atx_aquarian

@atx_aquarian@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Time to yeet your smartphone into the long grass⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is just something really amazing about being able to communicate directly between two points on the planet by bouncing EM waves off layers of the atmosphere. Like, imagine two people hundreds of miles apart are shining flashlights (or torches, if you prefer) at the distant sky, just above the horizon, and seeing the sky glow from each other’s beams signaling each other. At the right frequencies and with the right conditions, certain atmospheric layer boundaries become reflective, like the boundary between air and water, so imagine that distant sky looks a little glossy up there, like water’s surface reflecting your beam.

  But then run that light source through a machine that does that flickering signal fast enough to encode your voice in the pattern of flickering that’s glowing in the sky over someone else’s horizon.

  That’s pretty closely analogous to what amateur (“ham”) radio operators are doing when they play with the HF range of the radio spectrum. The electronics are less sophisticated than cell phones, but our usual gadgets rely on many other devices to relay info across the Internet (which is also amazing, in a different way). Ham radio, on the other hand, is like a fancy version of talking through two cans on a string, sometimes up to thousands of miles apart, but using fast flash lights instead of string and cans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft employee disrupts 50th anniversary and calls AI boss ‘war profiteer’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Username checks out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We are so cooked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The inherent problem with that is how few there are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit’s 50% Plunge Fails to Entice Dip Buyers as Growth Slows.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I reported a comment for basically saying that men are the only violent sex, and they temp-banned me for abusing the reporting system. The explanation message (canned, I’m sure) said that reporting abuse is a form of harassment or bullying, or something like that.

  Eat shit reddit, and fuck spez.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says | Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of us!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mexico asks Google to reject U.S. renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No no, we’re still talking about the map.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Continue to Organize in Plain Sight.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’ll be just like 2020: react after the damage is done and pretend they weren’t complicit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At 4AM this New Year's Eve, play the Ramones track "I Wanna Be Sedated."⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve been waiting for this moment…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be happy if you woke up today and your throat didn’t hurt.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the best feelings I ever felt was laying in bed the night after a car accident earlier in the fay. It was enough of an accident that I was glad to reflect on it not being any worse, but it also wasn’t bad enough to injure anyone.

  When I climbed into bed that night, I was seriously doing that thing dogs do when you take them outside and they flop and wallow around on the grass with their feet flailing carelessly in the air. That bed felt so damn good that night, and I try often to remind myself that it’s the same comfy and safe bed now that it was that day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.

  And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.

  *I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.