Sure there will be lots of wars and famine but predicting human extinction as a result of climate change is a bit of a stretch. Even in a bad scenario where 99% of humanity dies off things could still turn back around, regrow and we try again for an advanced civilization in a couple millennia.

Polls also only try to measure public opinion and don’t quantify the very real effects that the vast toolkit of dirty tricks play in the election process, including whatever October surprises are lurking around the corner.

I keep seeing posts that polls show it’s 50-50 but polymarket has Trump’s odds at 60, Harris’ at 40 with over $2B in wagers. Terrifying.

Thanks! I’ve done office work too but retail always has this appeal where you get to work directly with the random public and provide an actual, immediate service of value. I really wish it paid better but its frankly incredible to get such a broad view of your regional community if you can figure out how to get people to open up. Having good coworkers that support one another in an active environment is so great too.

Of course, many complaints and concerns about how the industry is changing currently, with AI and election time anxiety, corporate weirdness etc but the site I’m at runs well and has it’s own community that serves the larger area. Amazing stuff, I hope I find a job with a thriving wage that has at least some of those qualities someday.

I’ve worked retail where clothes were a component and the most frequent returns are for clothes too small, like a large exchanged for an XL or an XXL or the largest available size returned for store credit. There are a lot more of the very small sizes than there are very small people, anyone who fits into an S or M has a lot of options and not much competition. This is also more true of women’s clothes than men’s.

Also, clothes aimed more at an older, like 60s 70s years old consumer will have more reasonable size distribution in my experience, but the clothes will be extremely frumpy and odd.

Also, shop the clearance rack, especially when it’s been recently filled with new stuff, there is so much decent cheap clothing out there for like a couple bucks a piece.

I worked doing returns frequently and a lot of women doing returns clearly had the idea they would get clothes that would be fun and racy and it didn’t work out the way they saw it in their mind’s eye, which makes me happy they at least tried. Chase that dream!

I feel like I should mention something about fast fashion and slave labor producing so much clothing today. Also, quite a bit of what is produced doesn’t sell and where does it go? They have to make room for the new stuff.

I dont know if any of that is what you are looking for OP but those are my thoughts on the matter.

I’d tell them to knock 50-70 off for the condition of the surfaces. No idea about the model and specs or if that’s worth it but that’s an ugly case on it and I would be grossed out using it, would probably have to tape a sheet of paper over the worn out spots to be comfortable touching that surface.

People used 3.1 and 3.1.1 for years even though it was running on top of MSDOS but show me someone who used 3.0? Or 1.x, 2.x? Unheard of. Version 3 started off with some problems that needed a more or less immediate large update.

False claim, debunked by snopes. Mods should consider blocking this news outlet.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/geico-tesla-cybertruck-coverage/

I’m not on Bluesky, what downsides are you seeing in their app?

I was picturing a graphical map with circles for the communities at different sizes for the amount of traffic. It could be based on proximity for how much overlap there was in user posts and comments, and also by category, color the circles by instance maybe too? Like make it waaay more visible and accessible than Reddit. Somebody must have the chops to make something like that here, right?

🍿

Good points, I’m reevaluating my perspective on quantum computing.

From the article you posted, it says that “certain chemistry, quantum materials, and materials science applications” are suitable for quantum computing but that “accelerating incompressible computational fluid dynamics” aren’t suitable with current understanding of how the algorithms could work.

My takeaway as someone with a couple years of CS education from years ago is that the qcomputers are good at gradient descent/simulated annealing or something like that but that advantage disappears with more complex problems. Also that we’ll need a few more orders of magnitude qubits to make the output “interesting.” Still though, helpful to see that something worthwhile is stirring under all that research , I appreciate the insight!

I saw on a website dedicated to the Wright brothers, that but I was curious if there was something recognizable as a stock price listing as a publicly traded company. Larger investors like that might jump in before smaller investors started approaching it.

I posted a question about it on the largest stocks related communities I could find on Lemmy, maybe someone has expertise in that kind of thing. I’ll turn it over to AskLemmy if nobody shows up on the smaller forum.

Okay, I was being somewhat flippant. I don’t discount there seems to be progress in some areas but slow and in low-visibility ways. I could even believe much more powerful quantum computers exist in state facilities around the world. Have they been shown to be useful though or there some bottleneck that prevents them from outcompeting digital computers?

An additional concern of mine is what they are useful for is in rapidly breaking vital digital algorithms like elliptical curve cryptography, and can’t be allowed in public hands for that reason. Someone elsewhere said there were computers with 1100 qubits, why is it taking so long to exploit these machines to do useful work? Or am I mistaken and there is evidence, I would love to see it.

Would a savvy investor put their money in quantum computing now, was the Wright Company a good buy when it first started? This actually has me on a deep dive about historical stock market graphs…

From your article,

What everyone should know, however, is that quantum computing is not yet a practical reality. No company has developed a device that can beat classical supercomputers at anything more than obscure research problems that have no real use.

Until quantum computing has its Alan Turing moment it will remain a curiosity. The power of qubits needs to be yoked as a beast of burden for computation and actual useful problem solving the way that digital computing was with the Turing machine. It’s not a certainty that this will ever happen.

Sometimes I think that believers in quantum computing’s superiority to digital computing are as silly as those who think we’ve almost proven P=NP. But who knows, both might be valid.

If votes became truly public, what would stop a malicious user from automating crawling the fediverse to get a list of every up and down vote a targeted user has ever made? Admins can currently do this, I assume given enough time and intent? Yuck.

I really hope a solution is found and if Lemmy goes the way of truly public votes, it would probably turn this into a nonparticipatory medium for me, I’d still read posts but not vote or comment.

Edit: also, most casual Lemmy users aren’t aware of public votes and would be upset that it already works this way, and only particularly invested or curious users are even reading this thread.

I think most users assume votes are private and most will have a similar reaction to learning about this unintuitive negative feature of anything built on ActivityPub, including Lemmy.

Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features

US and UK flights are grounded because of the issue, banks, media and some businesses not fully functioning. Likely we’ll see more effects as the day goes on.

They’ve found hitting it with microwaves sinters it together pretty readily, so that would be the likely way they’d deal with it. Apparently also an effective way of making bricks out of it!