thebestaquaman

I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn't working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.

The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn't what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.

Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn't even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn't do what I said it did when they hadn't even run it.

here you go

I trusted the upvotes, and dared to click. It's a safe, informative piece on the topic at hand that I recommend reading.

I seem to remember reading that the US navy comes in second (which makes sense considering that a single carrier has a larger air wing than most countries air forces) but the point still stands.

I don't know for certain, but can't really imagine that being the case. There are several reasons I can't imagine something going viral off lemmy per now:

• 1. The combined user mass of lemmy is probably smaller than the critical mass needed to really go viral

• 1a. This could be "worked around" if someone reposted from lemmy to some other, larger network. Still, I wouldn't say that meant something "went viral off lemmy", since that would imply it went viral before being reposted.

• 2. Lemmy doesn't (by default) push heavily to get trending stuff into everyones feed.

• 2a. I say "by default" because I'm assuming someone could set up an instance designed around maximising the views of trending material.

• 3. Slightly related to 1, but afaik, there are few, if any, very big social media personalities on here. For something to go viral, you're basically reliant on either an algorithm catching on to your stuff and shoving it in everyone's face or some person with a huge following shoving it in everyone's face.
• 4. The very system of lemmy (following communities rather than users) makes it extremely difficult for any individual user to gather a large enough following to make things go viral by posting/sharing them

Basically: Too small user mass, no big personalities, and a "following system"/visibility algorithm built around promoting interesting and healthy media consumption rather than cultish behaviour prevents things from going viral off lemmy.---

With modern tv/streaming, tickets aren't a limited resource anymore, in the sense that by far most of the viewers are not in place live.

Sure, you could price live tickets following "normal" market rules, since you still have the practical limitation regarding the number of people living in reasonable distance from the stadium. The idea of using pricing to regulate demand/consumption for streaming services doesn't really make sense the same way, since the marginal cost of another viewer is essentially zero.

I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there's a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you're one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It's not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let's say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you're still left with millions of dollars per match.

Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we're in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they're still going to be making buckets of money. I don't really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.

Edit: ignore the below, I forgot my pi-factor in the gamma function for half-integers...

Edit 2: Since you're right, my missing gamma-factor completely changes this. An infinite-dimensional hypersphere will have zero surface area for any (finite?) radius.

Original dum-dum:

While I'm completely open that my factor is likely wrong here, the expression you provided is definitely wrong in the 3D case (I'm assuming the r superscript on the pi was a typo), since it doesn't give n = 3 => A = 4 pi r^2.

I believe the surface area of an n-dimensional hypersphere is (n - 1) pi r^{n - 1}. In that case (I may have some factors wrong here, just going off memory), an infinite-dimensional hypersphere has infinite surface area as long as it has non-zero radius.

That almost seems like a wilful misinterpretation of what I wrote, since I never claimed anything of the sort.

What makes you completely wrong is that you're using the fact that petroleum companies are filthy rich and bribe politicians to hell and back as an explanation for why we're still reliant of fossil fuels. The basic answer to why is that "fossil fuels and combustion engines are pretty damn hard to beat" to the point where we still haven't found a viable alternative for some applications.

I get why you would say this, but it's an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong.

Fossil fuels have an absurd energy density. They're just really hard to beat. Modern batteries and liquid hydrogen don't even come close. Pair that with the fact that we've spent a couple hundred years optimising the steam- and internal combustion engines, compared to some decades (in practice) for electric-based stuff, and you start seeing why fossil fuels are so hard to push of the top of the hill.

Until very recently all alternatives were pretty much worse under every conceivable performance metric. There's a reason electric planes are still in the prototype phase. It's just technically really really hard to even get close to jet fuel and combustion engines.

Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.

Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some "global government" ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.

These don't need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.

The EU isn't like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.