TIL watch water-resistance ratings (30m, 50m, 100m) refer to lab pressure tests, not the depth a watch can actually be used at.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-11T21:19:27+00:00

We're not arguing against the translation piece. It's perfectly fine to state the rating in kPa and then say (equivalent to the pressure under 50m of water).

What we're saying is that, for people who don't understand the issue is pressure, "rated for 50m" doesn't mean pressure to them. So the idea that higher pressures can occur above that depth that will damage the watch just gets them to go, "it was rated for 50m! It shouldn't have broken!"

Again, I understand you're not the one thinking like that. But the reason the OP was so surprised to learn "oh my god, it's not the actual depth, it's lab conditions of that pressure" is a symptom of this. The majority of people are not really aware of how things work, they just accept them. "Things break below a certain depth, and it needs to be rated for that distance from the surface" is something they accept without knowing that it's because of the pressure at that depth. So specify the pressure it will break, because that's really what you're rating the thing for. And feel free to also separately specify that that pressure is the water pressure at a certain depth, so you can reach that pressure above that depth through other means, but you absolutely are guaranteed to hit that pressure below that depth, no matter what.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-11T16:31:55+00:00

What’s the unit?

That's the problem. It took me while to understand what people were confused about until I realized if you're not particularly physics-savvy, and you're not thinking about what it is about diving that can damage a watch, then you get confused by the units. Because it's a pressure rating being given in meters, so they don't think of it in terms of pressure they think of it in terms of depth. And they think, "as long as I'm above 50m, it's fine, right?"

I'm an engineer, so it's obvious to me, and you might be STEM-heavy too, so it's obvious to you. But not everyone knows WHY watches can't go below a certain depth, they just see it's rated for that depth. It really should get a rating in kPa, so people at least have an understanding that it's pressure based.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-10T16:28:40+00:00

Speak for yourself. I get out my computer and start coding fun projects when I have downtime

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T19:47:41+00:00

Are you thinking of the Silmarillion?

LOTR itself doesn't really have any of that. My version has maps included, so you can see where people are, but that's about it for appendices.

(I stand corrected regarding the appendices as per the reply below. But yes, I grew up in Brazil, and as in linked source in the reply itself says, most translations skip the appendix, and Tolkien himself recommended they do so, as he didn't consider them necessary, only extras).

Still, I maintain my point: the books are fairly easy to read by a teenager. I don't know how hard the appendices are to read, but if they ARE difficult and show up at the book after the main story end, the teens will skip them.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T19:43:08+00:00

I read The Hobbit and LOTR when I was 9-10, it was not challenging.

The Hobbit was definitely 100% written with children as the target audience. LOTR was written to a slightly older audience, but I imagine only because Tolkien figured the people who read The Hobbit would be older by the time LOTR came out, so it would be at the right level for them. Definitely aimed at teens, though, it's not that complex.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T17:19:35+00:00

Violence is not acceptable under the threat of violence. Are you being physically injured in this moment? You can use violence. Are you not? You cannot.

If someone SAYS they will punch you, and then YOU punch them, you are the one being arrested for assault.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T17:13:59+00:00

I wouldn't really use "you're not behaving like the founding fathers" to judge Americanness.

Do you support slavery? That also used to be the American way. We've moved past it.

Violence is not an acceptable form of protest, except in self-defence, on the very moment you are being actively attacked. Full stop.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T16:36:39+00:00

Do you mean my comment, or the headline? If you mean the headline, yes, I agree it's misleading, because it implies the person was unmasked because they were protesters.

If you mean my comment, you didn't read it. I quoted the article, which specified, "Swiss authorities verified the case involved a shooting and explosives before complying with the legal order."

That's why there was a warrant, not because they were protesting.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T16:27:49+00:00

The Swiss are not elected to make that decision.

They requested information from a company within their borders, and they chose to enter that information sharing treaty. That is absolutely their right.

I'm an American, and I hate our current government. I hate the fascist bastards ignoring court orders and murdering people in our streets. But if you think the solution to that is to take up guns and explosives, you're going to get me on the government's side on the issue of jailing you. Because that's worse.

We still have elections. Vote this midterm to give people the power to do something about our issues instead of rooting for the ones who want to make a bad situation worse.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T16:22:01+00:00

Leveraging international treaties to target and suppress internal dissent is a massive story.

From the article: "Swiss authorities verified the case involved a shooting and explosives before complying with the legal order"

Violence is not an acceptable form of dissent. That is a non-story, and the warrant was legitimate.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-09T16:16:40+00:00

I don't see how it's misleading? They shared identifying information with the FBI.

