I was thinking of 10^16kg diamond storage inside a larger SSD that’s the size of a large moon, similar to how a real SSD has data stored in tiny little slivers of silicon inside a much much larger device.

I should have explained that one better. It’s easy to imply such details to keep text shorter.

10^24 is a lot bigger than 6×10^23

Well yeah it’s almost double, but I wrote the comment as a mental estimation of the order of magnitude, so it doesn’t change the substance of the discussion.

I mean at the beginning I arbitrarily picked a number in that 10^40 to 10^44 range and that’s a factor of 1:10,000 rather than 1:2, lol.

If you don’t limit it to valid positions/arrangements it’s like 10^120. Closer to the “number of X in the observable universe” caliber of number.

It was far too recent for somebody with my background. I learned how the UNIX command line was different from DOS in the late 90s, but it was only last year that I switched from a VM to a native Linux install at work. Then I swapped over the home PCs during winter.

After defaulting to Windows for so long because of games and employers favoring it, it was almost frustrating how fast, smooth, and “clean” feeling it was to install Linux natively on a system compared with the recent versions of Windows. And that’s without any special lightweight distro. I am a proud Linux Mint Cinnamon user, lol.

This was a fun one to look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

It looks like the number of valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10^40 to 10^44, and the number of atoms in the Earth is around 10^50. Yeah the latter is bigger, but the former is still absolutely huge.

Let’s assume we have a magically amazing diamond-based solid state storage system that can represent the state of a chess square by storing it in a single carbon atom. The entire board is stored in a lattice of just 64 atoms. To estimate, let’s say the total number of carbon atoms to store everything is 10^42.

Using Avogadro’s number, we know that 6.022x10^23 atoms of carbon will weigh about 12 grams. For round numbers again, let’s say it’s just 10^24 atoms gives you 10 grams.

That gives 10^42 / 10^24 = 10^18 quantities of 10 grams. So 10^19 grams or 10^16 kg. That is like the mass of 100 Mount Everests just in the storage medium that can store multiple bits per atom! That SSD would be the size of a small large moon!

Yep, if your condenser unit outside just won’t turn on it’s always a good idea to check this capacitor. I think it was just last year that I replaced the one in my unit installed in 2015. I went through a few capacitors with the ancient system before that!

God damn it, I had actually forgotten about that in the decade and a half that seems to have elapsed since October.

Oh Lemmy, I saw all the lightning bugs in the trees last night, blinking fast as hell because of the high temperature, and I thought of you!

I was just discussing my raggedy-ass yard and it’s contribution to the local fauna.

Just the other day my son was chasing the fireflies in our front yard.

…That front yard I was feeling bad about not mowing because the weeds mixed in with the grass quickly grow tall flowers above the head.

I think I want to keep helping those blinky-bois.

Thanks to Lemmy and Linux I’ve been enjoying the internet in much the same way for some time now.

I even use a desktop PC on a daily basis and it just feels right.

Well, it’s desktop PC but I have the main monitor on an arm so that it can hover over my lap while on the couch. I’m a middle aged dad and my family likes to hang out in the same room together, so it is much more practically usable for me as a couchtop.

Whatever shadow of a hope I had that the people of this country would not gobble up low-effort lies about Iran just had this comment appear from the shadows and shiv it in the fucking liver.

When I look at her eyes in a photo or video, I see the kind of evil where as she squeezed the life out of a kitten she would not laugh, cry, or grit her teeth. She would just stare, then tilt her head like a curious alien or Labrador without blinking.

Please note that I am a fan of both dogs and space, so I am sending zero insults their direction in that comparison. It’s like if I were to compare the number of times Trump shit his pants throughout his first term with the number of times my baby boy – born right after the inauguration – shit his pants over the same interval.

My official guess for the name of this new slavery program is the “Essential Guest Worker” bill/order.

I went to business school in the US about a decade ago (stayed full time engineer and happy about it) and I can absolutely see business schools unironically studying the process of privatizing and offshoring prisons as it relates to other more ethical and humane enterprises.

The crazy thing is we have 240V service to the home, but we only use it for large appliances that also use high current. My stove is induction and is one of the things plugs into 240V, and I bet it can boil a cup of water (though in a pot/pan) faster than most kettles.

There are plenty of cases where having the higher voltage in our outlets would be nice. For me it’s probably corded power tools more than kettles. But the vast majority of devices are fine either way.

Yooo, Democratic Senators, fuck youuuu!

Signed, an independent US citizen who has repeatedly voted for your shitty controlled opposition candidates because it was glaringly obvious to me SEVERAL YEARS AGO that anything Trump brings to the table is significantly worse for humanity than your bland business as usual.

Like, Trump was so, so bad that in retrospect it makes more sense that HE was the controlled opposition so that status quo capitalist corporate democrats could win their elections and keep the people “happy enough” while letting the elites play their games.

But no. Now he is much worse, mask-off, nominating unqualified morons and traitors to help administrate the federal government, and you fuckups in the “at least we aren’t an openly bigoted death cult” party did not stop it in cases where you could have.

Damn, that is incredible. I am somebody who comes from a conservative white religious family. I am not estranged from them and we actually have a good relationship, but I do keep them at a certain distance because of it.

But while the estrangement context is unfamiliar to me, all of the issues discussed absolutely ring true.

The whole “emotion creates reality” versus “reality creates emotion” thing is a fantastic was to phrase it. I think that simple description might hit the nail on the head for what the hell is going on with conservatives/religious constantly trying to fuck up the world and having ridiculous beliefs.

It also speaks a lot to narcissism, which does admittedly go hand in hand with the whole conservative need for social hierarchy and the expectation that oneself is obviously at the top.

USian here, and totally agree. The willful ignorance is stunning to behold.

But help me with my potential ignorance here - is this meme also suggesting that ordinary citizens of other developed countries know about these things? Do high school history and social studies classes have a day or a week that discuss US imperialism & shady dealings of recent decades?

My impression has always been that people in other countries read about this awful shit in the same places I do online, and that the differences in mainstream knowledge are about much more basic stuff like coal and climate change being bad while healthcare is good.

Remember, the #1 search on google on Election Day was “did Joe Biden drop out”

Jesus fucking christ. I have not read that before, but it is the most believable thing I’ve seen all week.

I’ll look it up tomorrow. I am always curious, but I cannot handle having this fact confirmed to me right now, lol.

I’m literally a yankee, as in a lifelong resident of the area north of the Mason-Dixon line and I’ve visited several historical civil war sites over the decades because they’re among the inexpensive points of interest within several hours of here.

I think you’re both kind of right. Everything the previous comment said is correct IMO about it starting with a negative connotation and people in the south probably hating it. But modern online usage feels pretty respectful too. Even in a professional setting, if I were on a typical call and somebody from Europe referred to somebody thousands of km (or miles, lol) away on the other side of the US as one of the yankees/yanks, I don’t think it would even register as something I’d remember. (well NOW it will because of this comment, thanks lemmy! :D )

Plus more recently, those of us who do wild shit like pay attention to the outside world don’t exactly take offense to people insulting this fucked up country/government/culture/etc. We’re right here agreeing with you. So something like “yankee” doesn’t stand out much when you read somebody across the world write “fuck all USians” and you think to yourself “…I can see that. That’s fair.”