• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes
    5·
    10 months ago

    not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

    with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

    with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

    with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

    so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

    the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

    and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8

  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtopolitics @lemmy.world•Young voters explain why they’re bailing on Biden — and whether they’d come back
    2·
    11 months ago

    you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list

    otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line

  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtopolitics @lemmy.world•Young voters explain why they’re bailing on Biden — and whether they’d come back
    21·
    11 months ago

    yeah we have RCV for everything… everyone knows how to vote; it’s really not hard

    https://www.aec.gov.au/media/2022/05-11.htm

    this articles a little old and it’s changed a bit since then, but on a basic level it the same:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work

    the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)

    so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes

    if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home

    some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Australia

  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtopolitics @lemmy.world•Young voters explain why they’re bailing on Biden — and whether they’d come back
    71·
    11 months ago

    sure! absolutely! for primaries go nuts, kick up a stink, let’s get a better candidate! totally agree!

    but when it comes to the election and if trump is the nominee for republicans and biden is the nominee for the democrats then you get the hell out there, suck up your pride and you vote against the dictator… and the only effective way of voting against the dictator is a vote for the democrats - not because you like it, not because it’s fair - but because the USA has a first past the post system and that’s just the bullshit reality of the situation

    and then, if you have the energy, you help at the local level to implement something like RCV

    (should be noted, i’m australian so i have no power to do anything, and a lot of people will say i have no business making comments like this because im not american! however america has placed itself in a position of power on the global stage - the way yall vote effects everyone! its critical - GLOBALLY - that trump doesn’t win)

  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos
    1·
    11 months ago

    afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content

    also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others

  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. AI Will Enable Mass Spying
    24·
    11 months ago

    i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…

    this could lead to a few interesting situations:

    • more ubiquitous ML could lead to enforcement of laws more evenly… ML doesn’t make “oh sorry sir i didn’t know who you were” decisions, and if that’s coupled with transparency then maybe we will be left in less of a “laws for thee and not for me” situation as it becomes more difficult to break laws for people in power
    • more ubiquitous ML, as long as it’s fairly openly available, will absolutely be used by media to piece together complex structures and do investigative journalism. it could help to hold people to account
    • more ML in tax could mean less tax evasion? or setting it to task on suggesting fixes for tax loop holes if it can see a lot more invasive data?
  • PupBiru@kbin.socialtoEurope@feddit.de•Postnord says no to Tesla
    3·
    11 months ago

    the company can refuse to deliver mail under a few obvious situations:

    • too far off regular delivery routes (though depending on the laws behind postal delivery in sweden this might not be an acceptable reason for postnord, but certainly would have to be for a private company)
    • consistent danger to delivery personnel

    so there’s definitely a line somewhere. i think that postnord is arguing that it can’t force its employees to deliver to tesla in the same way that it can’t force its employees to deliver to a dangerous address. the article also states that the right to strike is part of the swedish constitution