Fully agreed that it needs to be done right. I’m definitely not the best person to try and write it.

It also needs to be area specific. A predominantly republican area would need a different message to a predominantly black community.

Has Amazon ever actually said it wouldn’t sell the results of face tracking to data brokers? I can easily see it happening. It’s a lot of tasty data to them.

A better option might be a leafleting campaign.

It would need to bypass the “I’ve nothing to hide” effect. E.g. “Does your friend have an ex they don’t want to know where they are? Facial recognition would easily put them on your doorstep. Would you like a visit from them?”

Leaning on the ICE issues right now would also work in some areas.

If someone mocked up a few variants for different demographics, that could actually help.

Also, does anyone know an easy layman alternative to ring, that is more ethical?

They are excellent in the hobby world. It’s generally when you need to do a bit of quick logic, an ESP32 can be dropped in to do it. E.g. change the colour of an led depending on a sensor.

They also form the core of a lot of IoT devices. Simple sensors and relays that can connect to WiFi and throw up a simple web interface. ESPhome, tasmota and WLED exist to make this extremely easy.

They are basically the hobbiest electronic multi tool. Powerful enough to do most jobs without bothering with code optimisation. Cheap enough to throw in and leave there.

It’s niche, but it lets them get the best of both worlds. Even when a company does early access right, a lot of people would rather wait for the complete game.

This would let them refine and build up with early access, then get a significant boost at their proper release.

I can think about ideas without either visualisations or inner monologue. My inner monologue is mainly for mapping ideas to a “transmittable” state. I also have to force visualisations.

The best description I can give is multiple interacting “data streams”. E.g. a cat won’t be an image of a cat, it would be a mapping vaguely akin to how a computer game tracks things, a collection of data on pose, limb length, join angles etc. It doesn’t use actual numbers. It’s akin to how you know the angle of your elbow, without knowing the angle in degrees.

My inner monologue’s main use mapping from this internal data blob into something that I can explain to others.

You might be able to get your hands on an old nuke, but the maintenance to keep it able to go boom is another story. You could make a dirty bomb, but a hydrogen bomb needs maintenance every few years minimum.

I personally think this is why Russia hasn’t used a nuke. They don’t know if they will go off properly, or if maintenance got skipped and they are duds.

Making and supporting nukes takes a huge amount of expertise and equipment. Hiding those completely is difficult to impossible.

If you were going to use them as a self defence tactic, you would need to prove you also had a functioning device. Either by showing it off, or setting it off. Otherwise it would simply be seen as a bluff.

You’ve basically summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. To Linux users, bug reports are a good thing. They help fix things. To middle management, bug reports are a bad thing, they hurt their bonuses.

One group needs to change, and Linux users are impressively stubborn.

It’s anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.

While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.

While Putin was likely acting on their interests, the current situation has gone completely pear shaped on that front. Putin is stuck. If he backs down, he’s dead, if he doesn’t win, he’s dead. He’s currently riding the limbo between those situations, hoping for a 3rd option.

If he died, the powers behind him would likely take the chance to disengage. The current situation is bad for business, and plans need to be re-thought. It wouldn’t fix things long term, but short term, they would likely back down.

There’s a lot more to teaching than just good explanations. I do enjoy trying to explain complex science in more understandable ways however.

As for struggling, we all do at times, pushing through is how we get better. Also science is a little like a spider web. If you look closely, at just a few strands, they don’t make obvious sense. It’s only when you build up a broader picture that it becomes obvious and easy. Building that picture, unfortunately, requires pushing through the “what the hell, I can’t make sense of this!” stage.

It would be a mix of relative rates and the exact energy.

If you pick an area of “empty” space where you expect very little dark matter, you will get a baseline reading. When you aim at an area expected to be dense in dark matter, you will expect to get a higher reading. E.g. 10 counts a day, Vs 100 per day. This is basically how radiation detection works on earth, so the maths is well studied.

The other thing is energy levels. 2 electrons hitting have a distinct energy. It will vary upwards slightly, due to kinetic energy, but not that much. We also know the annihilation energy of other forms of matter, from earth experiments. A reading distinct from anything normal would be a good signature of an unknown type of matter annihilating.

There are also extra complications from things like red shift, but those can be measured in other ways, and corrected for.

The order of theory and discovery also helps. “Finding X that happens to support Y” is a lot weaker than “Predicting X from theory Y, then going and finding it”. If you run 1 million experiments, a 1 in a million result is quite likely by pure fluke. A 1 in a million result from a single, focused experiment is a lot more powerful.

In a short summary. Something is wrong with the spin of galaxies. There is more mass than we can account for, and it’s distributed wrong.

Either the laws of gravity are slightly wrong, or there is something out there with mass, but no interaction with other matters (light particularly).

More recent, more detailed studies have shown that the error is not consistent. Therefore either the laws of physics vary from galaxy to galaxy (very unlikely) or it’s something physical, rather than a law error.

That leaves dark matter, sometimes called W.I.M.Ps (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). They don’t seem to interact with electromagnetism at all, and even any strong or weak force interaction is minimal. It only interacts gravitationally.

We know the interactions at minimal due to gravity mapping. It seems to form a cloud around galaxies, rather than collapsing in. To collapse in, they must interact to exchange momentum. If they only interact by gravity, that collapse will be extremely slow.

That is most of what we can be fairly sure of. There’s a lot of speculation around this, and we might be barking up the wrong tree completely. However dark matter via WIMPs seems to be the most consistent with the evidence right now.

Edit to add.

This experiment seems quite ingenious. It assumes that WIMPs have a mix of both matter and antimatter. Ever so often a matter/antimatter pair get close enough to annihilate. This creates a pair of gamma photons. The existence of these would help back the existence of physical WIMPs. The energy would also tell us something of their mass (photon energy = mass energy + momentum energy). That will help narrow down where to look in our particle accelerator data.

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

The same reason a dam owner panics over a finger sized leak. A hole becomes a crack, a crack a breach, and a breach can collapse the whole dam.

It might also be a single dev who pushed for it. With only a 1-3% market share, the company is unlikely to push resources at it. That 1 dev getting any working version out is a win in many ways.

Also, most Linux users are a lot better trained at reporting bugs. Most of the time, this is a good thing, letting them get fixed in FOSS development setups. Unfortunately, in gaming, it ends up making Linux look a buggy mess. When 60% of your big reports come from 0.5% of your users, companies can panic. Even if the same bugs exist in windows, just no one bothers to report them.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

It depends how deep they are. I run into a depressing number that have just been caught up in the misinformation storm. Getting them to stop and think often helps recalibrate their thinking.

It doesn’t help much on those that are deep enough their ego is heavily involved.

As a late diagnosed aspie, I fully get that. I also know that vaccines save a lot of lives, including fellow autistics.

The phrasing is also fun to derail the brains of people complaining about vaccines. It can bypass their mental defences and makes them think for a moment. It doesn’t work on the hard core, but the casual idiots are easier to deprogram.