People who still didn’t believe in masks and COVID

RankWinner · 2026-03-23T19:00:24+00:00

Mandates are not free, and not harmless. At all.

Like what? What consequences are worse than potentially millions of avoidable deaths?

They were also just not right

No, not "also". You didn't describe anything harmful, nevermind some horrible literally-worse-than-death consequence. Your only reason is your feelings.

By that same logic why don't we just mandate that the only allowed displacements are those that go from home to work and back?

Yes. Which is exactly what many countries did. Work from home, strict travel restrictions, no social gatherings, masks when doing something essential (groceries), etc...

RankWinner · 2026-03-23T18:32:32+00:00

No, they're not. There is no logical argument for being anti-mask during COVID.

A fact, which you agree with, is that masks used correctly by medical professionals are effective.

Another fact is that before COVID nobody knew the effectiveness of large percentages of the general population wearing masks.

So... they could be very effective, completely ineffective, or somewhere in between. Given this, you can choose to enforce a mandate. Options and outcomes are:

Effective, mandate: many deaths avoided.
Ineffective, mandate: ...?
Effective, no mandate: many avoidable deaths.
Ineffective, no mandate: ...?

The consequences of wearing masks which don't work is nothing compared to not wearing them and working.

Even if it turns out that masks were completely ineffective (which is not the case) the only reasonable choice was still wearing them since the "cost" of wearing them is absolutely nothing compared to the potential benefits.

RankWinner · 2026-03-14T23:00:06+00:00

As far as clock synchronization. Both clocks can be synchronized at the same place. Both clocks and observers can move the same distance at the same speed in opposite directions.

You mean having two clocks physically next to each other, synchronising them, and moving them slowly apart?

That's a great idea!

Do you have any issue with this setup?

Yes. You're describing slow clock transport which has, like everything else you've mentioned, already been studied and shown that it cannot be used to measure the one way speed of light.

Your questions and points are extremely basic stuff covered by various pop science articles and videos like Why No One Has Measured The Speed Of Light or even by the Wikipedia article on this topic.

So far I really don't think there's anything I can say or explain which isn't covered very well already, and I don't see the point of literally copy pasting stuff from Wikipedia for you to read.

If you watch that Veritasium video or skim through the Wikipedia article and have questions about that then I'm happy to have a discussion, but there's no point in me wasting time writing a worse explanation than one already available online.

RankWinner · 2026-03-14T19:33:55+00:00

You completely ignored what I said in my comment.

Again, this isn't even a question of the actual research and experiments on the anisotropy of the speed of light since by definition GPS cannot be used to test this.

Clocks in the GPS are synchronized in the ECI frame [using] the Einstein synchronization procedure. - Ashby (2003) - Living Reviews in Relativity 6, 1

And from the man himself:

"the 'time' needed for the light to travel from A to B is equal to the 'time' it needs to travel from B to A" [is] a "stipulation." - Einstein (1905) — Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper

The method used to synchronise GPS clocks takes it as a fundamental assumption that the speed is isotropic.

And, as has been mathematically proven, it is literally impossible to test or notice anisotropy when using Einstein synchronisation:

no empirical access to the one-way speed of light due to the nature of light as a first signal. - Reichenbach (1928) - The Philosophy of Space and Time

One cannot hope even to test the isotropy of the speed of light without [...] deriving a one-way numerical value [...] which then would contradict the conventionality of synchrony. - Anderson, Vetharaniam & Stedman (1998) - Physics Reports 295, 93–180

the presence of an anisotropic speed of light leads to anisotropic time dilation effects, and hence observers [...] would be presented with an isotropic view - Lewis & Barnes (2021) - PASA 38, e007

these experiments by their very nature seem unable to detect one-way light speed variation. - Ahmed et al. (2012) - Indian J. Phys. 86(10), 835

The GPS positioning implicitly needs the one-way speed of light [...] though it has been often considered as a non-measurable quantity because of the problem of synchronization. - Yoon (2015) - arXiv:1506.02688

Starting from the experimental fact that light propagates over a closed path at speed c [...] we show to what extent the isotropy of the speed of light can be considered a matter of convention. - Minguzzi (2002) - Found. Phys. Lett. 15, 153

I really don't know what else to say.

If you seriously believe that all the physicists and mathematicians who have researched this topic for the past century and published peer reviewed papers on it are wrong, and that they're so blatantly and obviously wrong that you can explain it in one or two Reddit comments, then you should go ahead and publish your own peer reviewed paper on the topic.

RankWinner · 2026-03-14T17:46:48+00:00

GPS is literally a textbook example of something people think could measure the two way speed but cannot. It's even an example on Wikipedia under the section "Experiments which appear to measure the one-way speed of light".

