PupBiru

i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner

not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8

which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc

kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024

at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000

kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!

dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work

i’d avoid BIOS-based RAID… it doesn’t really offer many benefits over linux-based raid like MDADM, and MDADM offers a LOT of up-sides for portability, repairability, diagnostics, etc

let’s not go too far though… the holders of h264/h265 did put a lot of money and effort into developing the codec: a new actual thing… they are not patent trolls, who by definition produce nothing new other than legal mess

i’d say that we need a way of communicating and making group decisions, but government is an organisation that makes the decisions of the group… a government isn’t a process; a government is an entity… if your group decision making is a process rather than delegated power, then you don’t have a government but you may be able to effectively run your society

a healthy democracy requires others to have privacy. people like investigative journalists need to be able to blend in with the crowd and expose government wrongdoing

blending in the the crowd is the important part: if everyone cares about privacy, nobody sticks out for caring about privacy… but if nobody cares about privacy, the investigative journalist suddenly looks really obvious and can be targeted much more easily

if someone doesn’t think they have anything to hide, that’s fine (wrong, but fine) however they can help to make sure the government acts appropriately simply by not splashing data around everywhere for all to see

if it were profitable to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we’d do it where it’s a lot more concentrated: on exhaust outlets from power plants, etc

which is not to say carbon capture is a bad idea, but it ain’t gonna be profit-driven unless you force companies to pay for their emissions through offsets or something

of course, but they are complex problems and you shouldn’t poo poo a potential mitigation to 1 because it negatively impacts another

the solutions to complex problems shouldn’t require being solutions to every complex problem

the plastic problem is separate from the carbon problem though… we don’t ban plastics because we’re concerned about climate change; we ban them because we are worried that microplastics are causing significant health effects to both humans and most other animals