ChickenLadyLovesLife
@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
- Comment on Ciiiiircle of liiiife 1 day ago:
They did know that lead was toxic.
- Comment on The Truth Is Out There 2 days ago:
It’s insane that in this day and age people still believe in Bigfoot. It’s obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.
- Comment on This is why you should respect our vets 2 days ago:
My mother-in-law used to be a vet. When she sold her practice (to a national chain that told her explicitly that they were buying it to close it down and reduce their competition yay capitalism) she took home enough euthanasia drugs and syringes to take care of herself and everybody in her family if it ever comes to that. That’s probably the only thing you would actually want in a real apocalypse.
- Comment on Tesla's 'unsupervised' Robotaxis vanish a week after pre-earnings announcement 2 days ago:
My pet theory is that Musk was installed at Tesla by the Saudis (who apparently have a bit of money) to destroy the very idea of electric cars by putting out as bad and overpriced a product as possible. Despite his best efforts, people still want the goddamn things.
- Comment on Correlation equals causation 3 days ago:
Not directly relevant, but I’m surprised at how many people I’ve known over the years who think “correlation does not equal causation” means “correlation equals not causation”. In other words, they think correlation is somehow proof of a lack of causation. “Correlation does not necessarily mean causation” would be a better formulation of the original expression.
- Comment on Slay Girl 1 week ago:
Crows are complex, though. The ones that live around my house can often be found ganging up and chasing away the red-tailed hawks that like to snack on the squirrels. The squirrels repay the favor by chasing off the crows who come to eat the peanuts I leave out for them (and eating the peanuts themselves). One time the crows flew around above me making a godawful racket until I went to the back yard and freed a baby raccoon that had accidentally gone into the box trap I leave out for groundhogs; they immediately flew off as soon as I let the little guy out.
- Comment on Grok floods X with sexualized images of women and children: Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children in 11 days 1 week ago:
In my opinion, the rightward correction has gotten even worse since the defunding. For a long time now they’ve run a graphic showing their corporate sponsors before each broadcast (Meta and oil companies often show up there). They love to say it’s “viewers like you” that make them possible, but I think the corporate sponsors are a lot more important. It’s been a very long time since the government funding has even been that big a chunk of their income.
- Comment on Grok floods X with sexualized images of women and children: Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children in 11 days 1 week ago:
I don’t watch PBS News Hour but my parents do and I have to listen to it from time to time. They characterized this issue as one of Grok creating “explicit” AI images and artificially generating pictures of real women (not “girls”) in “bathing suits”. Not exactly an accurate characterization of CSAM.
- Comment on ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid 2 weeks ago:
An organisation that harvests the organs of homeless called “Rivendell”?
Surely “Mordor” would be a better choice?
- Comment on QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year 2 weeks ago:
I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn’t have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don’t think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.
A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM’s servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you’d made a one-line change to your code.
RIP RIM, but I’d like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 3 weeks ago:
I took German in high school and forgot it all immediately. A decade later I found myself in India studying Malayalam, the language of Kerala which is the southern-most state in the country. Very hard language to learn but as I was studying its formal grammar I was like, wait a minute this is very familiar. Turns out a German monk in the 19th Century visited Kerala and gave Malayalam its first formal grammar, which was basically just German’s grammar. So it wasn’t totally useless.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 3 weeks ago:
I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.
- Comment on Zootopia 3 weeks ago:
Hare down there
- Comment on YSK: Albert Einstein wrote about Socialism, and specifically calls out issues with the version proposed by technocrats. 3 weeks ago:
That was like the third-smartest thing about Einstein. Second-smartest was the Theory of Relativity, and First-Smartest was leaving Germany in 1933.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 3 weeks ago:
a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard
Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).
