Will that repo seriously run until it finds where that is in pi?

Sure. It’ll take a very long while though. We can estimate roughly how long - encoded as ASCII and translated to hex your sentence looks like 54686520636174206973206261636b. That’s 30 hexadecimal digits. So very roughly, one of each 16^30 30-digit sequences will match this one. So on average, you’d need to look about 16^30 * 30 ≈ 4e37 digits into π to find a sequence matching this one. For comparison, something on the order of 1e15 digits of pi were ever calculated.

so you can look it up quickly?

Not very quickly, it’s still n log n time. More importantly, information theory is ruthless: there exist no compression algorithms that have on average a >1 compression coefficient for arbitrary data. So if you tried to use π as compression, the offsets you get would on average be larger than the data you are compressing. For example, your data here can be written written as 30 hexadecimal digits, but the offset into pi would be on the order of 4e37, which takes ~90 hexadecimal digits to write down.

You generate it when needed, using one of the known sequences that converges to π. As a simple example, the pi() recipe here shows how to compute π to arbitrary precision. For an application like pifs you can do even better and use the BBP formula which lets you directly calculate a specific hexadecimal digit of π.

It’s not much of a stupid question even given that - for a refractive medium, speed of light can change with its movement. Though for air it’ll be extremely hard to directly notice; it has n≈1.0003 so speed of light in air is already 0.9997c, and increasing it to, say, 0.9998c would require moving the air at 0.166c.