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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    2 months ago

    It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

    If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    2 months ago

    It’s a lie.

    By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

    If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

    Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.


  • I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.

    Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.

    I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.

    But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.

    Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad


  • Money isn’t the limiting factor though.

    There’s plenty of money waiting to be spent on green electricity projects that’s bottlenecked by grid connections, permitting, panel and turbine manufacturing, rare element supply chains and host of other factors slowing down how quickly we can build new renewable capacity.

    Also the typical LCOE cost comparison approach doesn’t factor in the cost of grid connections, which is lower for a nuclear power plant than it is for an equivalent capacity of renewables. Nuclear is still more expensive on average, but the difference isn’t as clear cut and there a cases where nuclear might be cheaper in the long run.

    Everytime nuclear comes up on Reddit/Lemmy we always seem to argue whether nuclear or renewables is better choice like it’s a choice between the two. Both nuclear and renewables are slam dunk choices compared to fossil fuels on every metric if you factor in even an overly optimistic case analyisis of the financial impacts of climate change. (Nevermind giving considerations of the humanatarian impact.)

    80+% of our planet’s energy still comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables have been smashing growth records year over year for a long time now and yet we haven’t even reached the point where we’re adding new renewables capacitiy faster than energy demand is increasing. We’re still setting new records annually for total fossil fuel consumed. Hell we haven’t even gotten to the point where we stopped building new Coal-fired power stations yet.

    The people who argue that “we don’t need nuclear, renewabes are cheaper and faster” you’re missing the reality of sheer quantity of energy needed. We can’t build enough new renewables fast enough to save us regardless of how much money is invested. There aren’t enough sources of the raw materials needed to make that happen quickly enough, we can’t connect them to the grid quickly enough, we cant build new factories for solar panels and wind turbines fast enough. Yes, we will undoubetly continure to accelerate our new renewables projects at a record setting paces each year but it’s not enough, it’s not even close. Even our most optimistic , accelerated projections don’t put us anywhere close to displacing fossil fuel consumption in the next 10-20 years.

    We need to stop arguing over which is better. We need to do it all.


  • Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.

    If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.

    It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.

    This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.

    I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.

    A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent

    B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.


  • The challenge with green hydrogen is it needs to be created using green electricity. If the electricity isn’t green you’re still burning fossil fuels to create it. Creating hydrogen from fossil fuel generated electricity and then burning it is less efficient than just burning fossil fuels directly and results in a net increase not decrease in carbon emissions.

    As we build additional green electricity generation, it’s currently more impactful to use that to lower grid demand on fossil fuel generated electricity than to use it make green hydrogen. If it’s used to make green hydrogen instead, we’re only delaying the day we finally eliminate fossil fuel electricity generation, which again benefits the fossil fuel industry.

    Only at some point in the future, when we’ve completely eliminated fossil fuels from the electric grid, and have created an excess of green electricity generation does green hydrogen even become possible to create.

    And even assuming we can achieve that some day. It’s less efficient to use electricity to create hydrogen to power vehicle than to use batteries. Anything that can be converted to connect to the grid directly or run on batteries is better doing that than running on hydrogen.

    It’s not completely crazy… there are some potential use cases for green hydrogen that would make sense in some theoretical future where there’s an abundance of green electricity generation, allowing replacing of fossil fuels where more direct forms of electrification isn’t viable. Aircraft in particular come to mind here since hydrogen stores much more energy per kg than batteries, which are currently too heavy to be viable in aircraft.

    But almost all promotion of hydrogen today, including green hydrogen, is either more greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry or the work of well meaning idealists that have unwittingly become their shills.

    Green Hydrogen is not a solution for the vast majority of things it gets presented as a solution to.




  • Lived in a house that had a heat pump with resistive electric heat as a backup in Canada. Never noticed a significant difference between that and other houses I’ve lived in that had natural gas furnaces.

    Aux heat would kick whenever it was below about -5°C. That house would be about 20 years old now and had decent insulation for the location and age. It never really felt like the furnace struggled to keep the house warm, or was running all the time.

    Cost wise it didn’t seem significantly better or worse than natural gas. It was definitely using more juice in the winter when there was a cold snap, but it wasn’t crazy amounts. The electric bill was actually highest in the summer when the heat pump was cooling.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    I concur with everything you’ve written here.

    I concur that a left-to-right interpretation of consecutive explicit multiplication and division is wide spread and how most calculators and computers would interpret:

    a / b * c.

