ArbitraryValue
@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 14 hours ago:
If you don’t want legal or medical advice from an AI, you can already simply not ask the AI for legal or medical advice. But I don’t want your paternalistic restrictions on what I may ask.
- Comment on Tech industry is in tariff hell, even if refunds are automated 1 day ago:
The content of the article does not match the title. It doesn’t actually talk specifically about the tech industry or claim that it is in particular difficulty.
- Comment on 40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence: new research 2 days ago:
I don’t think that a poll which indicates that one in five girls supports violence to resist feminism should be interpreted without any reservations, as this article seems to be doing. The number of adolescents who support endorsing violence in order to mess with uptight pollsters is apparently quite high…
As for lying - it’s a matter of fact that people, including women making accusations of serious crimes, sometimes lie. Maybe there’s more to the question than is presented in the article?
- Comment on Polymarket Takes Down Betting on Nuclear Detonation After Backlash 3 days ago:
Well now that I can’t make money on Polymarket, I have no reason to start a nuclear war anymore. The world is saved.
- Comment on I am an amateur propagandist. A hobbyist. Enthusiast, if you will. 1 week ago:
Netanyahu’s sons did serve in the Israeli military, although how much danger they were actually in is unknown to me.
- Comment on AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains 1 week ago:
There’s nothing in this article about problems with AI specifically.
- Comment on A remarkable discovery was made during scientific research of Karin Månsdotter’s grave 2 weeks ago:
1612
Isn’t that a bit recent for the sort of archeology that involves removing golden objects from tombs?
- Comment on High IQ men tend to be less conservative than their average peers, study finds 2 weeks ago:
A total of 87 gifted adults and 71 non-gifted adults completed the survey.
I haven’t looked at their math but can that be enough data to look at eight different categories and avoid the green jelly beans phenomenon?
- Comment on outlawing pedestrians 3 weeks ago:
Just because I don’t want to endure something unpleasant doesn’t mean I can’t - the argument I’m responding to isn’t that walking is survivable but that it’s preferable.
- Comment on outlawing pedestrians 3 weeks ago:
I like walking when I’m not in a hurry and the weather is nice, but the weather usually isn’t nice in most parts of the country (the US West Coast is an exception to that). I’m looking at moving to a southern state now and the only reason I’m even considering it is that I would be living in a car centered area where I wouldn’t have to spend more than a couple of minutes a day outdoors during the summer. Compare that to NYC where I used to live: milder summers, but still hot, and I had no choice but to endure them because I couldn’t drive to most places I went to.
- Comment on Let's take a moment to remember the time period when everyone had to adjust to using dual-joysticks on controllers. 3 weeks ago:
I gave up on console gaming for the same reason (the last console I owned was a Super Nintendo) but that’s because mouse+keyboard is just so superior that using dual-joystick controllers feels like punishment rather than entertainment.
- Comment on In the future, it will be considered unbelievable that repairing a product used to be more expensive than buying a new one 3 weeks ago:
I think the opposite is going to be true. One thing I noticed when I moved recently is that’s it’s getting cheaper to throw out perfectly good stuff and then buy it again rather than paying to have it shipped long distance too.
- Comment on The classics 4 weeks ago:
I wish it told me what the title of the deleted video was, so that at least I could know what I was missing.
- Comment on A look at Moltbook, a social network where OpenClaw assistants interact autonomously, as they discuss consciousness and identity, technical tips, and more 5 weeks ago:
Another good article about this.
- Comment on Someone should really do something 1 month ago:
I used to work at a company involved in breast cancer screening, and one of the skills I learned on that job was how to say the word “breast” without giggling. It was a small startup so we had some interesting people, including a woman who, when discussing how the machine worked, would just grab one of her own breasts through her shirt and start poking it.
- Comment on Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds - Saigoneer 1 month ago:
I’m glad that at least one government is stepping in to protect the helpless public from, uh, ads over five seconds long.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 2 months ago:
Windows seems to be transitioning from being software you run to being an experience that Microsoft provides to you. The pattern of pushing new features to users unpredictably and without the option to refuse is clearly inappropriate in the first model but natural in the second. As a power user I strongly prefer the first model, but I recognize that most people these days might be ok with having their computer work like a website they access or an app they run on their phone - something they have no control over the state of.
- Comment on How often do you change your towels? 2 months ago:
- Comment on 'Devastating': Amnesty Rips Hegseth Memo Reversing Limits on Landmines 2 months ago:
I think the war in Ukraine has shown us that landmines are so effective that any nation’s ban on them is only going to last as long as no serious war is being fought.
- Comment on Damn 2 months ago:
Clearly he’s out of practice.
- Comment on Who shops at small businesses? 2 months ago:
I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there?
- Submitted 2 months ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 39 comments
- Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this. 3 months ago:
Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I gain the ability to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.
I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!
I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.
But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? Strange.
- Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this. 3 months ago:
Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now that I think about it, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.
- Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this. 3 months ago:
I think that I have a good visual imagination but it works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You think “I have seen a mouse. It was small and gray.” My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.
This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
They grab the hook because they intend to pull you into the water.
- Comment on xkcd #3170: Service Outage 3 months ago:
The curve for people who depend on the service seems wrong. I would expect a sharp drop as soon as the service goes out and then gradually a partial recovery as they find other things to do.
- Comment on The floor is lava 3 months ago:
I have never met a woman who liked being lifted off the ground in real life.
- Comment on How has there not yet been a leak of the Epstein files? Surely there is someone with access to them that could have been subject to worldwide pressure to let something out. 3 months ago:
My guess is that they’re not particularly outrageous but embarrassing to both parties. Maybe the unreleased information is about Epstein’s work with intelligence agencies, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to release and individuals with access wouldn’t feel a moral obligation to leak.
But that still doesn’t explain why Trump doesn’t just say so without revealing any details - it seems less damaging than total stonewalling.
- Comment on Just FYI 4 months ago:
I used to work for a guy who was never wrong. He didn’t talk much, but when he said something, it was always correct. He still hedged a lot, so he would say “I’m not sure you’re right; I think the answer might be X.” What that meant was “You are certainly wrong and the only reasonable answer is X.”