The problem is that the places where this technology would be useful also happen to be the places with little to no humidity. You can’t pull water out of the air if there isn’t any.

The places where this would be useful are places with high humidity, but then water sources aren’t usually an issue. You’d have to have a region where it’s very humid, but doesn’t have access to drinking water. I don’t imagine those are particularly common. Such a region would probably benefit more from water treatment than pulling it out of the air.

I thought about this before, and mostly agree. My mom knows nothing about computers and could probably use Ubuntu if I stick it on a machine and gave it to her. The thing preventing me from doing it is that when things go wrong in Linux, it often requires extensive terminal usage to fix. And my mother can often find new and creative ways to break a computer. If something went wrong with it, I would have to fix it. There is literally no one else she knows who would even know where to start. At least if she’s on windows, she can find someone to help her.

On Artemis, yes. On kbin.social, no. Was kinda wondering why no one else was talking about it.

Death is inevitable. Nothing I do will avoid it, I can’t escape it, and it will get me eventually. Thus, there’s no point worrying about it. If I live my life in fear of death, I’ll be just as dead as if I didn’t.

I’m not religious, so as far as I know this is the only existence I’ll ever have. I didn’t exist for billions of years, I exist now, and then I won’t exist for billions of years. In this brief window of consciousness, all I can do is live my life and try to experience it as much as possible. When I die, all I can hope for is that I was a good person who left the world in a better state than how I found it.

I won’t lie and say death doesn’t scare me. As I get closer, I’m sure it’ll scare me even more. I don’t want to die, so I’ll take whatever steps I can to avoid it. But to allow it to preoccupy my thoughts does me no good.

Awesome. I’m just lurking with Artemis until kbin.social enables the API, but really like how it’s coming along. Microblogging is the big reason I chose Kbin over Lemmy, so I’m excited for this.

There really does need to be a limit of how many magazines you’re allowed to moderate. There’s no way you can effectively moderate 59 different communities.

11 of me could probably take a buffalo. We might lose one or two of us, but come out on top.

BS looks better than AAS, but honestly that’ll only really apply for your first couple jobs. Once you’ve got a few years of experience, your specific education matters less and less. I will say that a BS is “better” in terms of teaching you more, but your Associate’s credits will transfer if you ever decide to go that route.

Also, once you pick up one language, you basically know them all (with some obvious exceptions). If you know PowerShell, you can pick up Bash pretty easy. If you know JavaScript, you can pick up Python. If you know Python, Java is pretty easy. If you know Java, you pretty much know C#. Learning a language becomes just figuring out how that languages does things. Picking up a new language goes from being a process that takes a year or two and schooling to taking maybe a week and watching some videos. There are some exceptions (Python doesn’t tell you much about SQL, and systems languages like C/C++ are their own animal).

Star Trek: The Next Generation. Watching that is the TV version of getting comfy under a warm blanket.

It’s tricky. Depending on what direction you take, CS can be very math heavy or not. If you get into algorithmic stuff, deep learning, data analysis, etc., that has a lot of math. But if you focus on, for example, front end development, there’s not that much.

I won’t lie and say CS has no math. At my university, you were able to avoid higher level calculus by doing a bachelor’s of arts instead of a bachelor’s of science. Calculus 2 is usually the highest level you have to take, which focuses primarily on integration. I was kinda in your boat of being hesitant to do CS because of the math, but I ended up minoring in it. The CS-focused math is mostly logic stuff and discrete math, which I feel is way easier than calculus. And honestly, calculus isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation would have you think (until Vector Calculus, that almost broke me).

Look into it, but I’ll say that while the math is there, it’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking. And if you know you’re not going into heavy algorithmic stuff, see if there’s a path that avoids most of it. And once you’re out of school, you’ll never touch calculus again (unless you do a lot of physics, maybe? Game dev, perhaps?)

I think better advice would be “invest/save” in general. You could just throw money into a mutual fund, index fund, savings account, whatever. If you get a job with an employer matched 401k, max that out. I don’t think you need to worry about trying to play the stock market by buying individual stocks. You’ll end up spending way too much time doing it for minimal gains over an index fund, and a lot of the time you’re just basically gambling on what companies you think are going to do well.