    But the sources you quote in your blog post and the style guides I’ve read, state that a fraction bar or parenthesis should be used to clarify if it should be interpreted as:

    (a / b) * c

    or

    a / (b * c)

    You make the argument in your post that:

    a / bc

    is ambiguous (which I agree with)

    but

    a / b * c

    is not ambiguous. Which is the part I disagree with, and I think the sources you quoted disagree with you as well. But I’m open to being wrong about that and am interested if you have sources that prove otherwise.

    If I’m understanding your response correctly, you believe that

    a / b * c

    is unambiguous, and always treated like

    (a / b) * c

    because of a wide spread convention of left-to-right interpretation (a convention that we both agree exists), not because you found a source that states that.

    Anyhow… I’m not out to convince you of anything and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your thinking to me.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    I would be particularly interested if you found something in a mathematical style guide that recommended an expression like

    ( a / b ) * c

    Should be re-written as

    a / b * c

    Generally speaking, style guides advise rewriting equations for maximum clarity. Which usually includes a guideline of removing parentheses when their existence isn’t needed to clarify intent.

    I believe, and I’m particularly interested to see if you found evidence that my understanding is incorrect, that the LTR convention used by calculators and computer programming languages today exists because a deterministic interpretation is a requirement or the hardware, not because any such convention existed prior to that or has been officially codified one way or the other by any mathematics bodies.

    So like, forget division for a sec…

    In a mathematics paper, you usually wouldn’t write:

    (a + (b + c)) + d

    You’d write:

    a + b + c + d

    (Except perhaps if in your paper the parentheses made it easier to follow how you got to that equation.)

    Because in mathematics, it will never matter which order you do additions in, so you should drop the parentheses to improve clarity.

    On a computer or a calculator though you might get a different result for those two equations like if a+b overflows your accumulator and c is a negative number, or when these are floating points values with significantly different magnitudes.

    I believe english speaking engineers just adopted LTR as the convention for how to interpret it since they had to do something, and the english language is a LTR language. I don’t believe that convention exists outside of the context of computing.

    The Wolfram quote and ISO quote in particular that you have in your post imply that an inline division followed by an explicit multiplication is ambiguous as to if it should be interpreted as a compound fraction.

    If that’s correct, then it would be the inline division that makes it ambiguous, not the implicit multiplication that makes it ambiguous.

    If there’s some source from before computers, or outside of the context of computers forcing a decision. Then your assertion that it is the implicit multiplication causes the ambiguity is correct.

    I’m not trying to prove you’re wrong, I’m just genuinely curious which it is. And if you found evidence one way or the other.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    My apologies, I wasn’t trying to spar with you friend, just trying to understand why a/b*c wouldn’t also be considered ambiguous, particularly since an author could have written a*c/b and removed any doubt.

    In your blog post you also quoted ISO

    In such a combination, a solidus (/) shall not be followed by a multiplication sign or a division sign on the same line unless parentheses are inserted to avoid any ambiguity.

    You seemed to speak rather definitively that it’s only ambiguous when combined with implicit multiplication.

    I agree that almost all calculators and programming languages will interpret consecutive explicit multiplications and divisions with left-to-right precedence.

    But as far as I’m aware no such LTR rule has global agreement in mathematics, I was curious if you found something in your research that says otherwise.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    Will you accept wolfram alpha as credible source?

    https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Solidus.html

    Special care is needed when interpreting the meaning of a solidus in in-line math because of the notational ambiguity in expressions such as a/bc. Whereas in many textbooks, “a/bc” is intended to denote a/(bc), taken literally or evaluated in a symbolic mathematics languages such as the Wolfram Language, it means (a/b)×c. For clarity, parentheses should therefore always be used when delineating compound denominators.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    What is your source for the priority of the / operator?

    i.e. why do you say 6 / 2 * 3 is unambiguous?

    Every source I’ve seen states that multiplication and division are equal priority operations. And one should clarify, either with a fraction bar (preferably) or parentheses if the order would make a difference.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml6÷2(1+2)
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    11 months ago

    You state that the ambiguity comes from the implicit multiplication and not the use of the obelus.

    I.e. That 6 ÷ 2 x 3 is not ambiguous

    What is your source for your statement that there is an accepted convention for the priority of the iinline obelus or solidus symbol?

    As far as I’m aware, every style guide states that a fraction bar (preferably) or parentheses should be used to resolve the ambiguity when there are additional operators to the right of a solidus, and that an obelus should never be used.

    Which therefore would make it the division expressed with an obelus that creates the ambiguity, and not the implicit multiplication.

    (Rest of the post is great)



  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlF#€k $pez
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    1 year ago

    Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.

    That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.

    The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.