• @[email protected]
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    1249 months ago

    Remember kids, don’t ever plug something in to your computer that you don’t trust or are unsure about. Picking up flashdrive off the street and plugging them in is one of the easiest ways to get malware installed on your computer.

  • Engywuck
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    9 months ago

    Let’s hope these don’t carry Linux ISOs, which would be a very problematic drug to deal with.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      I carried a USB stick with a Linux ISO once and my object in life has been to dethrone God and destroy capitalism ever since.

      • Engywuck
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        149 months ago

        I agree with your purposes. Good luck, fellow lemmer.

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        I keep my ventoy drive with me at all times (it’s plugged into my laptop). One of these days someone will let me install Linux on their computer. In that case, I have a second drive for the new convert.

    • comador
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      149 months ago

      Mint?.. MINT? We’re a RED HAT household Mister! You have some explaining to do!

    • @[email protected]
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      129 months ago

      I always just hand out slips of paper with the BlueRay encryption key 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

  • Cicraft
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    349 months ago

    I might be dumb but how many books would 64gbs mean

    • @[email protected]OP
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      9 months ago

      I’d say roughly 1,000 to 100,000, depending on format.

      Edit: Raw ASCII (7-bit) could give you up to ~half a million.

      Edit 2: According to Randall Munroe (to lazy to find the source), you could theoretically store one word letter per bit. That would give us up to ten two million books.

      • @[email protected]
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        229 months ago

        Edit 2: According to Randall Munroe (to lazy to find the source), you could theoretically store one word letter per bit. That would give us up to ten two million books.

        I don’t see how that is possible, I think it is be one letter per byte.

        Bit only represents one state 1 or 0, or true or false. It is too little information to store a letter.

          • @[email protected]
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            89 months ago

            That’s based on common entropy limits of written information. It’s also why I always Bachelor domestic extended doubtful as concerns at. Morning prudent removal an letters by. On could my in order never it. Or excited certain sixteen it to parties colonel. Depending conveying direction has led immediate. Law gate her well bed life feet seen rent. On nature or no except it sussex.

            Of on affixed civilly moments promise explain fertile in. Assurance advantage belonging happiness departure so of. Now improving and one sincerity intention allowance commanded not. Oh an am frankness be necessary earnestly advantage estimable extensive. Five he wife gone ye. Mrs suffering sportsmen earnestly any. In am do giving to afford parish settle easily garret.

        • Doctor xNo
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          39 months ago

          That’s bit, a letter or character is a byte (8 bits), this is about right for pure text files that have no overhead, any extra info (like font, size, type, anything except which chatacter…) Is extra bytes, of course.

          • @[email protected]
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            49 months ago

            If we’re only talking 26 letters no caps, we can cut that down to 5 bits. Then use a decent compression algorithm. Someone more bored than I am can do the math.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              9 months ago

              five bits would only leaves us with six punctuation marks (including spaces, and we don’t get any numerals either) though, do you think that’s enough? i certainly don’t; i have not even used a full stop and I have already exceeded it!

      • @[email protected]
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        169 months ago

        One letter per bit? You’d need some crazy effective compression algorithm for that, because a bit is 1 or 0. Did you mean byte?

        • @[email protected]
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          9 months ago

          UTF-8 and ASCII are normally already 1 character per byte. With great file compression, you could probably reach 2 characters per byte, or one every 4 bits. One character every bit is probably impossible. Maybe with some sort of AI file compression, using an AI’s knowledge of the English language to predict the message.

          Edit: Wow, apparently that already exists, and it can achieve even higher of a compression ratio, almost 10:1! (with 1gb of UTF-8 (8 bit) text from Wikipedia) bellard.org/nncp/

          If an average book has 70k 5 character words, this could compress it to around 303 kb, meaning you could fit 1.6 million books in 64 gb.

          You can get a 2tb ssd for around $70. With this compression scheme you could fit 52 million books on it.

          I’m not sure if I’ve interpreted the speed data right, but It looks like it would take around a minute to decode each book on a 3090. It would take about a year to encode all of the books on the 2tb ssd if you used 50 a100s (~$9000 each). You could also use 100 3090s to achieve around the same speed (~$1000 each)

          52 million books is around the number of books written in the past 20 years, worldwide. All stored for $70 (+$100k of graphics cards)

          • @[email protected]
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            119 months ago

            There’s something comical about the low low price of $70 (+$100k of graphics cards) still leaving out the year of time it will take.

            • Cicraft
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              18 months ago

              Well I guess you could sacrifice a portion for an index system and just decode the one you’re trying to read

    • DancingIsForbidden
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      9 months ago

      Have a couple old pirated e-textbooks as .pdf files on my PC from uni, several hundred pages with color images, and they are mostly under 50MB, averaging about 30MB. 1GB is a little over a thousand MB (1024) so 1 would maybe hold a bit under 50 or so each? So times 64 that, a hell of a lot. Several thousand total, at least, as size varies.

