Not a good example. “Defending X” is a much stronger requirement than just “pointing out that a specific argument against X is invalid”; the latter is done by everyone who likes seeing good arguments rather than bad arguments, and isn’t a sign of liking X.

(The most pro-russian (as in, supporting the russian-ukraine war) stuff I’ve seen was various memes from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad that ended up in popular. I’m having trouble finding a better example than that; in particular, because Lemmy’s search is bad and doesn’t seem to allow for searching recent comments from a specific instance, and also refuses to give me more than a few pages of results.)

This meme is from 2035

There might be a universe in which magic exists. However, there is no universe in which I exist and magic exists. That’s because I was born into a mundane version of the universe, so there are infinite possibilities, but because my existence in a magical universe is 0

That doesn’t really follow. Specifically, you’re putting way too much credit (infinity times as much credit as you should, in fact) on your ability to know exactly how your universe works. You’re saying there are zero hypothetical worlds in which you are the person you are now and also magic exists. I’m sure you can see how this is not true; for all you know magic is very obvious in your world and you just got mind-controlled, a minute ago, to your current state of mind. Or maybe you just never noticed it and hence grew up thinking you are in a mundane universe, which is very unlikely but not probability-0. Or one of many many other explanations, which are all unlikely (nothing involving a universe with magic in it is going to be likely), but very much not probability-0.

Incredibly weird that this thread was up for two days without anyone posting a link to the actual answer to OP’s question, which is g4f.

A standard legal income in North Korea is from $12 to $36 per year.

That seems like it can’t possibly be true. Where is this statistic actually coming from? I can find a bunch of other unclearly-sourced estimates like $50/month, which is more more reasonable.

(Looking for actual papers I find this, which cites an estimate of $1700 purchasing-power-parity-GDP/year/capita. The paper itself estimates per-county wealth via radiance as seen from satellites, and gets “around $790 per capita and 60% poverty rate”. It’s pretty unclear how this can be price-adjusted but it’s not “100 eggs per year” low, at least.)

One can justify it however they like but it’s going to end up making the experience worse for competent users anyway. Much like this Android 12 security change that made it permanently more annoying to manipulate files.

Huh, that’s a fun thought. If the bird flu turns into a pandemic (there’s a prediction market that gives 16% for it, which is pants-shittingly terrifyingly high), we’ll get to see how the Trump administration deals with one. And that… can go various ways.

On one hand, there’s tons of anti-vaxxers in the Trump voting base and presumably this will affect the government, which is concerning. But on the other hand, one of the biggest problems in the COVID handling was when FDA stopped people from using already-created vaccines for idiotic bureaucracy considerations while people were literally dying by the million. That’s the sort of thing that could go a lot better with just one presidential decision speeding it up, and there’s a bunch of new people with power in the government now, like Elon Musk. Muskrat is a horrible person and kind of insane in some ways, but not stupid and I think he’d notice and act upon an opportunity like that. So I’m not totally pessimistic about how a new pandemic would go, either.

“The crusades are an example of capitalist oppression” sure is a hot take.

If you can’t even fly around as an owl and eat voles in your free time, what is even the point?

I’m not sure what the author meant by this. Python does support parallelism via multiprocessing (and in experimental versions, via threads in no-GIL builds), e.g. like this. It’s a bit questionable whether it’d help in this particular benchmark, because the overhead of sending the inputs between workers may be comparable to the speedup, but it’s certainly possible, and very common in real tasks.

(I’m not familiar with Ruby, but from some googling it seems the situation is about the same as Python, but there’s not a stdlib implementation and instead you need to use something third-party like the parallel gem.)

Fun fact: if Luna was only about 30% heavier than it is currently, the Earth’s barycenter would lie outside of Earth, which would potentially make Earth not count as a planet by the modern IAU definition.

I can’t tell if this is a joke or real code

Yes.

Will that repo seriously run until it finds where that is in pi?

Sure. It’ll take a very long while though. We can estimate roughly how long - encoded as ASCII and translated to hex your sentence looks like 54686520636174206973206261636b. That’s 30 hexadecimal digits. So very roughly, one of each 16^30 30-digit sequences will match this one. So on average, you’d need to look about 16^30 * 30 ≈ 4e37 digits into π to find a sequence matching this one. For comparison, something on the order of 1e15 digits of pi were ever calculated.

so you can look it up quickly?

Not very quickly, it’s still n log n time. More importantly, information theory is ruthless: there exist no compression algorithms that have on average a >1 compression coefficient for arbitrary data. So if you tried to use π as compression, the offsets you get would on average be larger than the data you are compressing. For example, your data here can be written written as 30 hexadecimal digits, but the offset into pi would be on the order of 4e37, which takes ~90 hexadecimal digits to write down.

You generate it when needed, using one of the known sequences that converges to π. As a simple example, the pi() recipe here shows how to compute π to arbitrary precision. For an application like pifs you can do even better and use the BBP formula which lets you directly calculate a specific hexadecimal digit of π.

Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.

The idea that because they pay people salaries, including a few hundred K per year for the people at the top, they’re drowning in money and there’s no point in donating as long as they can pay their hosting bills and nothing else, is wrong.

I in fact don’t think that - to get the sort of people you want to be running your company, a good salary is necessary. I suspect a lot of the people that wikimedia employs are unnecessary because this is way too much money to be spending on salaries overall, but I have no way of checking it since they don’t provide a breakdown of the salaries involved. I do think, however, that a company that’s not drowning in money wouldn’t be giving a bunch of generic research grants.

Furthermore I suspect that at least some of the bunch of people who suddenly started coming out of the woodwork to say a few variations on that exact same thing are part of some kind of deliberate misinformation, just because it’s kind of a weird conclusion for a whole bunch of people to all start talking about all at once.

That’s valid, though I note that in the worlds where I am a normal person and not an anti-wikipedia shill, the reason why I’m saying these things now and not at other times is because I saw this post, and you wrote this post because you saw other people talk about some India-related Wikipedia conspiracy theory, and one reason why you’d see these people crawl out of woodwork now is because wikipedia ramps up their donation campaign this time of year, prompting discussion about wikipedia.

The main issue I take with your opening post is its vagueness. You don’t mention any details in it, so it effectively acts as a cue for people to discuss anything at all controversial about wikipedia. And the way you frame the discussion is that such narratives “are fundamentally false” because Wikipedia “is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others” - that’s assuming the conclusion. It’s no surprise that this results in your seeing a lot of claims about Wikipedia that you think are misinformation!

P.S. Rethinking my previous comment a bit, it’s probably good overall that reading my comment made you donate to charity out of spite - even a mediocre charity like Wikimedia most likely has a net positive effect on the world. So I guess I should be happy about it. Consider also donating to one of these for better bang on your buck.

Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.

(If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).

I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude “aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking”, but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn’t very coherent, is it now?

Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe 2 4 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn’t, I wouldn’t particularly advise anyone to donate to them.

Have you considered just not watching shortform video like tiktoks and youtube shorts?

No linux user ever leaves home without their… piss minigun??