TheTechnician27
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
- Comment on It's just loss. 6 days ago:
I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you foolish vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
- Comment on At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland 1 week ago:
A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined a retaliatory strike, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 for nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.
The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000, and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 1 week ago:
Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to “purposes of tariffs, imports and customs”. Tomatoes by and large aren’t being imported for their botanical value; they’re being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can’t “um ackshually” their way out of paying their fair share.
But that’s too sensinle; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just “le Americans uneducated ecksdee”.
- Comment on I am gorge 1 week ago:
- Comment on Flashbacks 2 weeks ago:
Are the people who put hot sauce on their eggs using napalm?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second. There’s zero consistent theme. The images are generated. They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio). It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”. The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?
- Comment on The Harbinger of the Dystopia 3 weeks ago:
Fair point! I entirely agree with that perspective in other areas. If we’re using this as an example, then I understand, but I actually think this is one example where the change is a tangibly good thing.
- Comment on Everybody poops 3 weeks ago:
Why did I think the centaur on the left was a man doing unspeakable things to a small elephant
- Comment on The Harbinger of the Dystopia 3 weeks ago:
And god knows McDonald’s wouldn’t want to be confused with inferior coffee.
- Comment on The Harbinger of the Dystopia 3 weeks ago:
I’m actually going to say that I think designing a restaurant for disastrously unhealthy fast food in a way that makes it look and feel like a playground shouldn’t be legal, and I’m happy to see them look as dull and unappealing as possible to young children.
- Comment on Fine Literature 3 weeks ago:
This is so true. But your title is fewer than 20 characters. Under Rule 7, Amendment 6 § 38.5, you’re hereby banned from every community I moderate.
- Comment on PROGRESS 4 weeks ago:
Just bend and glue them to make a toroidal sandwich.
- Comment on PROGRESS 4 weeks ago:
A spherical sandwich would just be a 3-ball of air surrounded by a 2-sphere with the following layers: bread (inner), contents (middle), bread (outer). You could also have a 3-sphere sandwich, which is homeomorphic to a calzone.
- Comment on Founder of 23andMe buys back company out of bankruptcy auction 4 weeks ago:
OP, you linked to the comments instead of the top of the article. 💀
- Comment on A 3-tonne, $1.5 billion satellite to watch Earth’s every move is set to launch this week 4 weeks ago:
I’m not agreeing with their dumb point, but just pointing out: this satellite works on radar.
- Comment on A 3-tonne, $1.5 billion satellite to watch Earth’s every move is set to launch this week 4 weeks ago:
I don’t know why you’re assuming their ‘/s’ is alluding to sarcasm around this being surveillance versus sarcasm around needing more surveillance. “We need more surveillance (we actually don’t)” seems to be indicated here, not “This is surveillance (it actually isn’t)”.
- Comment on A 3-tonne, $1.5 billion satellite to watch Earth’s every move is set to launch this week 4 weeks ago:
Did you read the part where this is a radar satellite designed for monitoring the climate? That is, did you read anything besides the headline before you decided “yeah, I think I’m able to make informed commentary about this”?
- Comment on Radio transmissions 4 weeks ago:
A few additional fun points about this:
- “Crab” is Germanic.
- “-ification” itself has its roots in Latin, so even your proposal would be “Latinised”.
- "carcino- comes from Ancient Greek.
- True crabs’ scientific name, “Brachyura”, is Neo-Latin derived from Ancient Greek.
- Comment on Radio transmissions 4 weeks ago:
I think the meme is funny too, but it seems like it’s becoming so divorced from its original context that some people actually believe that carcinisation is some kind of ideal endpoint of evolution. Just to clarify: this isn’t true given how few actual examples there are and the tradeoffs involved.
- Comment on Don't kink shame Oklahoma City. 5 weeks ago:
🎵 It takes a lot to make a stew 🎵
- Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash 5 weeks ago:
Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:
- Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning, and at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target.
- Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
- And even then the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
- And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives you easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
- And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
- Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).
What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.
- Comment on I've hated donald trump since day one but then I saw this and thought.... 5 weeks ago:
I’m not German and thought “huh, I’m not German; maybe I’m actually wrong, and I’m not going to overstep here”… And then the Germans arrived.
- Comment on Good job 5 weeks ago:
“Let’s nostalgia bait millennials who miss the Aero aesthetic.”
- Comment on I've hated donald trump since day one but then I saw this and thought.... 5 weeks ago:
“Are these anti-Nazi protestors holding up a Star of David trying to protect democracy in Germany, or are they just trying to keep their family from being deported?”
🤡
- Comment on Google used to show ads I didn't mind. Now Google is THE reason I use adblockers. 5 weeks ago:
That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:
- Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
- Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
- Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “whelp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.
It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.
- Comment on Missing project? 1 month ago:
it shouldn’t be that hard?OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why haven’t you hopped on what could possibly make you a decent bit of money from convenience fees?
- Comment on Judge finds police acted reasonably in shooting New Mexico man while at wrong address 1 month ago:
The judge also said the officers were entitled under the circumstances to qualified immunity — special legal protections that prevent people from suing over claims that police or government workers violated their constitutional rights.
And there it fucking is.
- Comment on YSK that editing Wikipedia is easier than it looks (and where to start) 1 month ago:
That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.
Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed.
The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.
(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)
- Comment on YSK that editing Wikipedia is easier than it looks (and where to start) 1 month ago:
If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to take a look and see what the reason edits got reverted. Obviously it’s stale enough now that I can’t ask anyone involved to not bite the newcomers or tell them why reversions they made may not be correct, but I’m still curious to see what kinds of edits by new editors commonly get reverted.