AppleTea
@AppleTea@lemmy.zip
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
Would Oganesson even last long enough to lick? Let me look this up…
…0.7 millisecond half-life. A fraction of a
millionththousandth of a second. So you really only have to worry about all the things it decays into, and not the element itself. - Comment on Shortly After Xbox Game Pass Prices Spiked, the Page to Cancel Game Pass Subscriptions Was Overwhelmed 6 days ago:
…is the difference being publicly traded on the stock exchange? The only company I can think of that doesn’t fall under “corpo” is Valve, and it seems to mostly be because they don’t have to answer to shareholders.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 2 weeks ago:
I get these stories as a way of pointing out the inherant absurditity in a lot of every day things…
…but also… life requires energy. Something’s gotta keep the metabolism going. Oxygen is both highly reactive and significantly more abundant than any of its heavier counterparts further down the column. If there is life out there with a metabolic rate anywhere approaching our own, it would be weird if it didn’t use oxygen.
- Comment on hyperbaric oxygen chamber 2 weeks ago:
those actually look pretty tasty
- Comment on Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse 2 weeks ago:
The AI being hyped right now is not AI at all. It’s really important that we all acknowledge this, that the world is selling itself a multi-billion-dollar lemon: predictive text engines that have nothing intelligent about them. They’re giant sorting machines, which is why they’re so good at identifying patterns in scientific research, and could genuinely advance medicine in wonderful ways. But what they cannot do is think, and as such, it’s a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.
Goddamn, a gaming outlet saying what the serious grown-up press should have been saying from the start!
- Comment on Based and Red Pilled Gigachad, many such cases 😔 2 weeks ago:
No other country has done as much? We’re gonna just ignore how much support Israel has thrown behind Trump? Netanyahu was meeting and communicating with him during the 2024 election cycle, all while ignoring the Biden administration! Snubbing a sitting president for a prospective candidate!
- Comment on Hmm this "unisex" bathroom seems biased... 3 weeks ago:
I think just being an organism with an anus leads to higher levels of poop exposure than whatever minuscule amount of particulate matter that manages to aerosolize from an unlided flush
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 3 weeks ago:
That’s assuming the someone running the simulation is even aware we are here. For all we know, they’re just trying to model out the behavior of stars and black holes.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
gonna keep banging this drum every time this comes up:
When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.
The post’s header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to “sense” a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was there.
Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than “sensor”, would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.
So, what we actually get is “Touching the photon changes the photon’s behavior.” The universe doesn’t magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!
- Comment on Good news. :) 4 weeks ago:
DC is a former wetland
for like half a century after the countries founding, there was no sewer system. So a giant lake of shit formed, practically behind the White House. It’s thought a lot of the early presidents had their life shortened by cholera complications
- Comment on Help. 1 month ago:
Voicing His Own Thoughts Without Prompts
What are you thinking about, baby?
- Comment on China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age 1 month ago:
Perhaps. At the same time, we also had a better reputation then. A lot of countries were quick to jump on board when we decided who was gonna get invaded. Maybe they would have been just as eager to pull together and go green? Not that we’ll ever really know, of course.
- Comment on China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age 1 month ago:
Maybe… but… remember ten years ago when there were all those articles about how “China is building train stations to no-where!” and today those same train stations are now in the center of new bustling cities? Isn’t this what we’d expect to see, right at the start of a pivot to green energy?
- Comment on Remember to 2FA your kidneys. 1 month ago:
maybe they mean with dialysis?
- Comment on China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age 1 month ago:
my dad once said that if he was in Bush’s position, he would have used 9/11 to justify decoupling from Saudi oil and push for more solar and wind development
I still think about that. So many missed off-ramps to this…
- Comment on China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age 1 month ago:
don’t worry, you can start shutting down france’s nuclear generators once you run out of your own
- Comment on Alpha males 1 month ago:
The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Terry Pratchett
- Comment on Chad NATO 2 months ago:
…what…?
- Comment on Hate to see all the suffering 2 months ago:
Sure, in a reductive sort of way. Kind of reminds me of native americans who, after being forcibly taken to europe and seeing how the people lived, concluded that no one there was free.
I think that criticism is still fundamentally true. But at the same time, what we have now is different from slavery. People are no longer legally considered property. Yes, labor is still coerced. But that coercion is now baked into the system, rather than an explicit interpersonal relationship of owed and owner.
- Comment on Hate to see all the suffering 2 months ago:
- Comment on Hertz' AI System That Scans for "Damage" on Rental Cars Is Turning Into an Epic Disaster 2 months ago:
I mean, it’ll mostly be accelerating a trend that was already there. Also, the initial scramble to use the legal grey area to cover as much shady shit as possible in a: Well shucks, how were we supposed to know the neural net would make illegal denials? After all, the guys who trained it don’t even know exactly why it does what it does kinda way
- Comment on Hertz' AI System That Scans for "Damage" on Rental Cars Is Turning Into an Epic Disaster 2 months ago:
just wait till they start denying health insurance with it
I’m sorry ma’am I know you’re upset, but the AI said it’s not covered. The AI is numbers, and numbers don’t lie.
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 2 months ago:
actually, they do get to complain
- Comment on 'Clanker' is social media's new slur for our robot future 2 months ago:
I have seen absolutely nobody refer to the chatbots as “clanker”. Notice how this so called ‘criticism’ of the AI future still accepts as true the same premise the AI fanatics are pushing, they just hold a flashlight under their chin and go, “and it’s evil!!!”
I don’t think statistical word generator is as useful as all the investor types seem to think it is, and they’re gearing us up for an unthinkably massive market correction in the near future. That’s a real criticism of AI.
- Comment on It's not just kind, it's kinder 2 months ago:
I kinda think it was made with the intention kids would be exposed to it by mistake.
- Comment on Why doesn't the US fill in the area in the Pacific to connect Alaska, Hawaii, and the mainland? Are they stupid? 2 months ago:
take it down one degree of absurdity and you just have Bojack Horseman
- Comment on High quality sticker though 2 months ago:
MAKE THE ANIMALS WEAR PANTS! COVER THEIR BUMS!
- Comment on They're completely serious 2 months ago:
plenty of sea critters have blue blood
horseshoe crab blood (blue) is even widely used to verify disinfection procedures
- Comment on well? 2 months ago:
That’s an easy criticism to make of someone on the other side of the planet. But on this side of the pacific, I can’t help but notice that we make the same excuses for continuing to live under our own government.
- Comment on well? 2 months ago:
Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.
And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”
It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