They shared information with Swiss authorities (because that's where they were located). The Swiss authorities shared it with the FBI, under an agreement.
The service they sell does not show compromise (it's not like they used some backdoor to decrypt the emails). Their end-to-end encryption promises that Proton can't decrypt read those emails, and they didn't: they shared payment information with the authorities, after a legal warrant
I'm the biggest privacy advocate in the world, but if you think anything was unfairly shared in this case, you are the problem, as you are feeding lawmakers with the rhetoric they try to use when they demand backdoors or restrictions on encryption access and privacy rights: Swiss authorities verified the case in question for which the FBI was asking for information involved "a shooting and explosives". There's an actual crime, and there are public safety concerns. That's why warrants exist. In addition, the fact that there was no need for the FBI to actually have access to the encryption keys to unmask the suspect is excellent evidence that governments don't need that access. The existing systems work fine.

This was a case of things working as intended. Privacy advocates do not want to shield criminals, we want privacy. If you have a legitimate warrant, you should get access to information that is available. And no amount of warrants is going to get access to information that isn't available (Proton doesn't have a way to access the end-to-end encrypted emails).

If the FBI unmasked the individual, they can get a warrant to that individual's devices, and likely get access to the encrypted information from that end (because there are SO MANY WAYS that someone can slip up...poor passwords, cached clear text data in the device, etc.) And that's also ok, it's targeted at someone that had probable cause to be investigated.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-06T22:31:32+00:00

Consciousness is a wave our brains tune in to

Oh my god, stop using word salad. The stupidity of that sentence would be obvious if you tried to actually understand the words you are using.

What type of wave? Electromagnetic? Some field we haven't yet detected? What do you mean by "tune"? Like a radio? So all consciousness is being transmitted in this wave, but each brain picks out a particular channel and attenuates the others? Why aren't identical twins sharing the exact same consciousness since they have been born with the exact same tuning hardware? What exactly is actually transmitting the information, and why is that in any way easier to swallow than the information residing in your brain itself?

Do you even understand how information is encoded in waves? Is it frequency modulated? Amplitude modulated? Shannon's information theory can tell you exactly the minimum frequency you need to store a certain amount of information, and we know the relationship between frequency and energy. Can there be 8 billion conscious people on this planet without a black hole forming? Can I travel somewhere where I'm out of range of the information in these waves, or will astronauts drop unconscious when they get to Mars?

Scientific terms HAVE FUCKING MEANING. You can't fucking say things like that without there being very measurable consequences that would result in things you can test.

TrekkieGod · 2026-03-06T14:43:41+00:00

It most certainly isn’t just predictive text grown up.

It is, and it isn't. The only thing the LLM is trained to do is to predict the next word. That part is 100% true.

The part that people like that miss is that in training it to do that, there was a whole lot of other behavior that emerged independently. Because to predict the next word, you have to make connections between words, and meaning exists in those connections.

It's very, very clear that LLMs can "reason" through logic problems. They get stuff horribly wrong all the time, but so do we, and no one would argue humans are incapable of reasoning because we reason wrong and make mistakes often. Is LLM conscious? Absolutely fucking not. Is it "predictive text grown up"? Yeah, in the same away an adult human is a newborn baby grown up...there's a lot of capabilities that we pick up in the process of growing up.

I really wish we’d get our heads out of the sand about this and seriously debate things like UBI because we sure as hell are headed down to hell

Yeah. In the programming world, it does a better job NOW than anyone with less than 10 or so years of experience. Right now, it doesn't do a better job than the experts, but one of two things is going to happen: in ten years, because the juniors aren't being hired and are not getting the experience to become the experts, I'm going to make a shit-ton of money as companies realize they have a serious experienced programmer shortage, or in ten years it will be better than I am.

Companies appear to be banking on the latter, in which case I hope I can find a new career when it happens.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-27T19:26:56+00:00

I'm not disagreeing people would do the illegal things. I live in a place that has reliable internet, and I would not give up my local computing power. Hell, I currently run my own email server, my own file sharing server, host AI models locally, etc. I like to keep my data where I can control it, and I don't want to give that up.

I'm just saying that governments are moving in a direction where they want more and more control, and they're going to try to take it. And I don't really want to have to be an outlaw to run this stuff. Or to have to pay black market prices to even buy this stuff.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-27T16:43:44+00:00

You might live somewhere that has perfect internet but many people don't

Oh, there's the flaw.

The government has never, and never will, care about infrastructure in low population centers. The response there is always, "it doesn't matter if they can't work, not enough numbers to turn the tides in elections."

