[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 50 points 9 months ago

IIRC undercovers have, in the past, taken drugs to 'fit in' and keep their cover. The guidance to undercovers is probably 'try to avoid it' but the directive of 'don't get caught' and 'try not to die' probably override that.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 15 points 11 months ago

ME: A 12 yo Navy brat living in Italy, on vacation at a Palermo resort.

The waiter (addressing a table of 10-13 yo kids): I can take your order while drinks are self serve; soft drinks are over there, wine and whisky to the left of that.

ME: Wine it is then.

I don't know what the legal drinking age was at the time (mid-2000s), but if it was above 13 it certainly wasn't really enforced.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 46 points 1 year ago

The Vatican is its own country, they don't pay themselves taxes.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

No, this is the media conflating the publics perception of physical security and cybersecurity to make a story. If you ask an average person how hard it is to steal money from a casino they'd say it's next to impossible, but if instead you asked them how hard it was to hack their attached hotel's booking system they'd say they had no idea.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago

Game devs have many teams all with different jobs, for a big game like this you'd typically have multiple teams dedicated to optimization in different areas (and between them). The specific problem in this case was how the game was communicating with graphics drivers (among others), which for any graphics heavy game is very fundamental to performance optimization. The problems aren't even an after-the-fact optimization sort of thing that teams should have to identify and follow-up on, batching jobs is standard practice when interacting with GPUs whether or not there's a translation layer.

When the devs of a core translation API between two supported graphics drivers that are commonplace in the gaming ecosystem have to write code to specifically fix issues with your application you've done something fundamentally wrong.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

Search engines like Google have cost many people there job; the list of now-rare positions and/or duties associated with a position (thereby thinning the need for such employment) that search engines have replaced is long.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

It's only this particular kind of plastic in its specific state with respect to the liquid placed inside of it, also the fact that the worry of micro/nano-plastics is relatively new.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

It makes sense considering SCP originally found GPT loaded onto magnetic tape reels in what has only be described as a disused military bunker.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 59 points 1 year ago

You forgot the many difference species of fish/creatures-of-the-sea.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago

I feel that the mention of reddit's 'r/all' algorithm being better than Lemmy's algorithm certainly shows a clear misunderstanding of these algorithms; r/all can be sorted in the exact same ways as Lemmy, the only difference is that reddit has more active users and thereby more content + people filtering it by voting. I also think people in this thread misunderstand 'algorithm' to mean something solely meant to find posts that they may personally like or at least the least are somehow quasi-objectively 'good'. An algorithm for that can be made, but that is not what the algorithms currently in-use have ever been intended to do.

If someone wants a feed of posts that particularly targets their interests then they'll have to tailor one themselves, just like on reddit.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Naturally, organic simply means carbon is present in the (non-metal) structure. Generally carbon-carbon, carbon-hydrogen, and a few other bond-types are considered organic. Many articles prey on people's misunderstanding of this in order to craft a good headline, since "carbon-based material" doesn't sound as exciting as "organic material".

And when they say it "be created by processes not related to life as we know it" they should also probably mention that it can be created in the absence of any life at all; since if that weren't true then it would in fact be direct evidence of life.

[-] sethboy66@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Only very hot flames are a plasma and usually only within certain regions of the main body of the flame; most flames one encounters in their life will not be a plasma due to low or non-existent ionization. A candle flame is almost certainly not a plasma, rather it's a combusting (oxidizing) gas which appears as a flame due to the emission of photons in the visible range from regions where the fuel is reacting with air. Furthermore, fire does not require mechanical or kinetic force to combine a fuel and an oxidizer, there is no need to 'ram' these particles together. Simple contact between a fuel and an oxidizer in states which would allow redox will cause burning and possibly visible flame (not all redox produces visible flame).

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sethboy66

joined 1 year ago