- Comment on My apartment building gives me free water but I pay for electricity. What if I run the faucet nonstop and rig up a hydro turbine in my bathtub to generate my power from it? 3 weeks ago:
I bought a house two years ago and had a plumber come out to install a new water heater. He asked me where the water meter and I had to say “fuck if I know”. He said lots of people just let their water account lapse and then remove the meter and tap directly into the water line in the street and get free water. He assumed that the previous owner of my house had done this; I was pondering whether this was a bad thing or not when he found the actual water meter out in the yard under a metal cover. Good news? Probably not – it turns out my house water is supplied by a very cheap independent local water authority, but they had to go into bankruptcy along with the city and apparently some Saudis are planning to buy it to provide water to grow alfalfa for their racehorses.
- Comment on Can't stop won't stop 3 weeks ago:
drinking one glass of whisky
To be fair, medical professionals generally triple or quadruple patients’ reported alcohol consumption.
- Comment on Can't stop won't stop 3 weeks ago:
In college I arranged a co-op at IBM. They made me take a drug test which I failed (for marijuana). A person from IBM’s HR called me and said literally “you need to clean up your act” and they brought me in to do the co-op anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that was all about.
- Comment on Can't stop won't stop 3 weeks ago:
British cartoon pig?
- Comment on Good one 4 weeks ago:
I thought Muscadine was the actor in Kung Fu.
- Comment on Good one 4 weeks ago:
Since horse racing is all about betting: Zinfanduel.
- Comment on YSK Tempur Mattresses fail quickly and the warranty is fake 4 weeks ago:
The bus is not my main residence. I live in a place (Philly area) where residence in a motorhome is not really a legal option. I embarked on the skoolie journey without a realistic plan for actually living in it and so far it’s been nothing but a gigantic time and money sink. But it has been fun and I’ve developed a lot of skills (mainly metalworking like welding and riveting) that I didn’t have before. You may enjoy my build thread.
I do hope to someday be able to live in it for a few years at least. We’ll see if that’s possible.
- Comment on YSK Tempur Mattresses fail quickly and the warranty is fake 4 weeks ago:
My sister-in-law had a victorian-era sofa in their house for a few years. Incredibly well-built piece of furniture and quite beautiful, but truly uncomfortable. Also heavy as fuck – I’d rather move a piano.
- Comment on YSK Tempur Mattresses fail quickly and the warranty is fake 4 weeks ago:
I own a skoolie (a used school bus converted to a motorhome). I acquired two sections of one of those giant sectional sofas from a woman on Craigslist who was giving them away for free. She paid $4000 for the entire thing and when I deconstructed my sections to build them into the bus I was astonished at what incredibly poor quality the things were. The framing (such as it was) was unbelievably cheap wood that looked like it was cut by a beaver, and the ends were made from OSB scraps - not even cheap plywood. The backs underneath the cushions were entirely made from nylon lawn chair straps haphazardly stapled down.
The cushions and fabric were decent enough, but the thought of paying $4000 for furniture that shitty underneath is pretty hard to imagine.
- Comment on YSK that electric blankets are cheap and incredibly cozy 4 weeks ago:
DON’T DOXX ME
- Comment on YSK that electric blankets are cheap and incredibly cozy 4 weeks ago:
I like electric space heaters, but: I bought a cheap Chinese one a few years ago that somehow rewired itself. Like, the “off” setting became “low heat”, “high heat” became “fan” etc. I took it apart to see how the fuck that could possibly happen. The dial switch included a little roller contact that moved over a printed circuit board sort of thing to determine the setting; if the heater got too hot (imagine that!) the switch solder would melt and then re-flow into a different pattern, causing the switch to work completely differently. Just unimaginably hazardous.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
You could take artificial diamonds back to the time before there were such things as artificial diamonds.
- Comment on It's the truth! 5 weeks ago:
In Japan they’re called blue onions - neither blue nor onions.
- Comment on It's the truth! 5 weeks ago:
Cultures around the world divide the color spectrum up in wildly different ways, which really highlights the absurdity of “color” being a real, objective property. There’s one culture (I forget which, somewhere in Africa) where all the “dark” variants of colors are called by the same name. Other cultures often combine texture and other properties into their words for colors.
- Comment on It's the truth! 5 weeks ago:
It was “purpura” in Latin. OP said purple is relatively modern in English.