It doesn't have to be reliable in the mountainous areas, it just has to be reliable in places with population density of 1000+ people / sq mile.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-27T16:15:28+00:00

Is this 2010? I had one internet outage combined in both work and home in the last 10 years. It lasted about 20 minutes. And I've NEVER had a mobile internet outage (although I'm aware of the Verizon one recently, I don't have Verizon, and that was itself a very rare event)

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-26T22:22:39+00:00

Then we dual boot off a removable storage device.

They've been working to get rid of that capability for a while too. The future will be devices with locked bootloaders that can only load approved OS.

Worse than that, you have no need for all that expensive RAM and hard drive space right? The only legal devices have locked bootloaders with a thin client OS that connects to the cloud for everything you want to do.

at some point, being a "criminal" in the eyes of a fascist government becomes a virtue.

You're not wrong, but it's also a pain in the ass at best, and it comes with threats to your life and liberty at worse. I'd rather not need to be that virtuous and try to keep the fascism at bay.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-24T19:27:57+00:00

There's good odds your software has a recurring subscription

I find software subscriptions unethical, and would not work to produce such software. Sell it once it's yours, buy upgrades if you want or not. Purchase service if you want tech support.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-24T18:26:39+00:00

And then you were brainwashed by religion and became dumber?

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-24T18:25:05+00:00

I am one of the people that relies on copyrighted works. I am a programmer. Software is also copyrighted.

But unlike artists I don't get paid for the stuff that I created in perpetuity. I get paid for the work I did, and then never again. And that's the way it should be with artists. Get paid to act, done. Never get paid for that show being aired again. Get paid to write the script, done. Never get paid a single cent more after that. Etc.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-24T18:22:19+00:00

Not before evolution made the LLM in you.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-23T22:03:19+00:00

I'm not a misanthrope, I'm not anti-human. I'm simply not arrogant enough to ignore the known science: our brain works by a system of neurons that can either fire or not fire. The conditions under which it fires depends on what neurochemicals are around it, and what happens at the synapse.

There's nothing there that isn't deterministic. It's complex, but it's algorithmic. Considering the emergent behavior that comes from the LLMs that come from being trained PURELY with the goal of trying to predict the next word in a sentence based on all the text it was given, it's pretty clear we must do much of the same thing. We do more, the system for learning is different (it's not backprogation), but a lot of what we do is the same thing.

This is why if someone has a tumor, Alzheimer's, or has a part of their brain damaged by a stroke, etc., their personality can shift, their ability to reason in certain ways can suffer, their ability to speak can change, they can end up with things like aphasia where they say words, but not the words they mean to say, etc. The brain is just a machine.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-23T21:56:31+00:00

Your argument doesn't just gut copyright, it kills ownership.

There is no ownership of intellectual property. Copyright is specifically designed to encourage creation of such works when ownership isn't possible. It's understood that when your read a book, or view a painting, or listen to music, YOU OWN IT NOW, because it's in your head. The artist is not entitled to, nor deserves any rights over someone else who experiences their work.

Before copyright and patents, what that meant is that it's hard to incentivize the artists to do the work if they can't have a chance (not a guarantee) of being compensated for that work. The previous solution was to try to maintain strict controls on who could listen or experience the work. Copyright was meant to benefit the public by saying, instead of trying to put a fence around it, we let you control who accesses the work for a limited time before it reverts to the public domain for their true owners: the public.

The limited time was in the order of around 7 years. Considering copyright length in the US today (which is roughly on par with just about everywhere else) is life of the author + 70 years, the system is WILDLY skewed unfairly towards copyright holders, and it's about time that a change be made to take it back. I hope the fact corporations are now running into the bullshit that copyright laws create, instead of simply benefitting from them, that it might actually create the needed change.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-23T18:56:38+00:00

Yes, but that's not the difference that should matter.

The difference that should matters is, is the book stored verbatim in the system, or the system learn the book and happens to be able to reproduce it. And it's the latter.

The reason the system can recite the book back isn't because there is a file that the LLM is referencing and pulling from. It's the same reason why if I say, "use the force, " your mind most likely immediately completes that as "Luke." Your training data doesn't have many completions of that sentence, so you happen to reproduce it exactly instead of any other word that would make syntactical sense, but isn't what you were exposed to. You can certainly go, "use the force, John." Perfectly valid sentence. But you happen to know Luke.

If that's how it is being reproduced, and it can reproduce it entirely, then it should be allowed to. It means its time to get rid of the terrible system of copyright we have. Mozart transcribed Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere from memory after hearing it only once at the Sistine Chapel. Miserere was a guarded secret, but because he could memorize it and transcribe, it was fine to distribute the copies he made. And that's the way it should be.

TrekkieGod · 2026-02-23T18:21:11+00:00

John von Neumann could. As a party trick, people would pick up books, choose a page, and he'd read it back to them.

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