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It's been around a year since a lot of us quit Reddit, myself included. I'm happy with Lemmy, but I still feel a bit lost online since leaving the old site. Discussion?
  • There's a pretty solid different between discussing things that people might disagree with in a mature, measured way, and attacking people for disagreeing with you.

    Starting things off with a rant about the people against you is.... probably not the best way to try and convince anyone you're the former?

  • PlayStation official response to Helldivers 2 fans
  • I'm not sure why you're getting so aggressive over this, or so defensive about being told to separate your TV from your streaming tools so that if the streaming tools start to suck you can just replace a $20 stream stick instead of a several hundred to several thousand dollar TV you need to calm down and stop being a dick to people trying to politely help you and explain things to you.

  • Removed
    The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
  • That's a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.

    The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.

  • How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
  • In the case of Discourse, a hardware engineer is an embarrassment not deserving of a job if they can't hit 90% of the performance of an all-time-great performance team but, as a software engineer, delivering 3% the performance of a non-highly-optimized application like MyBB is no problem. In Knuth's case, hardware engineers gave programmers a 100x performance increase every decade for decades with little to no work on the part of programmers. The moment this slowed down and programmers had to adapt to take advantage of new hardware, hardware engineers were "all out of ideas", but learning a few "new" (1970s and 1980s era) ideas to take advantage of current hardware would be a waste of time.

    You can really tell this guy is some hardware design engineer at nvidia that has absolutely no fucking clue about how real-world user space programming works. Also I like how 74% slowly kept getting inflated until it became 90%.

    Like, this dude is trying to claim that fucking Donald Knuth himfuckingself cannot figure out some new computer hardware.

    Multiple processors working in concert is not, and never has been, a cure-all. It's highly situational and generally not useful.

    What's dumb is that, as a Systems Design Engineer at NVIDIA, Dan Luu should know that. After all, how has SLI been doing recently?

    That said, yes, of course, web dev bloat is absolutely out of control, and slow websites absolutely have nothing to do with hardware or network. That's a culprit of bad frameworks, horrific amounts of ads/trackers/bullshit, and honestly just general lack of programming fundamentals in the web dev space. Might as well call them web technicians and really ruffle some feathers. :P

  • Cyberpunk 2077 Still Has Easter Eggs Players Haven't Found
  • Man, there's some salty people here that don't like when others don't play cp2077 religiously.

    You all need to calm down, people are allowed to not play a game 300+ hours. They're even allowed to not like it.

  • 'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions
  • You're welcome for the details.

    So I see 'they were ready to surrender' a lot in this thread, and while that's not... false, it's not exactly what it sounds like. They were ready to come to the table, yes, absolutely, but the problem was that they wanted to dictate their surrender - they wanted to keep their military, they wanted their industry rebuilt, they wanted the current government to stay in power- it was less of a surrender or more of a cessation of hostilities. Japan was 'ready to surrender' in much the same way Russia was 'ready to come to the peace table' about a year ago.

    This was geopolitically not realistic, for a number of reasons- for one, allowing that kind of conditional surrender with Germany is directly what lead to WW2 in the first place, and nobody had any intentions of repeating that mistake. There was concern, given the view on surrendering, that it wouldn't actually be peace, or a surrender, merely a delaying tactic to build up forces and entrench. For another, Russia was bearing down on Japan, and the Allies wanted to limit Russia's geopolitical influence by preventing another East/West Germany. While the extra troops would have undoubtedly help save American lives, it would have ended in significant Russian and Japanese deaths, as well significant geopolitical issues long-term (East/West Germany worked so well, after all :P )

    Long story short, the Allies absolutely wanted an unconditional surrender, exactly the kind of thing the Emperor and the military refused to contemplate, even after a single bomb was dropped. The military still refused to consider it even after the second, so seeing the a-bomb in action once would likely, I feel, not have done much.

    RE: hitting civilians in large numbers, my understanding is less that they were deliberately targeting civilians, and more that they were looking for military targets that were geographically located in a position that would enhance the bomb's effects without considering civilians too much. You could argue in a very real way that they were deployed as terror weapons, or perhaps 'shock and awe' weapons if you want to be slightly less confrontational. Civilian casualties were, much like the entire rest of WW2, not much of a consideration- WW2 was considered a total war, and the Geneva Convention would not be signed for another 4 years, directly as a result of the atrocities of WW2. At the time, civilians were not considered something to inherently avoid unless you had some sort of political reason to do so (hence the leaflets). The most obvious example of this is the firebombings of Tokyo, which killed far, far more civilians in arguably far more painful ways, but there's plenty of example in the European front from all sides as well. Again, they were making decisions with the knowledge and viewpoints of the time. Doesn't excuse it, but trying to moralize decisions made in the past with current morals is always kind of a waste of time, in my opinion.

