Whether it was explained differently, or a foundational bit of knowledge made it click, how did you finally understand?
No politics – I'm thinking along the lines of math/programming, language, crafts, etc.
I have a few spare glass bottles and want to explore what decoration I can make with them, without just painting outside them.
Preferably safe, in case of an accidental breakage or leak. Preferably indefinite shelf-life.
Some ideas:
Let's say, I sit down in a mall, open my laptop and connect to a secured mobile hotspot. Then I do it again next week after a reboot. What information would a nearby shop or a passive malicious hacker be able to find about my device? Does my device send out identifying information before joining, like a MAC address? Is this persistent, or randomized?
I intentionally haven't specified a distro, so if something only applies to some network managers, give some details.
Bonus points: what about Android phones?
I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.
This reminded me of (and it's an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.
I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.
Full 30 min film: A Welcome to Britain, 1943
After being reminded of incidents where US soldiers started riots in allied countries due to racism (UK, Aus, NZ), I wondered if there were any surviving videos briefing soldiers on race relations outside the US.
This pub clip is not about race at all, but I found it interesting, and as someone who has seen many a stereotypical "loud American" tourist, relatable.
(For an example of a racial diversity training, see that full film link, starting from 25:19
Most of us are familiar with what (your local equivalent of) $10 USD is worth, or $100 or perhaps even $1,000,000.
But larger amounts soon become unrelatable. And with the huge wealth inequality at play, it's easy to come across stories where something worth hundreds of millions was wasted.
Yes, this instance is definitely the wrong place to ask, but maybe I'll be surprised.
I hate commercial ads. I consider them intolerable and violating. I'm far from alone in this perspective (see: famous Banksy quote, and subvertising + related cultures). It's one of the rawest forms of exploitative manipulation.
So surely you can understand my confusion whenever I see people just watching ads on their phone until they finish, or even watching ads on television until their show starts again. Come on, just do something else for 4 minutes (most channels run two 4 minute segments per half hour, that why your downloaded TV episodes are 22 minutes each instead of 30)
Is there a more meaningful answer than "laziness"?
I want to build a small site which acts as a broad, searchable FAQ for a certain topic.
Consider I have the FAQ:
What is the approximate mass of Earth?
It's 5.9722 × 10^24 kilograms, wow!
I want the user to have a chance at finding this FAQ by asking How heavy is our planet
Looking at this basically, the two similar questions have only one shared word, "is", which is an extremely common word. So using something really simple like word comparison or even stemming/lemmatization alone won't help.
On the very other end of the spectrum, a search engine's AI feature can interpret this effectively, rephrase the question and give a similar answer. So, what strategies are are in-between these two extremes?
A few people will be adding questions to the site regularly.
If possible, no external services, just self-hosting on an affordable server.
Simpler and lighter solutions are preferred.
Are any of the features in OpenSearch (ElasticSearch/Lucene fork) able to do this? Is it overkill?
Since the site will have new questions to match regularly, will a solution require the repeated, wasteful retraining of NLP models to to create weights? Or is training so efficient for small-scale text datasets that it's responsible and reasonable to do on a cheap low-end server?
edit: Just spitballing here, I could try a solution which does the bulk work at insert-time rather than runtime, by asking a general pre-trained language model to rephrase the question many different ways, or generate keywords, then use those responses to generate tags for a basic keyword search to match. This would avoid making a heavy search function or retraining any model on the server.
::: spoiler Example result:
GPT-4o mini
Here’s a list of synonyms for the keywords in "What is the approximate mass of Earth?" formatted as an array of strings:
json
[
"weight",
"heaviness",
"bulk",
"load",
"volume",
"estimated",
"rough",
"approximal",
"near",
"close to",
"planet Earth",
"the globe",
"the world",
"Terra",
"our planet"
]
:::
Finding a wholesome community archive with tagging done well is a rare treat, so I think this place is worth a special mention.
PSA is a public service announcement, an awareness campaign.
It could be as simple as teaching everyone to walk on the same side of the footpath in each direction, to demonstrating how quickly a fire spreads and ways to prevent and react.
I'm going to make a compilation, so specifically mention the work which answered the question. Bonus points for a direct link or quotation of a paragraph or two which directly refute the argument.
I'm going to have access to a 3D printer for a few days. I know two friends who've used them, but it's only been for art and figurines, or professional purposes.
Are there any other cases you can think of where a custom-printed item is better than the myriad of mass-produced plastic items?
What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
An Asian market store (mostly Chinese foods) opened near me this month and I've seized the opportunity to make hotpot-inspired soups. Mostly throwing garlic, mixed dried/canned/frozen vegetables, tofu and noodles into boiling water in sequence, then swirling on some sesame oil and chili oil.
It couldn't sell in a restaurant, but it's quick, nutritionally-diverse and tasty. It had only one fresh ingredient, but I managed to get 10 different vegetables in one meal and minimal additives.
We want to DIY some unique marker inspired artwork. The "DNA art" from companies online involves sending a DNA sample, and we have privacy concerns about that, and we'd rather not fork out thousands of dollars for DNA sequencing devices just for this. We can resort to a fingerprint for inspiration if there's nothing more interesting available and affordable to us, but we'd like to explore our options first.
The DNA sequence artworks they're talking about are ones like this, but it doesn't necessarily have to look anything like these:
Zohran Mamdani famously won the New York mayoral election, along with news of some other social democrat, and in at least one case socialist, politicians being elected to various levels of governance in the past weeks.
However, there will obviously be a broad range of reaction from the owning class (including but not limited to possible capital strikes). On top of that, since Mamdani ran as a Democrat, there is a very real threat of the Democratic Party establishment forcing Mamdani into compromise, for example, by state Dems threatening not to approve Mamdani's tax increases on the rich.
We've already seen some possible signs of Mamdani moderating stances on police and Zionism, and we've already seen other recent DSA politicians like AOC compromising, so this threat of Democratic Party pressure could be imminent if Mamdani (and the Dems) aren't held accountable by citizens and their power structures (including unions and other interest groups).
What power do citizens have to hold these social politicians to their word? How much power do existing structures like the DSA and worker unions have?
From The IT Crowd, S04E05 (recorded in July 2010). Jen is mocked in an HR assessment for thinking "IT" stands for "Internet things".
::: spoiler Explanation: While "IT" stands for Information Technology in their context, "Internet things" isn't as ridiculous as it sounds - the existing term "Internet of Things" (IoT) was coined in 1985 (I didn't know that) and began to creep into the tech mainstream in the 2010s as smart gadgets became commercially popular. I would expect most IT staff today to at least be aware of the Internet of Things. :::
Most people reading this are probably very familiar with buying things between $0-1000 USD (such as everyday food and everyday clothing, perhaps weekly rent). Some of us will have experience buying more expensive items, like a car ($10,000s), or maybe even a house ($100,000s or even $1,000,000s). Some of you might want to object to those numbers I listed, they obviously will vary wildly in different markets, but I want to now ask about much more expensive things.
What is the cost of some items that few-if-any Lemmy users can afford? What can the absurdly rich buy that we can't? How much does it cost them?
You must give a money value with some evidence, no just knee-jerking and saying something vague like "elections" - instead find articles disclosing how much manipulation campaigns cost a political party.