[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 35 points 1 month ago

Fun fact, snakes' adaptations to their feeding style are actually not about the way the jaw hinges. Instead, their lower jaw is two separately moving bones held together with stretchy ligament tissue so that each side of the mouth can be "walked along" the prey item separately.
So the chef could eat the burger... but would follow along its longest dimension to do it, laying it down sideways.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 13 points 4 months ago

It's the parts of a program's concepts, rules and behaviours that are specific to the program's task. For instance

  • Items, a shopping cart and the conversion of such a cart into an order at checkout in an e-commerce application.
  • Clips of video and audio, static images etc. and the compiling of these into a single output video for a video editor.
  • Vertices, triangles, meshes, animation rigs etc. for a 3d editing program.
  • Accounting standards and tax laws for an accounting system.

When developing software you deal both with these kinds of specifics and generically reusable concepts that are more purely computational science, so a term to distinguish them is handy.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think this is partly about giving yourself an out for liking childish things as a near- or young-adult. Kids shows commonly do include some Parental Bonus but extending that idea specifically to dark undercurrent plots that you have to read between the lines of the text seems like a way to feel "in the know" about something adult in the work while still consuming something you feel society expects you to have grown out of.
Then with a bit more maturing than that, you can hopefully just embrace childish joys earnestly, because joys are precious.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 67 points 7 months ago

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 13 points 1 year ago

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 year ago

It's the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the "rules" somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

  • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government's authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
  • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under "natural law".
  • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it's a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it's a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat's longer form explanation.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn't much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 41 points 2 years ago

FIDE has two competitive circuits - the open circuit where men and women (cis or trans) can compete, and the women's circuit. Players can (and commonly do) compete in both circuits. Ultimately the goal of the women's circuit is to boost recruitment of female players and make competitive chess less of a boys' club. Opinions are divided on whether it's the most effective method.
The recent decision affects AMAB people who want to play in the women's circuit, but does not bar them from the open circuit.

It's a pretty shit decision as far as I can see, but it's good to make judgments on the facts.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's only 1 year ago Biden signed legislation forcing the railroad unions back to work with only 1 day of paid sick leave per worker per year. While as the author says it "One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side", that feels very much like putting the bar on the ground.

[-] MagosInformaticus@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'd say the key insight with quantum computing is that its algorithms are about choreographing interference patterns among qubits such that wrong answers cancel each other out but right answers reinforce one another. It's not just a matter of trying possibilities in parallel or "running different probabilities simultaneously" - the qubits' states are complex combinations of 0 and 1 states, and they interact with and change one another. Simulating those interactions on a classical computer requires exponentially growing amounts of memory space and time as the quantum computation gets bigger. Trying to divide-and-conquer this simulation over multiple classical computers runs into the need for different parts of the circuit to know about each others' state, limiting how much work can be sectioned off to be done by each computer in the group.

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MagosInformaticus

joined 2 years ago