water-data-dude

You have one misfolded protein that “teaches” other proteins to misfold in the same way[1]. It’s very slow initially because you’re talking about individual proteins, and it takes a while for each prion to bump into a normal protein of the correct type. The immune system can’t do anything about them though, so once a protein is converted there’s permanently another prion. The conversion rate is very slow, but it never ever ratchets back - the number only increases. It’s a geometric progression.

Once symptoms show up there’s a TON of them, and it goes downhill fairly quickly. That’s why there’s such a long latency period.

[1]It’s like Ice-9, if you’ve read Cat’s Cradle.

I feel like some of the angels would probably be able to calculate very large primes easily. I’m not an angeloligist, but maybe the ones that are wheels all covered in eyes.

I wish Duck Duck Go was fewer syllables so I could try to force it into conversations as a verb.

Given how similar this reply is to the emails the customer was trading with customer support earlier (it looks like it’s fixed, try again!), I wouldn’t assume it’s actually fixed until the customer says it is.

Aside from the issue of biometrics not being covered by the 5th amendment (so I won’t use them for login purposes), I’m hesitant to arrange incentives such that melon baller based crime is lucrative.

I wanted to get a sense of what that MEANS relative to the rest of the gas giants. Apparently it’d be roughly the size of Uranus or Neptune.

I guess I’d always put all the gas giants in the same “very, unimaginably big” bucket. I knew Jupiter was the biggest, then Saturn, but I didn’t realize just HOW big they were compared to the rest. At the risk of stating the very, very obvious, Jupiter is huge!!!

Masses of gas giants are: Jupiter, 317.8 earth mass; Saturn, 95.2 earth mass; Neptune, 17.1 earth mass; Uranus, 14.5 earth mass

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Unit_of_mass_in_a...

The fact that it’s so bare bones (no stereo, etc. unless you put one in) makes me really hope that it doesn’t phone home with a firehose of telemetry like pretty much every other new car. If so, they’ve got my interest

Whoops, you’re right! I read the article and then some comments that were (I see now) tangentially related. Stuff got jumbled up, and I confidently posted something incorrect.

One concern I might have is that I’ve heard (and Wikipedia confirms, though with caveats[1]) that ejaculation can help avoid prostate cancer.

“These [studies] suggest that frequent ejaculation after puberty offers some reduction of the risk of prostate cancer.”

I think we need more/bigger studies to get a handle on how big the effect is though.

[1] NSFW warning - this is a Wikipedia article with a picture of a guy ejaculating riiiiight at the top: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculation#Health_issues

“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies”

God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.

This feels similar to the Reagan administration’s approach to the HIV epidemic, and for similar reasons. This will disproportionately impact men who have sex with men, and I have very little doubt that that’s the point.

Honestly, no one should be using water to grow alfalfa in Utah. The way Western water law currently works with prior appropriation encourages extremely wasteful uses of water, just because they don’t want to lose their valuable water allocations (use it or lose it). Alfalfa is a VERY water intensive crop, growing it in the desert wouldn’t make sense without these perverse incentives.

There’s a lot of effects, but one very visible one in Utah is the fact that the Great Salt Lake is drying out, because too much water is being diverted from its tributaries. Now there’s dust getting stirred up from the exposed lake bed that’s chock full of heavy metals, which is less than ideal next to a fairly big city.

People have mistaken the symbol for the thing symbolized. The second amendment, in SPIRIT, is about protecting our ability to dissent and protest our government if it becomes tyrannical. If the people who are loudest about upholding the LETTER of the second amendment were actually serious about it then they’d also be advocating for strong cryptography and due process, and opposed to mass surveillance.

Oh no, don’t link United Nuclear! To paraphrase an xkcd: “it’s like rickrolling, but the victim’s stuck all day”

I didn’t read the word “directory” initially, and I was imagining a scenario where the author gave Claude access to an API, and was like “this endpoint will set off a nuke” and then Claude was like “Ok! :3” and triggered it.

Well, that’s going to make it harder to hide from the hunter-killer bots

According to the very article you linked, that’s none of them. I’ll consider buying a newer car eventually, but only if I can physically disconnect the modem.

This immediately brought this xkcd comic to mind:

https://xkcd.com/1387/

Friendly reminder that “most CO detectors use a sensor with a defined, limited lifespan, and will not work indefinitely.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_detector

17 is “the least random number”, i.e. the number people choose most often when asked to pick a random number (between 1 and 20)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_(number)

The USPS is one of those institutions that disproportionately benefits the rural population. Part of the reason it’s cumbersome and unprofitable is that they deliver mail to pretty much everyone, including VERY out of the way places where it wouldn’t be profitable for a private company to offer service. Since so much of his voter base is rural I __hope__ he won’t absolutely wreck it out of self interest, but I’ve mistakenly expected him to face consequences enough times that I have no clue.

See The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges:

https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabel

Good author: don’t tell, show.

Very good author: don’t show, _suggest_.

I _think_ they’re talking about the people arrested for storming the capitol?

I always just referred to them as “murder hornets” anyway (see the bee massacre video below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_8B4bcrSs8

“Fun” fact: prions can survive an autoclave!

Ah! It was early, my brain wasn’t working. I appreciate the restraint the HN community exercised in not mocking me, hahaha

Wait.

“In the two years since passkeys were announced and made available for consumer use, the FIDO Alliance reported a few weeks ago, “passkey awareness has risen by 50%, from 39% familiar in 2022 to 57% in 2024.”

I don’t think that math works? Am I misinterpreting something?

I’m trying to get people at my workplace to use yubikeys. I would have thought it’d be easy, since “touch the blinking green circle on your yubikey” is a way less obnoxious form of 2FA than “pull out your phone, wait for a text, type in the number” or “pull out your phone, open up the 2FA app, scroll to the service, type in the number”. I was wrong though, it’s like pulling teeth and I’m not sure why!

I think you’re right, any change has to fight against the “this is how I do it already” inertia.

It rhymes! I’m assuming it matches the meter/rhyme scheme of a particular song, but I’m music stupid, so I can’t really make a guess. But the point is to be funzies and light hearted :)