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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Sure, but only fourth grade logic is required to see why that’s wrong.

    Trump: 50,000,000 votes

    Kamala: 50,000,000 votes

    Other candidates: 1,000 votes + 3,000 votes + 7,000 votes + …

    When an primitive voting scheme is used that says “winner takes all and you can only vote for one candidate,” a vote for any other candidate is essentially the same as not voting unless the masses gather behind a single third party (which will never happen, especially with the internet).

    A voting scheme more sophisticated that allows people to pick multiple candidates, in something like a ranked list for example, would make third party votes worth something. But that disrupts the status quo and doesn’t help career politicians, so we’ll never see that unless heads start rolling.








  • Not necessarily. Buttons and switches introduce contact resistance, which in the case of the mushy Duracell buttons, is relatively high and also dependent on how hard they’re pressed.

    Ideally, the buttons are pressed very hard to ensure the entire contact area is closed, minimizing the contact resistance from the buttons. A good switch should have little resistance.

    Poorly closing the contacts by not pressing the Duracell buttons very hard would result in higher contact resistance (because there’s physically less contact between both halves of the switch), which means less current flows through the strip and less heat is generated. This would look identical to a deader battery with the buttons pressed well.











  • More than just “ripcord likes to have lights on at 6:00 pm,” surprisingly.

    It knows what brand lights you have, who’s interacting with it, who you might be with if anyone speaks in the background, what times and days you’re typically home… it’ll even infer your mood based on how your voice sounds.

    Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t required to disclose every bit of personal data they take from you, so only so much is known about it. If you consider though that data collection is a new, multi-billion dollar industry, and how effective hundreds of PhDs in data science and social-engineering can be with near infinite resources to develop tools to extract as much information from these devices as possible, it starts becoming more believable.

    Here’s a good paper I found: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10920