jorge

It is a f-string

What is the ratio of Stanley Nickels to XBucks?

Wow, Facebook is lobbying for a law that eliminates their position of monopoly and makes it easier for its users to migrate to other apps. Zuck must be playing some 4D chess.

That, or maybe Facebook has been lobbying AGAINST this law, and your comments in this thread are just fearmongering and conspiracy theories.

Things like asteroids, galactic dust and the like are already accounted for in the baryonic (ie ordinary) matter. We can estimate it for example measuring the absorption of different wavelengths of light, or extrapolating the local abundance of asteroids. There are theories like the MACHO that propose that we are missing some, but in general it is understood they can only account for a tiny fraction of the missing mass.

The predominant hypothesis is that dark matter is composed by some unidentified particles, that have the same thermodynamic properties as usual matter (basically that their energy is proportional to the volume), but that don’t interact (or interact very weakly) with normal matter.

“Hubble constant” is a misnomer, and an old fashioned term. Cosmologist actually use the term “Hubble parameter” (which is in general time dependent except in very specific models which only contain dark energy), and denote its present value as H₀.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble's_law#Time-dependence_of_Hubble_parameter

What you’re talking about is the energy dependence of the coupling constants, which is a phenomenon that is very well understood theoretically, and also checked in experiments. The early universe was much hotter, and thus particles had much more kinetic energy and “felt” slightly different coupling constants. The neat thing is that, since this is a purely energy-dependent effect, we can recreate the conditions of the early universe: the collisions at LHC have an energy of the order of 1 TeV, which corresponds to a temperature of 10¹⁶K, the temperature 10^-12 s after the Big Bang. Anything after the first 10^-12 s we can directly recreate, and from 10^-12 s to about 10^-30 s-ish we can more or less reliably extrapolate. And of course this is all included in the standard Lambda-CMD cosmology.

Although the article is behind a paywall (which is somewhat strange in cosmology, but I digress), you can check other articles by the same author that also use the “varying constants” framework, for example https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11667. His framework is that the speed of light c, the Planck constant h, the Boltzmann constant k and the Gravitational constant G depend directly on time, or to be more precise, on the expansion factor of the universe. There are two big differences with respect to what you were saying:

• c, h and k are not coupling constants, and therefore they don’t receive any energy-dependent corrections. In fact, you could think of these constants as “conversion factors” between units: c converts space-time coordinates in seconds to space-time coordinates in meters, k converts kinetic energy in Joules (or electronvolts) to kinetic energy in Kelvin, and h converts angular momentum or action measured in quanta to angular momentum or action measured in J·s (or eV·s). Honestly it doesn’t make much sense to me that these constants could change (what does it means, in physical terms), that they could change in a correlated way, or that they could change in a correlated way to one, and only one, coupling constant, G.
• Since this is a time-dependent change, there is no real way to significantly test the hypothesis (unlike the energy-dependent changes). We can not go back in time, or to wait to a different time when these constants would be different. He actually proposes to study how the experimental determinations of these constants in the last 10-20 years, which sounds very wild, as those tiny differences are very susceptible, by definition, to experimental uncertainties, and they are not very suitable for controlled tests.

Yes, this is a bit frustrating. Part of the scientific method is to propose new hypothesis, and that’s what the original author did, so no issue with that. But then there is a chain of increasingly pop-sci media that hype some of these hypotheses as they were already confirmed and accepted by the mainstream scientific community, which is not the case. For example, the title of the article, “New research puts age of universe”, that is pure clickbait, the correct tense is, being very generous, “could put”.

And when this happens in a field like cosmology, it’s relatively harmless. But the same happens in fields that have a more direct impact in the general public’s life, like the usual “a couple of years ago they said eggs were unhealthy, and now they say we should eat 5 per day”. And the effect is that people stop trusting the recommendations of the experts.

and he can explain dark matter.

* dark energy. They are not the same.

I, for one, welcome our new bot overlords

The EU started their own instance when Musk bought Twitter

But they aren’t forcing Threads as a default. They are associating Instagram accounts to Threads accounts, the same way Google associates GMail accounts to GDrive.

We all hate Facebook, but can we hate them for the things that they actually do, instead of inventing false reasons to hate them?

Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam.

Nope. It is because the admins of the instance have decided to do so. It might be for the reasons you list, for completely different reasons, or for no reason at all.

Exactly, and that’s the reason why deleting a Threads account also deletes the Instagram account. Because there is only one account for both services.

I’m Your Huckleberry and so’s my wife

This “problem” isn’t new or unique to the Fediverse, or even to the Internet. It’s much much older. What’s to prevent someone from hijacking your name?

Most societies converged to a simple solution: surnames. The Fediverse is not different. “YourHuckleberry” is your username and “@lemmy.world” your usersurname. It is impossible to hijack your name+surname.

Instagram has 2 billion active users. So only 1.5% of users have activated Threads.

These numbers aren’t extremely high, we just don’t realize the scale of the world outside our little fedi-bubble.

Instagram has more than 2 billion active users, and each (non-EU) Instagram user can conveniently login Threads just pressing a button. If they’re fudging the numbers, activating only 1.5% of their potential userbase seems odd. Why not activating hundreds of millions of accounts?

As for the posts, an average of 3.2 posts/users for just the first day sounds reasonable to me.

BlueSky will use their own protocol, so they will indeed be a closed bubble.

As for Meta, my (totally unjustified) hunch is that they’re expecting that other big names like Twitter, BlueSky, Google or Amazon will migrate or create their own ActivityPub services, and they want to be early adopters. If Threads is successful, I could see them migrating Facebook and Instagram too.

To avoid this, we need to defederate while we’re still ahead. I’d personally draw the line at 25%, but the point is just having it significantly less than 50%.

Mastodon has 13 million users. In the first few hours, Threads already had 10 million users. That battle was lost before it even started.

TIL that WhatsApp internally uses XMPP