Excrubulent

Excrubulent, 2 days ago

Wow repressing a population under the pretext of fighting terrorists only radicalises that population. We certainly couldn’t have predicted this based on millennia of examples.

Excrubulent, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

EDIT: I should’ve read the article, but I’m taking the L and leaving this up with a strikethrough. The phrasing “after” in the headline definitely creates the wrong impression here. As for what this says about people, I guess we’ll have to see if the other ten whistleblowers still testify.

And if you think it’s too much to assume Boeing killed these two people, that’s the wrong question. It matters more whether as a fellow whistleblower it’s reasonable to worry about whether Boeing killed them, and I think it is.

Also Boeing definitely killed the first guy at least. “If I die, it’s not suicide.” - man who “committed suicide”. WTAF.

If you ever hear anyone talking about how humans suck and we’re all terrible and will definitely destroy ourselves, just think about the fact that killing whistleblowers was quickly followed by more whistleblowers. Not just lone heros, but ten fucking people said, “hey, fuck you, are you really gonna kill me too?” knowing that the answer could well be “yes”.

Excrubulent, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

To be fair if someone yelled “good morning officer” I’d look up too, because that’s just a weird thing to hear and I’d want to know where the cops were.

Excrubulent, 1 month ago

I’ve said this recently, but intelligence is domain specific. People just being generally “smart” is not a thing people should really care about.

Excrubulent, 1 month ago

Shoutout to the stock image photographer who put an egg timer on a 5.25" floppy disk to symbolise the looming spectre of obsolescence.

Excrubulent, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

It’s almost like she’s trying to be polite because she knows that sometimes guys turn violent when they’re rejected.

EDIT: Look, I’m getting tired of this. Not a single person arguing with this is having a conversation about this that is based in reality, they are just trying to twist words to make it sound like maybe there’s some equivalence here. Have some statistics from Australia. You can look them up for your country if you care:

www.abs.gov.au/statistics/…/latest-release

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/f7406c12-8aa2-485c-b3cf-6c102db4cc49.webp

Those discrepancies are shocking but not really that surprising if you’ve lived in society at all. Also, this is just rates of violence, of any kind. It says nothing at all about the consequences of that violence. I’ll bet if you looked into that it’s worse for women too. If you’re wondering why so many categories don’t have rates of violence against men, it’s because they have a “high relative standard error”, which is statistics speak for “the rate is so low we can’t properly measure it”.

But if you’re saying, “NOt All mEn” in the face of this reality then let’s be real, you don’t actually give a shit about this. You just feel personally attacked and you want to deflect. Men getting mad because their fragile egos are bruised. Maybe some of them would turn violent if a woman said it to their faces. As they say, a hit dog will bark.

Excrubulent, 2 months ago

I just can’t figure out why this community about reddit keeps talking about reddit tho.

Excrubulent, 3 months ago

He did all that to support his gay son, that is a real ally.

Excrubulent, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Seems like the way for reddit to “solve” this is to just close bad subs.

But that’s easily exploited, if people migrate to other subs and start protesting the sub closures, those subs get worse and they need to be closed…

Oh no, reddit, did you just discover that you relied on your users to make your site good and by screwing them over you’ve made your entire business unsustainable at scale?

Also, somewhat related, is there a short snappy name for lemmy communities? Some people call them subs out of habit but I don’t wanna do that, and “communities” is four whole syllables, and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Excrubulent, 4 months ago

And they lived to 90, not a bad run.

Excrubulent, 5 months ago

Whemp, video doesn’t lie. I guess the first law of thermodynamics is wrong.

Excrubulent, 5 months ago

Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.

Excrubulent, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Your question relates to the effect of aerofoil shape on lift: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/…/shape.html

Please note that in aerodynamics, “lift” is any aerodynamic force that acts perpendicular to the relative wind on an object, so it’s lift whether it pushes a plane up, down, left, right, or pushes a sailing boat across the wind.

Also the keel of the boat that keeps it sailing in a straight line is technically providing lift in the water, although that “lift” is sideways. Also it isn’t aerodynamic lift, but hydrodynamic. The general field is called fluid dynamics, which covers both gasses and liquids.

You’ve got some good answers, but the problem with the air bouncing idea is that it ignores the air on top of the wing, or to the leeward side of the sail. The sail is pushed on by the windward air, and pulled on by the leeward air. (Edit: technically not pulled on, but you can model it that way if you take atmospheric pressure as 0 and anything lower than that as negative; it will give you correct results)

This is such a common misconception that NASA has listed it as a common incorrect theory of lift: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/…/wrong2.html

A better way to think about it is flow turning - as the wind moves past the sail, its flow is turned and the momentum change causes an equal and opposite change in momentum of the boat: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/…/right2.html

So ideally the leading edge of the sail should be parallel to the oncoming wind, and the trailing edge will be by definition parallel to the outgoing wind. The difference in velocity between these two winds multiplied by the mass of air passing over them over time will give you the force acting on the sail.