For IT you could do Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, etc. There’s a whole lot of angles you could come at it from too. Would you want to maintain systems or develop them?

If databases interest you, you could be a DBA. If networking interests you, a network engineer. If you want to do development, you can focus on front-end development, back-end development, full-stack, embedded systems, and more. Maybe hardware interests you, so you’d like to be a computer engineer. Computers/IT has a lot of components to it, and even if you find yourself a person that likes to bounce between different things, there’s a lot here that you can bounce between. School will have you touch a little bit of everything, and you can find that part you want to specialize in.

My advice for picking a degree: pick something that you want to do, but also something marketable. The degree is useless if you can’t get a job in it.

If you’re worried about college being difficult, it can be, but 95% of your success is going to be based on motivation. I was a TA in college, and the best students were the ones that asked questions, came to office hours, and participated. I saw many a “smart kid” bomb a test due to overconfidence.

If you’re not sure what to do, you can start with general education credits or even do the first part of your degree at a community college to save money. A lot of times a 2 year associates degree will serve as the first 2 years of a bachelor’s.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I can answer this. Two things come to mind.

First, really should have just done college after high school. I really wasn’t looking forward to more school after graduation and wasted about 5 years before going back for my CS degree. I’m in a good place now, but could have had a 5 year head start on life if I’d just gone straight in.

Second, please take better care of your health while you have it. I was skinny as a rail in my early 20s and sort of took that for granted. I’m not obese or anything right now, but as you get older keeping in shape takes conscious upkeep. Get in the habit now and it’ll be easier to maintain later. It’s harder to lose the weight once you have it rather than keep it off.

Mod’s gone, post fantasy content.

Taking a picture instantly after would probably create a different hash value. The thing about hashing is that even if one bit is different between source images, the resulting hashes would look entirely different.

I suppose I could conceive of a proprietary hash algorithm that would allow for fuzzy matching of iris photos, but as you said, eyes taken years apart in different conditions wouldn’t match the original hash. Or falsely match similar looking eyes. It’s not like this system allows them to get high resolution perfectly lit iris photos, after all.

The whole thing sounds dubious, and I suspect AI is mentioned solely to secure investor funding, much like how several years back everything mentioned Blockchain.

Several years ago for April Fools Day, Reddit launched /r/place, which created a canvas where users could place individual pixels every few minutes. Communities would get together to carve out their own little corner of the canvas for a piece of art, and overall the whole thing was pretty well received.

Last year for April Fools Day, they did it again. Overall, once again pretty well received.

Now, since Reddit has pissed everyone off, they’re doing it again again, likely in a desperate move to try and generate some positive community interactions. /r/place has always been pretty popular when they’ve done it before, so this is probably a ‘push in case of emergency’ attempt to placate users. Predictably, everyone’s still mad so they’ve littered the whole canvas with ‘fuck spez’ posts.

@ernest, if Kbin starts making okay money, don’t be afraid to give yourself a salary. It’s important that you get to eat too.

Another thought is that they’re not trying to kill Mastodon, they’re trying to kill Twitter.

Mastodon has a bit of a community already, so by implementing ActivityPub, Meta can make its platform seem bigger than it is by pulling in Mastodon content. Gives it another edge over Twitter.

Best case scenario is Threads sees ActivityPub as just the cost of doing business. That way, even people who won’t use your platform are still interacting with it. Downside, people on your platform can leave for a federated alternative and not miss out on any content. Not sure if that downside makes up for the potential gains.

I think the default approach needs to be defederate first unless Meta shows actual interest in developing the fediverse with good intentions. If Threads become the majority provider of content to the fediverse and then we defederate, we lose all that content. It could lead to Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin withering and dying as everyone goes where the content is.

If you get your public education in the deep south, you’ll get a lot of lost-cause revisionist history. Everything from “the civil war really had nothing to do with slavery” to “slaves were actually treated very well”.