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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • The SSN is likely to appear in multiple tables, because they will reference a central table that ties it all together. This central table will likely only contain the SSN, the birth date (from what others have been saying), as well as potentially first and last name. In this table, the entries have to be unique.
    But then you might have another table, like a table listing all the physical exams, which has the SSN to be able to link it to the person’s name, but ultimately just adds more information to this one person. It does not duplicate the SSN in a way that would be bad.




  • (Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)

    See, I disagree on that. If I know something I could (help to) build will only ever be used by a few folks and can never help most people, then my motivation is significantly lowered. Well, unless I’m truly just scratching my own itch, but even then I might choose to not scratch my itch, because I’d rather quit using the platform, if possible.

    And then, yeah, what the other person said about financing.

    For Android, there are various small efforts in terms of forks, with the biggest being LineageOS. There are even some commercial efforts, like /e/OS. I think, Huawei also wanted to do a fork or something. No idea what happened with that.
    But yeah, none of these efforts are hard forks, which can change more than superficial stuff. And it’s not for a lack of desire, but because it’s just such a ridiculous uphill battle to try to get anything noteworthy changed. Many times, LineageOS (and its predecessor CyanogenMod) had some cool features, which they later had to scrap, because they needed to follow what Google was doing and their features wouldn’t work with that anymore. If they would’ve seen any chance of a hard fork working out, they probably would’ve tried to go that route.



  • Android, Chromium.

    The problem is that:

    1. Google puts in more development power than anyone else. Any forks we’ve seen so far are only really soft forks, as in they only apply a few patches on top of what Google puts out, rather than taking the project in a new direction, because you’d be behind pretty quickly.
    2. These projects establish platforms that have shitty decisions baked in. For example, the Android dev tooling has Google ads/tracking as one of the built-in UI components, which is why even if you patch the OS, the apps will still be shitty. To actually change this stuff, you’d need a majority of users to switch to your fork and stay there for a few years.
    3. Partially, it’s only financially viable for Google to develop these projects, because they have those Android ads or benefit from a web with less tracking protection. This makes it extremely unlikely for any other organization to be able to splurge a similar amount of money, which brings us back to a fork just being unlikely.

    And so long as a fork is unlikely, Google can do shitfuckery quite similar to proprietary projects.



  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy would'nt this work?
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    4 days ago

    Perhaps also worth pointing out that the speed of light is that exact speed, because light itself hits a speed limit.

    As far as we know, light has no mass, so if it is accelerated in any way, it should immediately have infinite acceleration and therefore infinite speed (this is simplifying too much by using a classical physics formula, but basically it’s like this: a = f/m = f/0 = ∞). And well, light doesn’t go at infinite speed, presumably because it hits that speed limit, which is somehow inherent to the universe.

    That speed limit is referred to as the “speed of causality” and we assume it to apply to everything. That’s also why other massless things happen to travel at the speed of causality/light, too, like for example gravitational waves. Well, and it would definitely also apply to that pole.

    Here’s a video of someone going into much more depth on this: https://www.pbs.org/video/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-light/







  • I still don’t get why the backslash is on keyboards to begin with. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone write a slash backward with a pen. And even if folks do, you could’ve had only one slash anyways. Like, people are going to understand what it means, whether it’s / or \.

    I guess, it not being used for much else, does at least make it useful for escaping stuff and for Windows to use as path separator.



  • we would like to officially announce that this will be the [last] version labeled Alpha. We have already updated the versioning scheme (this version being 0.27.0) and we will progressively stop using the Alpha label altogether up to the next release, which will be Release 28.

    Excellent. Whenever I told people about 0 A.D., I felt like I should add that it’s not actually an Alpha, especially with their webpage saying in various places basically “no, don’t look at us yet, we’re not ready yet”.

    If they continue adding content, I do think that’s awesome, but what’s there is already plenty solid.