My favorite episode of the season so far. It was just fun.

I loved Encyclopedia Brown when I was a kid, and I enjoyed seeing Leela and Bender play Sally and Leroy.

I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Now that you mention it, yeah, I wonder if they haven’t updated recently.

Isn’t the 7950X3D the best at basically everything? I mean, disregarding value per dollar, it’s still better than any of the other Ryzens for gaming, isn’t it?

https://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a good starting point.

If you want to beat the PS5 Pro in terms of raw performance, you’ll probably want to look at the “great” tier and higher. It’s hard to say now since we don’t have any real-world benchmarks to go by.

$700 seems like a lot for a PS5 Pro, but if it’s really as powerful as they claim then it will still compare well to PCs under $1k.

I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.

Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.

Same on macOS. Apple has “case-sensitive HFS+” as an option for UNIX compatibility (or at least they used to) but actually running a system on it is a bad idea in general.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

Ranging from frames per second to seconds per frame.

For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

I don’t think there’s any way to count years without rooting it somewhere arbitrary. We cannot calculate the age of the planet, the sun, or the universe to the accuracy of a year (much less a second or nanosecond). We cannot define what “modern man” is to a meaningful level of accuracy, either, or pin down the age of historical artifacts.

Most computers use a system called “epoch time” or “UNIX time”, which counts the seconds from January 1, 1970. Converting this into a human-friendly date representation is surprisingly non-trivial, since the human timekeeping systems in common use are messy and not rooted in hard math or in the scientific definition of a second, which was only standardized in 1967.

Tom Scott has an amusing video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

There is also International Atomic Time, which, like Unix Time, counts seconds from an arbitrary date that aligns with the Gregorian calendar. Atomic Time is rooted at the beginning of 1958.

ISO 8601 also aligns with the Gregorian calendar, but only as far back as 1582. The official standard does not allow expressing dates before that without explicit agreement of definitions by both parties. Go figure.

The core problem here is that a year, as defined by Earth’s revolution around the sun, is not consistent across broad time periods. The length of a day changes, as well. Humans all around the world have traditionally tracked time by looking at the sun and the moon, which simply do not give us the precision and consistency we need over long time periods. So it’s really difficult to make a system that is simple, logical, and also aligns with everyday usage going back centuries. And I don’t think it is possible to find any zero point that is truly meaningful and independent of wishy-washy human culture.

The linked article focuses on Mastodon. I’d be interested to hear more about how this relates to Lemmy in your experience.

If you can accept the possibility of making contact, you should be able to accept the possibility of a hit. The difference between a hit and a foul is, like, centimeters or milliseconds. Why do you think a difference of that size is literally impossible?

We’re taking about a chance, so it’s fair to ignore the worst-case scenario and consider the best-case scenario. Forget about 100mph heat; that’s the exception even in pro play. And we’re not going for consistency, so you can forget about reaction time. Feel free to start swinging way earlier than a real pro would. Close your eyes and pray to your deity of choice. There’s a chance.

A pitcher does not respond to small-scale movements of the hitter once the wind-up begins, so this is not a 100% head-to-head skill issue. There is plenty of time for a reasonably-athletic layman to get the bat through the strike zone in a time frame that overlaps with the range of probability of a pitch. Not with any consistency, because that would require precise reaction and control that are not possible without a ton of experience. But again, we’re not talking about consistency. We’re talking about a single stroke of luck. A single hit is within the realm of luck. Skill simply tightens up that probability distribution in your favor.

As for football, yeah, I concede your point. The the kind of play I’m describing happens every season, but you’re absolutely right that a layman wouldn’t actually be able to get in position to make that catch in the first place. My scenario was assuming a miracle position for a good runner to take off, which puts it outside the range of a single stroke of luck. My bad.

That’s because golf and pool aren’t head-to-head sports (per se); the other golfer(s) or pool player can’t interfere with your ball as you hit it.

Excellent point! That’s also basically the scenario I mentioned with football and baseball. In football, you’d need to have a clear shot and be a good runner (like in Forrest Gump). Unlikely, but within the realm of possibility for an athletic non-football-player. In baseball, once the ball is in the air it’s anyone’s game. Anyone who can swing a bat has a chance to get a lucky hit. Not a good chance, but a chance. Especially a professional athlete from a different sport. I mean, we kind of saw that when Michael Jordan played baseball. He had a very respectable batting average…for a basketball player. :)

If you put me in the majors, I’d bet I could manage a .001 batting average!

“Some people who don’t play table tennis actually think they have a chance to win a single point,” said Anders Lind, 25, of Denmark, the No. 62-ranked player in the world. “It’s cute. But it’s not true.”

The idea isn’t crazy, depending on what sport you have as a frame of reference.

I mean, I’d have a chance to win a single hole against a pro golfer with a lucky shot. I’d have a chance to score a single hit against a major-league pitcher. I’d have a decent chance to at least sink a single ball against a professional pool player. I’d surely capture a few pieces in a game of chess against Magnus Carlsen (though not any he didn’t intend to lose, so bad example). I might even be able to Forrest-Gump my way to a touchdown against a pro football team if someone sent me a perfect pass.

Of course I’d have no chance to win an entire game in any of those cases, but in many sports, a competent amateur has a chance to at least get a point against a pro.

That said, I’ve seen pro table tennis and I know for sure I’m not getting a point unless they are struck by well-timed lightning. We are not playing the same game. It’d be like going to a motorcycle rally with my bicycle.