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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.

    But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.


  • fiasco@possumpat.iotoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldHow much swap?
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn’t any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn’t enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.

    If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.

    Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I’m curious why, but unless you’re in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.

    Edit: Didn’t notice what community this was. Since it’s a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I’m pretty sure they’re easier to resize as conditions change.







  • Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

    So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.

    It seems to me, the dangers are more like…

    Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

    It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

    Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

    Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.






  • Fun question, but it leads to other questions…

    First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you’re asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

    This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

    If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn’t be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant’s permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

    The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.




  • This phenomenon is as old as history.

    Socrates was killed because he made fun of powerful people. Anaxagoras was exiled from Athens for arguing that the sun and moon are just fire and rock, rather than gods. Galileo was persecuted because he got into a pissing match with the Jesuits over the nature of comets, then when the Pope’s support for Galileo’s (geocentric) views wavered (…they wavered for political reasons), Galileo wrote a treatise ridiculing the Pope. Hearst and Pulitzer propagandized the US into the Spanish-American War. Mondale lost the election because the media decided he looked ridiculous.

    Yeah the internet is terrible for discourse, but the more basic fact is that almost all humans suck at discourse. Even, or maybe especially, Galileo.




  • There’s something important missing from most of the other answers. There’s a lot of different kinds of network and internet traffic. Web browsing, email, instant messaging, online video games…

    By formal standard, certain port numbers are designated for certain functions. Web traffic happens on port 80. Incoming email is sent on port 143, outgoing email is sent on port 456 or 587. Something like Discord will have a specific port it uses for both sending and receiving messages. Word of Warcraft has certain ports its uses for telling the server when you cast a spell, and for the server to tell your client when you take damage.

    So yes, ports are like PO boxes at a post office, but the analogy doesn’t quite capture it. Port 80 is always web traffic, and this is important, since your web browser requests pages on port 80, just as a web server returns web pages on port 80. The web server probably has other ports on it, like FTP (ports 20 and 21) or SFPT (port 22). If you connect to a web server on port 80, that means you’re asking for its webpages. If you connect on 20, 21, or 22, it means you’re trying to transfer files to it.