      • @thepianistfroggollum
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        49 months ago

        PDF is super overkill for ebooks. Mobi or epub are usually <5mb per book (usually around 1mb)

        • DancingIsForbidden
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          9 months ago

          No actually I agree with you, plus PDF is a privacy and security nightmare allowing for arbitrary JavaScript execution by default if you don’t limit its permissions. but unfortunately it was all that I could find of that ISBN so it was either shut up and use them or pay full price for my textbooks, so, y’know, I sort of grit my teeth and went with it.

    • H3‎
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      129 months ago

      a shitload. 64000 if it were simple text only stuff with 1MB per book, 640 if it were 100MB chonkers full of images

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

        yeah i read mostly sci fi books so around like 300-400 pages all text and i’d say the average e-book for them is like 150-200kb’s so if it were books like that you’d be looking at stuffing like 300,000 books on there.

  • @[email protected]
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    269 months ago

    It’s so depressing how this meme is gonna get turned into a real thing by the right claiming it’s real

      • @thepianistfroggollum
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        9 months ago

        I’d 100% do it if I could source the drives before Halloween.

        For next year I might 3d print molds for resin casting and have my wife paint them. Well, 3D print a mold to make a silicone mold for resin casting.

  • Black Xanthus
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    149 months ago

    I would be very interested in the list of banned books, and how it would be curated.

    For 64gb, you might have to extend the years to be: banned books ever, and then break down that list by reason. Just to fill space you’d end up including dubious books, and you’d need to be clear on where/who/why a book got banned.

    A book being ‘banned’ from a pre-school for being ‘not age appropriate’ by some pointless helicopter parent wouldn’t count unless the book was actually age appropriate.

    Then you would need a category of ‘banned by author banned’(or similar). Books that were considered age appropriate at the time, but now definitely aren’t. I’m thinking here of the recent removal/editing of Dr Seuss books to remove problematic racial stereotype. Not necessarily banned in their original form, perhaps, but still censored (perhaps, rightly so for the target age).

    64GB is a lot of books. You would end up even including ‘The tale of (Darth) Pelagius’

    (Pelagius was considered a heretic in the early years of the church, and his writings were banned)

  • @[email protected]
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    89 months ago

    As long as they’re not books on kinky sex that you share with kids because you’re pure evil, I support you.

    • @[email protected]
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      129 months ago

      I guess you mean “Mein Kampf”? And no, the people who are into banning books are very much OK with that one.

    • @[email protected]
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      79 months ago

      Either censored by the government or self-censored by the library/institution as the case may be. It’s truly a process as old as writing itself.

      In the case of kids specifically I would probably limit it to age appropriate reading material, which Hitler’s angry prison manifesto really isn’t…

      That being said there are a few hard hitting children’s books about the holocaust, and those actually are on banned books lists.

    • @[email protected]
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      69 months ago

      Mien Kalf can only be read as ‘my calf’ or a woman with the first name Mien and last name Kalf in Dutch. Mien being pronounced like ‘mean’.

      Mein is pronounced to rhyme with nine. The ‘ei’ only being correctly pronounced in American when saying Einstein, other -steins get mispronounced to rhyme with ‘lean’ (Weiner as Weener instead of whiner fi).

      So we’ve got ‘mein’, to rhyme with nine, and Kampf, which might look like it’s out of your comfort zone, but it’s pronounced like comfort without the -ort.

      Didn’t intend for this to become a German pronunciation lesson using dictatorial literature, but there we are…

      • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)
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        29 months ago

        If Kampf is pronounced “comf” does that mean the English words, “comfy” or “comfortable” come from the German word for “struggle”?

        • @[email protected]
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          29 months ago

          Nah, not at all.

          To be fair, it only really works with the american accent, where the ‘o’ in comfortable gets pronaunced a bit like an a. In British english it leans more to ‘u’.

          Comfortable is from latin ‘to strengthen or to help’. Com (cum) Force (forte) (maybe the british pronounciation is more correct because of the latin ‘cum’ :).

          German Kampf is related to camp, which would mean a military kamp, but also a battle. It gets translated to ‘struggle’ in English, but ‘My Battle’ or ‘My Fight’ would be more correct, albeit less litererary pleasing.

          • Mossy Feathers (They/Them)
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            19 months ago

            Ah, okay. I was wondering if it was a silly reason like, “it’s a struggle to do anything when you’re comfy” or something like that.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              8 months ago

              As a rule, when speculating etymological relations, always look at the spelling rather than the pronunciation, since the latter tends to change a lot more quickly. English, of course, is an extreme case of this; during the Great Vowel Shift spellings stayed much the same while most vowels changed to the point of becoming unrecognisable. This is the main reason why English spelling makes no sense.