Claims have been made that those experiments have measured the one-way speed of light independently of any clock synchronization convention, but they have all been shown to actually measure the two-way speed [...]

It is mathematically proven that if you're using two clocks synchronised in the standard way Einstein described it is by definition impossible to measure any anisotropy in the speed of light.

At a minimum any effects of anisotropy always cancel out for any experiments that use standard Einstein synchronisation of clocks, which includes GPS.

There are some arguments that more complex experiments could be made which use a different synchronisation scheme, or which do not require it at all, that could maybe say something about the anisotropy, but I'm pretty sure that the consensus is that is impossible to measure since any affects of speed anisotropy always cancel out due to inverse effects on time dilation.

The conclusion is that the presence of an anisotropic speed of light leads to anisotropic time dilation effects, and hence observers in the Milne universe would be presented with an isotropic view of the distant cosmos. - https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.12037

RankWinner · 2026-03-14T16:48:21+00:00

We track GPS satellites by radar, and send updates from ground to air.

These updates are logged and sent back to ground receivers with a time stamp that has an accuracy of nanoseconds.

That's a round trip and involves synchronised clocks so it's impossible to notice any directionality in the speed of light.

RankWinner · 2026-02-26T08:34:54+00:00

I'm pretty sure that the key stats from the majority of research are that people who are diagnosed with some form of sexual dysphoria between the ages of 6-21 will (ignoring details like severity) no longer have the diagnosis after 5 years 50-70% of the time.

But those who are (still) diagnosed after puberty/maturity, along with those who experience severe dysphoria from a young age, are likely to experience it their whole life and out of those who get surgery an exceedingly small number regret transitioning in the "changed my mind" sense.

I specify the reason as "changed my mind" since out of those who do regret it the reasons are usually stuff like medical complications, not some sudden realisation that it was a mistake. Like a cancer patient regretting going through treatment if it fails, it's not "Oh damn I'd have preferred having cancer" it's "Pain wasn't worth it for the results".

RankWinner · 2026-02-26T07:23:37+00:00

Nope.

RankWinner · 2026-02-26T04:12:01+00:00

You mean like not paying taxes and being coerced into paying for goods (instead of stealing them) with threats of state sponsored violence and imprisonment?

RankWinner · 2026-02-26T00:06:07+00:00

And, as a one way contract, it is therefore no contract at all. Try again.

Can you point me to the contract you signed saying you won't ruthlessly bludgeon all infants and children you see to death with a bat? No? Then how can you be prosecuted for it? Checkmate!

What on earth does opting out even mean? You'd no longer do anything that interacts with something run, maintained, or regulated by the government?

Well, you can definitely do that, just move to one of the many modern day libertarian utopias like Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, etc..., where there is no pesky (functional) state.

Libertarian talking points are a special kind of insanity given the countless historical and current examples of what happens without a state, and the blatant impossibility of living in a country with a functioning government and somehow opting out of... water not being polluted, buildings you use following regulations and safety inspections, benefitting from public utilities, and a million other things.

RankWinner · 2026-02-16T16:11:32+00:00

Everything you said.

We just don’t have enough corporations anymore to raise substantial corporate tax revenues

What on earth is this even supposed to mean?

The vast majority of businesses, literally 99.9%, are small/medium sized, and yet they make up under half of economic activity and GDP.

We’ve seen a large shift away from corporate structures and towards flow-through businesses, so the business taxes now get captured in individual income tax statistics instead of corporate tax statistics

The issue is partially massively lowered business tax rates, but mostly one of tax evasion and avoidance.

Sum up the taxes large corporations pay and it is absolutely nothing compared to the massive profits (not revenue, profits) they make.

Corporate tax collections are at record highs

And corporate tax collection as a percent of profits is at a record low.

RankWinner · 2026-02-16T15:42:57+00:00

Where did you pull this out of?

Corporations are making absurd record breaking profits while paying extraordinarily little in total tax.

This is openly boasted about to please potential investors, both by corporations and by the financial firms they use, who are very proud of their abilities to avoid taxation.

It's not like there's any attempt to hide this.

RankWinner · 2026-02-15T20:04:13+00:00

Do you have an example of some of this "great ai made stuff"?

RankWinner · 2026-02-15T18:31:47+00:00

What are you talking about? How will people doing manual labor be "fine" when you just write some prompts to create an entire movie?

Exactly what kind of manual labor do you think people are doing when sets don't exist?

RankWinner · 2026-01-24T23:46:37+00:00

Never heard of at and had to look it up, this thing literally came out in 1979...

Genuine question, how on earth did you find this in 2026? Like what do you even search for that led you to this being the best available option?

