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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This is true, but…

    Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

    So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

    You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

    And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

    Same curve.

    Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

    The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

    Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

    Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

    While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.







  • HamsterRagetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt's a choice
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    14 days ago

    You’re not going to split hairs out of this one. Trying to say that these are not Evangelicals because no true Evangelical would do this is pretty much the "No True Scotsman " evasion. When people say, “Evangelicals”, this is exactly the group to which they are referring.

    The one or two “True Evangelicals” in the US can consider themselves exempt from this thread.


  • HamsterRagetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt's a choice
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    14 days ago

    There’s a bit of “No True Scotsman”, going on here I think. You cannot deny what we all see every day, Evangelicals working every day to suppress LGBTQ and women’s rights. That’s what they do, that’s what they are.

    [Edit for typo]





  • Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

    Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

    I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

    I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.




  • Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

    I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

    Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.





  • Agreed, but I don’t know the mindset of those people and how to think of them. Do we just take them out of the voter pool? Are they potentially swing?

    My take on 2016 was that the Dems were deeply unenthusiastic about Hillary - and who can blame them - so they didn’t show up to vote. On the other hand the Reps were stoked about Trump so they turned up at the polls.

    Swing voters? I don’t get it. I cannot see any rational person sitting in the middle comparing Trump and Harris and picking Trump as a better presidential option. Irrational people? My gut tells me they they are probably sitting and the far ends of either camp.

    My guess is that the people closer to the middle aren’t actually swing voters, but they are far more likely to have their enthusiasm to vote influenced than the true believers.

    The big question, in my opinion, is how much - or how little - the polls reflect the enthusiasm to go out and vote. My impression is that Dem enthusiasm in high right now, while not so much for the Reps. It’s possible that a 50/50 poll may hide the fact that a big chunk of one of the 50% is much less likely to actually vote.

    I’m Canadian, so I see the news but I don’t have day to day experience with US voters. Of course, neither do the 90% of Americans that don’t live in those swing states.