• 34 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2022

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  • It’s about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend’s data in particular.

    And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.

    Also, what your friend said is that they basically don’t care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc…) because they themselves aren’t affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that’s that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.

    And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I’m also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won’t change anything for society. But do they vote?

    You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That’s how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That’s how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that’s how people won’t get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.

    And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn’t an x, then they came for y, but I wasn’t a y, then they came for z, but I wasn’t a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.

    Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.

    And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They’re not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that’s all.




  • Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.

    The downside is it needs human intervention. It’s hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.

    It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space… which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can’t work for small random websites in an automated fashion.

    It might, and that’s a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y’know, that whole distributed consensus thing… lol… an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely…

    Basically , I’m all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren’t possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.





  • …but do not seem to bear any tangible meaning. Like, what is force, work/energy, field, matter?

    Contrary to what some people might expect from physics, it’s a lot more philosophical, than just tangible. These terms are in some ways more philosophical than material, and I guess that’ s the part that’s confusing you.

    I guess in general, with physics you’re dealing with a different set of philosophical categories than with maths, it’s less abstract logic and sets, and is more about actions and reactions.

    And in the words of people more eloquent than me, physics is a story written in the language of maths, that’s their difference, as well. It’s like grammar vs a screenplay. Technically, they’re both linguistics, but very very different at the same time.

    On those notes, force is just defined as an “influence that can change the motion of an object”, sort of like in common every day parlance. Force is a thing that makes changes in the world. Energy is the ability to create those forces.

    Field is something that fully permeates 3D space and exists there with its changeable local properties. It’s what enables the existence of matter in space. Matter is an “excitation”, a value lump, a value spike, in that field in a specific location. Think of it like a math graph with a small bunch of values in a specific part of it, matter in a field. And so on…

    …mystical/mythical (dark matter, anti matter…

    I don’t think these two are particularly mystical. Dark matter is just a phrase we invented for the fact we notice the gravity of a lot of matter when observing the way the galaxies rotate, but we don’t see any of that matter. Therefore we conclude, there must be some matter that has mass/gravity but can’t be seen, i.e. doesn’t interact with electromagnetic waves. That’s all, nothing spooky, just instead of protons, electrons etc… it’s a different type of matter.

    Similar with antimatter. Matter atoms are made from massive “positively” charged protons and small-massed “negatively” charged electrons. Antimatter is the opposite, made from massive “negatively” charged antiprotons and small-massed “positively” charged positrons. That’s it, it’s like chemistry or whatever. Different lego blocks. It’s just that matter and antimatter, once they collide, go boom and turn into photons and stuff so basically all the matter we have around us is regular matter because there was more of it in the early days of yore.

    … spacetime…

    I guess this one might bit a tad mystical, in the sense that time and space are philosophical concepts. I actually feel tho that once they’re combined like this into spacetime they become a lot more tangible and mathematical/geometric and easier to digest. In some ways.

    …I just don’t think Bell’s theorem has taken into account the entire possibility of hidden variables … I doubt myself on this one since Redditors downvoted this.

    Well considering the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022 was just awarded two days ago to three scientists for establishing the violation of Bell’s inequalities, I’d say your judgment on trusting the more knowledgeable people on reddit was right. Unless you think you know more about the topic than Nobel laureates. ;)

    How do you get any pleasure (lol) from all of these?

    Some people enjoy chocolate, some enjoy vanilla, some enjoy strawberry. Some enjoy physics, some enjoy maths, some enjoy philosophy. We’re all different.

    Also, any study references? I found Feymann’s Lecture on Caltech’s website a bit too wordy.

    I actually think it’d be better for you to not dive straight into textbook style rigor, and instead watch some more fun physics youtubers once in a while, like the ol’ classics of Veritasium, Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, PBS Spacetime, Fermilab etc… to build that physics intuition and perspective you seem to missing here, first. There’s a treasure trove of accessible fun content there.












  • I’d just like to take this one step further and say that color has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation and its wavelengths. Not at its core.

    You could easily have a robo-eye that reacts to water waves or anything else that might carry similar information and converts it into a bio-chemical signal that goes into the optical nerve and into the brain and you’d see color. In fact, you can see color in your sleep/dreams with no input from outside the brain. Or less abstractly, you can see flashes of color with your eyes closed after going in a dark room after being in a bright space, because of the state of the ”irritated” chemicals in the back of your eyes. The subjective perception of color, the qualia as it is called, is something that correlates in the physical world, or has its physical correlate (noun) only to something in the brain. The EM waves are just carriers of information that supply us with information that gets experienced as color once it finds it’s appropriate home in the information structures of the brain, and the mind.

    Another example of this is how people with amputated limbs can feel “phantom pain” sometimes in the non existent body parts, because the stump nerve is being appropriately irritated to send a signal to the brain, that becomes pain in the brain, independently of the existence or non-existence of the body part.

    Same with irritating the ear bones, without any air waves, as with tinnitus. The air waves just carry the info usually, they’re not sound itself.

    You can indeed hear EM waves’ info too, not see it, just listen to a radio.

    Shape is something we experience because of the existence of space, the perception of the “category”, the concept of space in the mind.

    Which one is more fundamental depends, I guess, which one you believe is more fundamental, if any, quality or concepts, perception or reason.

    This would be of equal true value, whether you label things as a materialist or as an idealist, just label it then as, let’s say, matter arrangement, or laws of arrangement. Or maybe simply, matter and spacetime.

    I’d say they’re of equal footing, and don’t quite go, one without the other, in the human mind, or the physical world, as we know them.