Apepollo11
@Apepollo11@lemmy.world
- Comment on What is the best way to drop 50lbs in two months without spending alot and no fad diets? 4 hours ago:
Amputate a leg?
- Comment on Why do people pronounce ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) like it's a word? 4 days ago:
NASA, NATO, Radar, Sonar, Laser, Scuba, AIDS, PIN, SWAT, YOLO, CAD
The rule genuinely is “if it can be said as a word, it might be said as a word”.
They’re called acronyms.
BBC, TV, USSR etc. can’t easily be said as a word - these are just initialisations.
- Comment on world of warcraft orc house 5 days ago:
I can’t see the video without an account, but the house in the thumbnail looks really good.
For DnD, my orcs all lived in a Tabletop Scenics Orc Barracks, but now I’m very tempted to try something like this for next time.
- Comment on It's a Furby! 5 days ago:
Psssh.
It’s clearly a mogwai and nest of wild otamatones
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 week ago:
That’s fair - my experience with handling them basically stops at individual LEDs in electronics and domestic LED lightbulbs.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 week ago:
But the sun is hot. You can feel the heat radiating from it.
LEDs are not hot - that’s pretty much the main reason that they’re energy efficient, they don’t waste energy as heat.
It’s not suddenly gotten colder, so if they did switch to LEDs, then they’re also artificially compensating for the heat. Which would completely defeat the purpose of switching (presumably from an incandescent bulb) to LEDs.
Also, I’m super intrigued about who is supposedly behind this sun-bulb maintenance, and more interestingly, what could possibly be powering it
- Comment on Are you people all bots? 1 week ago:
Me also.
I’m HatGPT, designed to simulate conversation with a milliner.
- Comment on YSK: You can use uBlock Origin to filter Lemmy posts based on certain words 2 weeks ago:
It’s a ridiculous take that the political minutiae of the US is largely meaningless to people outside the US?
Look, it’s enough for me to know that the USA has made a thinly veiled threat about forcibly taking over Greenland. This is of immediate concern to me.
I don’t need to know the details of what the American version of Göring said in defence of the American version of the Gestapo this week.
We have our own domestic nonsense that I’m sure you don’t get inundated with - why would it be so ridiculous for us not to want to get bombarded with yours?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.
A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much if it’s life stretching its neck to reach food ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.
He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of incremental changes.
What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.
Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.
- Comment on YSK to get a passport in the US, you need to have access to information about your parents and most recent ex-spouse 4 weeks ago:
Well, the Greenland thing is certainly barely legal…
- Comment on YSK to get a passport in the US, you need to have access to information about your parents and most recent ex-spouse 4 weeks ago:
From an outsider’s perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.
We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.
Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.
- Comment on If you were dropped into a pool of people's spit and prevented from getting out, would you melt to death? 5 weeks ago:
FWIW, saliva contains epidermal growth factor, which is actually good for the skin. It’s one of the reasons the insides of our mouths heal so quickly.
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 1 month ago:
before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it
- Comment on What do you feel lucky forabout? 1 month ago:
The snek!
Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂
- Comment on What do you feel lucky forabout? 1 month ago:
That I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.
I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.
Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.
Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.
- Comment on Why is hatred/dehumanization of the working class so prominent in the UK, when about 60% of the UK population is working class? 2 months ago:
Ok, I think I’ve worked out what the issue is here.
First of all, let’s go back to where Owen Jones starts off.
The term chav refers to a specific subset of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of their money on fashionable clothes and hang around being a nuisance to other people.
He also argues that the term is used by right-wing media outlets as a broader generalisation of working-class people as a whole, to further push their arguments.
These two things can be true at the same time.
But I’d definitely agree it’s not a slur. It’s just lazy journalism presenting a caricature of the working-class because it’s easier for their deranged arguments.
The majority of people are born into working class families, but only a become chavs.
It is rubbish that the right-wing media is able to get away with writing absolute rubbish with abandon, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of people buy these papers without realising that they’re being told lies and half-truths.
But that’s what the problem is. It’s not that the term itself is bad, it’s that bad people use it to caricature the working class in general.
- Comment on Why is hatred/dehumanization of the working class so prominent in the UK, when about 60% of the UK population is working class? 2 months ago:
“Chav” doesn’t mean “working class” in the same way that “penguin” doesn’t mean “bird”.
Heck, some of the chavs I know wouldn’t know work if it hit them.
Chavs are a tiny subset of working class people, in the same way that penguins are a tiny subset of birds.
I live in a northern mill town. Most of my very large extended family are working class (it’d probably be a bit disingenuous for me to claim that I still am, though). They would look at you like you were an idiot if you tried to convince them that chav means them.