          • @[email protected]OP
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            19 months ago

            Remember to always provide context when describing pronunciation in English. The letter u may be realised /jʉw/ (“use”), /ʉw/ (“rule”), /ɵ/ (“put”) and /ʌ/ (“cut”), of which only the last one is a valid approximation.

  • linuxgator
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    29 months ago

    I always thought it would be funny if someone were to get some individually packaged Gillette Mach 3 razors and put them in the buckets of kids who look old enough to shave.

  • Doctor xNo
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    -109 months ago

    Must be bad books? Usually banned books are a good thing. Learn what nobody wants you to know! 😅

    Or am I missing some kind of sarcasm here? 😅

    • @[email protected]
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      79 months ago

      I think a lot of the downvotes are from people misinterpreting your comment as saying that banning books is good.

      The joke is making fun of conservatives banning books and paranoia around blades and poison hidden in Halloween candy.

      • Doctor xNo
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        49 months ago

        Oh, I see it now, editing it for clarification… 😅

    • Throwaway
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      -209 months ago

      Most banned books aren’t age appropriate or contain some issue. Like Gender Queer, the “Most banned book in America”, freely available to order, contains pictures of sex, blowjobs, and a blood soaked tampon left until the blood curdled. It’s not exactly appropriate for kids, so it got banned.

      The issue is that most of lemmy has never looked at a banned book, and they’re just circlejerking thinking that only super important books get banned or some shit like that.

      • @[email protected]
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        169 months ago

        No, most banned books are sex-education or contain something that the conservative parents that don’t actually read these books won’t like because of some mistaken idea that teaching kids about the world is a bad thing

        As someone who has perused multiple of the books on the ban list: not a single one I’ve seen is something that you’d legit keep out of a kids hands unless you were some weird prude who hated sex. Eg, a conservative with little sex education themselves

        • Throwaway
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          -109 months ago

          Gender queer is sex education. Just because it has information in it doesn’t mean its appropriate.

            • Doctor xNo
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              69 months ago

              I’d argue talking about how babies are made with mommy and daddy is just as appropriate or inappropriate as talking about changing sex, depending on the age, occasion and intent.

              Changing ‘Gender’ without deviating sexually however should be fine imho… I’m a straight male and I have never shunned anybody for what they think or believe, many of which were very different than my experience of life or personal belief. If I can’t relate I just accept, and I don’t think any information about genderfluidity would have changed me, but instead maybe even better educated me to know how to respect others that are cause I’ve been in quite a few arguments about it just for being uninformed about something that didn’t apply to me. It’s harder than it should be to ask “why” for reasoning and clarification as a binary without apparently sounding condescendent, so advance information about it would have actually been helpful to me… 😅

      • @[email protected]
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        119 months ago

        You wanna hear something mind-blowing? When I go to a library and don’t like a book I just don’t read it…

        • Throwaway
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          -89 months ago

          Yeah, doesn’t mean that libraries can or should carry every book ever made. School libraries should have books appropriate for the students.

          • @[email protected]
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            99 months ago

            Problem is idiots will see an authors last name being Gay and immediately call for a ban without even knowing what’s in the book.

      • Doctor xNo
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        9 months ago

        Oh, these kinds of “banned books for children”… 😅

        Thank you so much for not just downvoting me, but at least enlightening me of what I didn’t get! I appreciate that! Many just downvote without making me any wiser, even when I ask for clarification… 😅

        Either way, those kinds of books are indeed not for children and are bad to be getting in candy, hands down agreed on that! I just saw “banned books” and assumed books with information that make you question the powers that be or the preset values taught… It’s ok to think differently and to critic information that only comes from one side of the story. But it of course is a bad thing to give any sexual or gorey content to children, I just didn’t think about that kind of bad when it is put in front of “books”, tbh, if it’s sexual content I’d more expect it to be ‘pictures’ then instead of ‘books’,…

        Anyway, again, thanks for clarifying!

          • Doctor xNo
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            9 months ago

            Damn, the bloody female-napkin, however weird it feels, is still kind of educational for girls not to be scared to dead if this ever happens, and maybe lessen the shame of it a bit too as it normalizes it a bit and it is a very common part of life that way too often still gets seen as ‘disgusting’, while it’s just nature…

            The sex-toy thing however does go over the line, though, there’s nothing educationally useful in that information. They’ll find out about those eventually anyway and there’s literally no need to specifically mention it exists to children at any age…

            What does either of those things educationally have to do with being queer, though? Call me conservative for saying this but I’d expect a book about the differences of being queer to be, well… about the differences of being queer actually, not the (slightly) taboo similarities that are controversial in any book to begin with… 😅

      • DancingIsForbidden
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        9 months ago

        blood soaked tampon left until the blood curdled. It’s not exactly appropriate for kids

        Well shit, I’m in my early 30s and that’s definitely sounding like it’s not appropriate for me either 🤢