If the leading edge isn’t parallel, the air’s transition from free flow into contact with the sail will not be smooth, and will cause losses that reduce the efficiency of the sail.

In practice, the way to achieve this parallel flow is to let out the sail until you see “luffing”, which is just the leading edge flapping a bit in the wind. Then you tighten it until the luffing disappears, at which point the sail should be correctly trimmed. As you carry on you can occasionally repeat this process to check that you’ve still got the right angle, as minor shifts in wind or boat direction can change the ideal angle of attack.

This is also called “setting” the sail. So when a ship “sets sail” it’s referring to the fact a skipper would order the crew to “set sails”, which would start them moving. Now the term also means to commence a voyage.

In some bigger boats you have strings called “telltales” on the surface of the sail. If you see them flapping you know the air flow is turbulent, and you can trim the sail until the telltales on both sides of the sail are blown into a smooth line along the sail. If you tighten the sail too much, the leeward telltales will flap. If you let it out it too much, the windward telltales will flap.

A flat surface is much less efficient as it will cause a lot more turbulence on the leeward side. A lot of work has been done to make sails form the most efficient shape, and they are always deliberately curved. The shape will change depending on the tightness of the sheet (the rope that sets the sail) and on its manufacture, but ultimately your sail shape was basically set when it was made. Different sail shapes will be optimised for different types of tack and different tasks, but I don’t know enough about that to explain more. Mainly I know that spinnakers are made for running downwind and the other sails usually have to make do for the rest of the situations, but this article tells you a lot more: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sail_components

I only just found that article, so if it disagrees with anything I’ve said here I’d defer to it.

Very high performance sails and setups can do some cool things, like racing catamarans with their very sleek hulls and optimised sails allow you to sail in a close haul within 30-something degrees of the wind, whereas most normal sailboats can’t get much closer than 45 degrees.

There is much more reading and interactive lessons on lift and other aerodynamics concepts on NASAs page here: www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/…/short.html

Edit: This seems like a decent resource for first time sailors, and gives some more in depth explanation of how to set your sails correctly: www.cruisingworld.com/learn-to-sail-101/

This is also where I learned what telltales are called. I’ve never sailed bigger boats much tbh.

Okay, I think that’s most of what I can info-dump on the basis of your question. You landed on an intersection of two of my special interests lol :)

Excrubulent, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.

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I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…

claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”

…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.

This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.

Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.

To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.

Excrubulent, 6 months ago

“…offers to give participation medal back because she’s being targeted by transphobes and just wants the harrassment to stop.”

I mean, I assume that’s the reason, right? Why else would you give back a participation medal? It wouldn’t be out of principle because it’s a ridiculous thing to expect anyone to do.

I searched up this story after making the above guess and it was roughly right because these people are so damn predictable. Only the worst outlets are reporting on it, and they’re misquoting her horrendously. She didn’t “offer”, she said if the organisers want it back she’ll give it back. It was an acknowledgement that it’s the organisers’ decision, not hers.

She’s maintined the whole time that she’ll follow whatever rules are in place, including running as a man when the organisation requires it. Of course transphobes are using that as “proof” that she’s a man.

She’s also quoted in headlines as saying “I’m not a woman,” but it was sarcasm. She said, “I get it… I’m not a woman, I don’t have a womb.” She was characterising the hateful remarks she’s received and they twisted that and said it came from her mouth and even called it an “admission”.

This is the original article as far as I can tell: nypost.com/…/trans-marathoner-glenique-frank-offe…

It has the same shameless “14,000” fact-twisting in the headline, but unlike other articles piggybacking on it, at least it tells some of her side and doesn’t constantly misgender her.

She also says she won’t apologise because she didn’t do anything wrong, which she didn’t. She’s running for no prize and she’s raising money for charity, but the culture war needs victims I guess, so she’s fair game to these people.

Excrubulent, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Wasn’t like… a huge deal made about how the Teslas are so waterproof they could double as a boat? I mean they can in fact ford much deeper than ICE cars because they don’t need air, but also there’s definitely tweets about this.

Edit: he said it about both the cybertruck - loads of stories about this - and the model S: popularmechanics.com/…/elon-musk-model-s-boat/

This is entirely separate of course from the much more basic issue that a car that breaks because of some fucking precipitation is not fit for purpose and this damage report would be indefensible just about anywhere in the world. Precedent for manufacturers taking responsibility for bad products was first established in Britain centuries ago.

Excrubulent, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

There’s data on this: …cloudfront.net/…/42800fa0-876c-11ed-b4ef-3dee38a…

Millenials, and presumably gen z, are getting less conservative with age, a complete reversal of the traditional trend. We’re also the first generation that’s poorer than our parents.

They kept the money flowing in the post-war economy, and kept propping it up with increasing globalisation, pushing the poverty onto poorer nations, but it looks like that’s stopped working and now the economy is cannibalising its own young.

I hope this sparks revolution, and I see our job right now as building the structures that will make a better world afterwards.