    Regarding the third shot, there was, at the time, no bombs available when the uranium Little Boy bomb for Hiroshima was dropped, but they had prepped for another. They immediately turned towards trying to prepare another (Nagasaki's plutonium-based Fat Man), and managed to rush it to completion in just a week, but keep in mind that these were highly dangerous, experimental one-off prototypes being produced- it's why all of the planned subsequent bombs were of the fat man design, which was significantly safer, and America was completely out of uranium at that. It was only able to be rushed to completion so much because General Groves always planned to use two, and a lot of the logistics were already worked out and prepped beforehand. Before more plutonium bombs could be made, Woodrow Wilson called off the production. So yes, America was technically out of bombs, and completely out of uranium.

    Arguably, America could have created more plutonium bombs, but was limited by the availability of plutonium (which is lengthy to turn into weapons grade), the speed at which they could be safely produced (and Fat Man was, frankly, very unsafely produced, it should have taken nearly 3 weeks to create), and America only had a small amount of weapons-grade plutonium stockpiled. So technically, both positions are correct- America only had two bombs, and they certainly could have made more, but they were limited by time and materials, and lack of willingness. They had, perhaps, one or two more fat mans they would be able to drop, with perhaps 3+ week production times for each (because no logistics were prepared for it), before it would have dropped to something like iirc 6 months per bomb due to lack of prepared plutonium.

    So yes, one could argue there could have been more bombs after the first two, but it was generally considered by the American military and also the President that two was the 'magic number,' so there wasn't any setup for them, so they would not have been cranked out anywhere near as fast. Nobody believed that one bomb would trigger a surrender (because of, again, the cultural viewpoints on surrendering) as well the implicit belief that it would be a one-off prototype that could not be repeated.

    If two did not, and it was widely considered it would, nobody believed 3 would be any more likely to trigger a surrender than two did, and might even convince them to fight harder. In addition, due to the effects of radiation, America would have limited to how they could use the bombs one the land invasion started- with Russia from the north, America from the south-east, and most of central Japan firebombed, there's not a lot of good targets without hitting allies.

  • 'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions
  • He's not theorizing, he's summarizing decades of historians' research. We know, for example, with the benefit of hindsight, that your idea would not have worked- it would have lead only to countless deaths via nuke, and then a long, slow slog through the meat grinder for troops and civilians.

    How do we know this? Because we have Japanese communications from the time- and they basically sum up to something along the lines of "They don't have the balls to use the bomb against people again." with a side dash of "they don't have more bombs to throw at people."

    Exploding the first one over water, the second one over a city on people, and then NOT dropping a third one because we didn't have anymore would have proved them right, and without a surrender it would have lead to millions of dead Americans and Japanese. They made so many purple hearts preparing for that invasion in 1945 that we still haven't gone through the backlog, 80 years later.

    Now think about it without the benefit of hindsight. You know that culturally, they refuse to surrender. You know they see massive losses as completely acceptable, civilian, military, and suicide bombers. You know they want to try and grind the US down, make them give up because of the sheer number of troops dead. You know they're trying desperately to negotiate a favorable surrender where they can save face, maintain their 'experiments', and maintain their military, which is exactly the sort of thing that lead to WW2 in the first place. Finally you know you only have two bombs. Use them wrong, and the deaths, crippling, and wounding of millions of your own country's soldiers is directly on your head. Use them right, and you might get some surrenders.

    Frankly speaking, dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost didn't end the war. The second bomb was what finally changed the mind of the emperor, because he bought the bluff that if we had two we would throw at people, we had more. Even then, there was instantly a coup to try and halt the surrender process- and they thought this guy was literally an incarnation/speaker/appointed of god. That's how much the military hated the idea of surrendering.

    And finally, do keep in mind- every time the US bombed a Japanese city, they dropped leaflets warning the civilians to get out. By all accounts, they were actually highly effective.

    To make it clear, dropping the bombs was a horrible thing. That it killed so many civilians who wouldn't- or more likely couldn't - get out in time, even if warned, is horrific. Leaflets are good and all, but that doesn't meanyou have anywhere to go, or the infrastructure, and beyond that, the Emporer was executing anyone who tried to leave bombing areas. (Seriously, possession of a leaflet was grounds for immediate execution.) But the alternatives to dropping the bombs were judged, at the time, to be worse. And I believe that their decision to do so were understandable with the knowledge they had, the options they had, and the consequences to their own troops if they didn't.

  • Property owner stunned after $500,000 house built on wrong lot: ‘Are you kidding me?’
  • Yeah, this is just straight up a scam, she has no obligation to buy their fucking illegal scam house. House belongs to her, in my opinion, if she wants it, and if she doesn't, it's on company dime to bulldoze the entire thing, clean the lot, reseed it, and pay back the tax burden they forced.

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