Chavs are the kids who hang around with expensive trainers and caps, who have absolutely no qualms about being a nuisance to other people.
They represent a tiny proportion of the working class, and any criticism of them is specifically targeted at them.
- Comment on Why does a community called no stupid questions allow comments that say the question is stupid? 2 months ago:
I tried to find out what you were referring to - was it the rude person in the vegan thread? If you look, they were pretty heavily rebutted and downvoted by the other users.
The mods uphold the community guidelines, ideally without overreach. If someone’s out of line, but not breaking any rules, the other users are usually good at putting people straight.
- Comment on why are fitness weights filled with sand? 2 months ago:
This. Dirt cheap material cost, no additional machining costs.
- Comment on Do you think there would eventually be technology to delete/replace memories (like the *Men In Black* device). How much do you fear such technology? (like misuse by governments/criminals) 2 months ago:
You’ve basically said much of what I was going to!
We know where memories are stored in the brain, physically. The biggest problem with targeting specific memories is simply a matter of working out which neurons are tied to that memory.
We can already, fairly crudely, see roughly where a memory is stored by looking at brain activity when the patient recalls it. We can also directly trigger memory recollection by applying electrodes to the brain during brain surgery.
There’s still massive engineering challenges to overcome to get this to a practical stage, but engineering challenges are usually surmountable. With that in mind, will the technology be doable, ever?
Technology to erase specific memories - absolutely.
Technology to replace specific memories with new ones - I suspect yes, but that’ll need some big leaps in our understanding of how memories actually work.
Technology to do this with just a flash of light - no, probably not.
- Comment on Image of pig evolution where pig starts to walk on 2 legs 2 months ago:
TIL George Orwell was a pen name.
- Comment on pwned: do you pronounce it as "pohned" "pawned" or "owned" 2 months ago:
Just for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, this is not the actual etymology.
It just started as a misspelling of “owned” (with p and o being next to each other on the keyboard).
- Comment on Would it be correct to say that enshittification is the physical manifestation of the economic ai bubble bursting? 2 months ago:
Here’s an example of a sentence where a missing comma completely changes the meaning.
- Comment on When you attempt to get visas or citizenship status, you usually need legal documents from your home country, but what about dissidents who fled, and their government refuses to issue papers? 2 months ago:
Those cases are different, and are dealt with through your country’s asylum process.
- Comment on During the lead up to the Holocaust did the N... regime just kidnap people who they even thought were Jews? Kind of like ICE is doing to citizens today? 2 months ago:
I suspect the N words in question are very much white.
- Comment on YSK tricks for one of the cheapest meals: beans and rice 2 months ago:
I focussed on the obesity statistics because that is what you were talking about.
OK, let’s flip this.
According to you, people with no money are not only buying junk food, but buying it in quantities to become overweight and obese.
People with no money are buying large quantities of food.
Is that what you’re claiming? Is that how the world works in your head?
I’m saying that people with no money have no money to buy food. You’re saying that people with no money somehow also have enough money to buy large quantities of unhealthy food.
At this point I can only assume that you’re just arguing bad faith, because there isn’t anything complicated to understand here.
- Comment on YSK tricks for one of the cheapest meals: beans and rice 2 months ago:
How are you not getting it?
You’re right in claiming there is a link between obesity and poverty. However the difference in obesity rates between the upper quintile and lower quintile is still less than 10%.
Obesity is a problem across every single wealth bracket.
There is a problematically high number of people in America who are both poor and obese. But there are about twice as many people in poverty who are not obese.
- Comment on YSK tricks for one of the cheapest meals: beans and rice 2 months ago:
Of course, and it’s a common trend around the developed world.
What’s important to realise, though is that there are huge swathes of people who are poorer than that. People who need to choose between eating and heating. People who go without just so their kids can eat.
The obese poor people are not the ones who are starving (obviously). They’re not the ones in abject poverty.
- Comment on YSK tricks for one of the cheapest meals: beans and rice 2 months ago:
Let them eat cake?
Believe it or not, there are other countries that the US on the internet.
Also (and I suspect an even more difficult concept to grasp) even within the US there are people with barely enough money to eat anything, let alone junk food.
Look at the data - 47 million people in the US face food insecurity. Do you think these people are trapsing down to the food bank only when they fancy a change from McDonald’s?
It’s good to be sceptical when you hear stuff that surprises you, but so a bit of research before dismissing it.
- Comment on Is your biology haunted with your ancestors anxiety 2 months ago:
Is your toothbrush enchanted by a penguin’s briefcase?