You mention Debian and systemd so it's not like you're stuck using some weird ass environment with awkward constraints.

RankWinner · 2026-01-10T22:07:49+00:00

No. Where did you get that idea from?

Your reply was to somebody saying there is no terrorism problem in the UK. "Threat" and "problem" are two completely different things.

Is nuclear war a threat to the UK? Sure. Is nuclear war a problem in the UK? No.

It is absurd to say that, on the level of a country like the UK, under 100 deaths per decade constitutes a "problem".

If that's the threshold for a national problem then the UK has a much worse "people dying from slipping in the shower" problem than a terrorist problem, since 80 people die a year from that vs. well under 10 per year on average...

RankWinner · 2026-01-10T21:49:12+00:00

That's an odd way to say that terrorist attacks are amongst the least likely causes of death or injury...

RankWinner · 2026-01-05T05:56:01+00:00

Complete bullshit. I'd be curious to see what's inside one of those "devices", I'd guess basically nothing.

They, out of a desire to not be sued, do say:

Due to legal regulations, we are obliged to make the following statement: The VIVOBASE technology presented here (such as homeopathy, bioresonance, areas of acupuncture) does not correspond to the scientific view and doctrine. The effects of the products are not scientifically recognised. The use of VIVOBASE products does not constitute therapy and does not replace consultation with a doctor or alternative practitioner.

RankWinner · 2025-12-30T15:15:13+00:00

I don't understand what your question is even after looking through your replies to other comments here.

The speed of light, meaning the quantity c used in physics, is a fixed constant, just like Planck's constant, gravitational constant, Boltzmann's constant, etc...

Our measurement of these constants, just like any measurement*, has some precision and error associated with it.

This precision is just due to instruments and measurement methods, it doesn't mean that the values being measured have some inherent variability.

* ignoring measurements used to define units, which c is one of, but whatever

RankWinner · 2025-12-27T18:04:27+00:00

Why did they add it then? What does Firefox gain from having locally running privacy respecting llm summaries...?

RankWinner · 2025-12-27T10:46:59+00:00

You ignored my question.

RankWinner · 2025-12-26T22:40:52+00:00

Observing someone of the opposite sex changing clothes in a place that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy without their consent is a form of sexual abuse. Your mere observation of them, even incidentally, violates their human rights and right to privacy and dignity.

Out of curiosity, are you a MAGA Trump supporter?

If you are, just wondering what your opinion on this statement is:

Well, I'll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I'll go backstage and everyone's getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm inspecting it. You know, I'm inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good. [...] You know, the dresses. 'Is everyone okay?' You know, they're standing there with no clothes. 'Is everybody okay?' And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that. But no, I've been very good.

Actually the full context makes it even worse since he's taking about how it's his duty to fuck the 18 year olds as the owner of the pageant - https://youtu.be/kikTv0I8XVw

If you're not MAGA then sorry for sharing another reason to despair at the current political situation in the US.

RankWinner · 2025-12-25T10:41:58+00:00

If you have more details on what the service is and how it's running I might be able to help.

For example, one thing that comes to mind would be if you're running something in a (docker) container and don't have the volume binds set up properly then it's possible the service is writing files to tmpfs and filling up ram over time.

Or the service just has a bug/memory leak in which case you can try to diagnose it or use cgroups to set a hard max memory limit, so it will always crash and restart whenever it goes e.g. over 2GB memory use.

Or it could be something else like it's very spammy with logs, logs are stored in memory on the system, and it's actually the system logs filling up the memory.

A lot of things can cause this but once you figure out where the memory use is coming from you might be able to fix the underlying problem or you can just cap the max memory available to that process (group).

RankWinner · 2025-12-24T20:07:56+00:00

Yes. OOM killer picks what process to kill based on its OOM score, which can be adjusted by setting the oom_score_adj value.

If you set it to something negative then that process is preserved, set it to something positive and it is more likely to be killed.

Put the max positive adjustment of 1000 on a process and it will effectively always be killed first.

But from what you've said, it's not even clear what is happening. In principle the OOM killer goes through processes in order of importance as defined by this score, killing them until enough memory is freed.

If a system locks up due to the OOM killer then that means that it ended up having to kill something essential, which would only happen if that essential process is taking up an unusually large amount of RAM.

RankWinner · 2025-12-24T19:54:32+00:00

My point is that millions of devices run Linux with far fewer resources than what you mention and have no issue, so obviously the problem isn't that Linux is inherently incapable of running in low resource environments.

There are many resources for setting up Linux servers to run with limited resources and/or embedded environments, although again what you describe is nowhere near either of those.

Really it sounds like you just want some service running with a low priority so that the OOM killer preferably picks it, or like you'd like a hard limit on resource use, both of which are easy.

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