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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Nollij@sopuli.xyztoLinux@lemmy.mlThe Mozilla layoffs ... will get worse
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    7 days ago

    I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.

    Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?

    Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.

    Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?

    Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.





  • Nollij@sopuli.xyztoPiracy@lemmy.mlAI for torrenting?
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    18 days ago

    You are comparing it to a hash, following some extra rules on what the data could be. You have exactly the length of hash before you can reliably count on duplicates (and collisions happen much sooner). In torrent v1, this is SHA-1, which has a 160-bit (or 20 byte) hash. Which means for every single additional random bit, you have doubled the number of possible matches.

    If your torrent has an uncommonly small chunk size of 256KiB, that’s 261,144 bytes. Minus the 20 from above, and you have a likely 256^261124 chunks that match your hash. That’s a number so large that Google calls it infinity. It would take you forever just to generate these chunks by brute force, since each would need to be created, then hashed, then the results stored somewhere. Many years ago, I remember someone doing this on CRC32 (32 bits/4 bytes) and 6 byte files. It took all night, and produced dozens of hash-matching files. You’re talking many orders of magnitude bigger.

    But then what? You’d still need to apply the other rules on what the data could be. Rules that are probably more CPU-intensive than the hash algorithm.

    The one trick that AI might be able to use to save the day is that it may contain in its corpus the original file. In effect, that would make the AI an unlikely seeder.



  • While misrepresenting yourself or your credentials can be fraud, the title of PhD/Doctor (outside of MD) is not regulated, at least not in the US. It’s almost like an endorsement from the university that you passed their tests.

    But that’s not very regulated either, and there are countless certifying boards (Boards of Regents, typically).

    Falsely claiming to have a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard, or an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Knox College, would be fraud. But just saying that you have a PhD without specifying anything more specific is not.

    And it comes up regularly - an easy example is the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.


  • Nollij@sopuli.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world...
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    1 month ago

    The most likely scenario is that both the presidency and vice presidency would be vacant. That means it would go to the speaker of the House, most likely to still be Mike Johnson.

    But if Democrats have an unexpectedly good result, they could control the House and elect a new speaker. Similarly, Republicans could replace Johnson with someone else.



  • Nollij@sopuli.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world...
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    1 month ago

    No. That’s not how the system works at all.

    Short of a violent coup, the president’s term ends at noon on January 20, 2025. At that point, there is simply a vacancy in the presidency. It would then be filled according to the line of succession (VP, speaker of the House, etc)






  • This is actually a regional bit of language, specifically the region of the US. The term ‘state’ originally meant (and in some places, still means) an independent and sovereign entity/government. Under the terms of colonial America, each state was truly independent, so the term makes complete sense. Even the original attempt at uniting the colonies (under the Articles of Confederation) maintained that independence.

    But that failed and was promptly replaced by the US Constitution, which made the states much more like provinces. They became a piece of the whole, with significant influence from the larger entity. But we kept the term “state” when referring to them.