stray
@stray@pawb.social
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 4 days ago:
There are also child gambling machines, like crane games, coin pushers, or that one with the moving light. I don’t get why stuff like that is okay. I’m not defending loot boxes, but I do think it’s really weird to single them out. Why don’t they just work to pass a law which bans all of them?
- Comment on ard 1 week ago:
Yes. It’s not too unusual for that sort of thing to happen. Feverfew and lungwort are plants named after their medicinal uses, and the tea plant and rubber tree are named for what they produce. Wheat means white, referring to the ground flour.
A lot of things might have had other names before a use was discovered, or they just might not have been named by anyone yet. I think most plants have probably had lots of different regional names within the same language. Flowers seem to collect a lot of names; I think they make us poetic because they tended to interact with human culture in many ways.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
T-Rex didn’t become famous until after Jurassic Park.
Really? I thought everyone knew T-rex when I was a kid. The only pick for Land Before Time I thought was weird was Duckie because I’m still not 100% sure what she is despite having looked it up a few times. The rest of the cast are what I’d consider your classic dinosaurs. But it’s hard to know what other people know when you’re an autistic kid.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
All birds today are actually coelurosauria dinosaurs, a group of theropods (T-rex and raptor-shape dinosaurs) who are thought to have all had feathers for warmth, show, and/or gliding and flight. I know we have evidence that some other theropods had feathers (or at least hairy stuff), but I don’t know whether the rest of them are lacking evidence of feathers or whether we have evidence against them having feathers.
I would also love such a book, preferably with lots of pictures.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
While the look is based in old misconceptions of dinosaur biology, the Jurassic Park dinos lacking feathers actually works really well for the story. They were never meant to be real dinosaurs. They’re just theme park attractions, so of course they look how the customers expect them to. Just like how most of them aren’t even from the Jurassic period.
- Comment on ard 1 week ago:
It could have a negative connotation. One could be a genuine wise man or essentially a snake oil salesman, so the word could be applied in both ways. It’s like how we use “genius” as an insult; we’re using the word in an ironic and sarcastic way.
Here is a collection of various uses throughout history:
- Comment on ard 1 week ago:
It’s not “too” something; it’s just being strong (hardy) or remarkable in that trait. A lot of sources list it as derogatory, but it isn’t so in all instances of use.
A wizard is not too wise, but very wise. Renard or Reinhardt is someone who gives good advice or makes good decisions.
The “must” in mustard is juice and pulp which you intend to ferment, because grape must was an ingredient. There’s a lot of debate over whether the “ard” is the one in this post or ardens (burning).
- Comment on Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities 1 week ago:
I’m on Summit and it’s obvious from your post title and screenshot in my feed that this will be you presenting some kind of website or software. When clicked, the actual thread has your main post written out nicely.
I think if a filter like what’s described is on its way, it’s very poorly thought-out. Many interesting topics will include images; an album cover when discussing a band, your cat when asking for advice about said cat, etc. It’s also fairly normal on Lemmy to add alt-text of images as plain text in the main post, so a filter would either include such posts as not image-only or exclude posts like yours. Seems like a bad system. I should think it’s better for users to block meme comms.
- Comment on It makes me shudder 2 weeks ago:
My T-shirts all have the tag at the bottom of the left seam.
- Comment on It makes me shudder 2 weeks ago:
Coughing can’t possibly be a symptom of any illness because I sometimes cough without being sick.
- Comment on The HOA isn't going to be happy about the colour, though. 3 weeks ago:
The way that’s angled, doesn’t it just immediately fill with water the first time it rains?
Why don’t they just change the tennis regulations to only use biodegradable materials?
- Comment on Facebook is absolutely cooked 3 weeks ago:
Is there a reason an emailing group isn’t a good solution?
- Comment on This past week, Lemmy has gotten really good 3 weeks ago:
As someone who used Sync up until I was forced to replace my phone recently, I recommend Summit.
- Comment on Nice horsie! 🐎 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure why you’ve been downvoted because you absolutely could domesticate them given sufficient time and consistent selective breeding. You could turn them into crabs if you wanted to. The trouble is that they don’t have a very social disposition, so no one is motivated to dedicating their entire bloodline to the project. Most domestication happened kind of on accident as we developed symbiotic or exploitative relationships with various species.
- Comment on A succulent meal 4 weeks ago:
Wheat grain is strictly a vegetable, being an edible plant part. But people usually use the word to refer to a socially-constructed category which is completely feels-based. Membership tends to be determined by flavor profile, nutrition content, and whether the given part falls into another popular sub-category (such as fruit or nuts). This is why fruits like the tomato and pumpkin are usually sorted as vegetables separately from fruits with generally sweeter flavors like the banana or orange.
Vegetables like grains, legumes, and certain tubers will often be grouped together as “carbs” due to their high carbohydrate content which distinguishes them from low-calorie, high-fiber vegetables like spinach or broccoli.
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 4 weeks ago:
Maybe they’ve changed something since I last tried getting help via Discord, but I found the search feature extremely lacking. I never have trouble finding someone else with my same question/problem, but there’s no means of viewing replies to the message in question, or even whether anyone replied at all. One is required to manually browse potential hours or days of messages in the hope of following a conversation chain that might not even exist. This is made even worse by the fact that replies to a message aren’t necessarily registered as replies because they’re just subsequent chat messages.
- Comment on /c/fuckai in shambles rn 1 month ago:
The difference between ChatGPT and Computer (not into Star Trek enough to know what it’s actual name is) is that Computer doesn’t pretend to be a person or have feelings, and it doesn’t encourage harm to anyone. Computer’s purpose is to serve its crew in a constructive manner, not to keep the user engaged at all costs.
- Comment on AI-generated isekai novel that won a literary contest Grand Prize and Reader’s Choice award has its book publication and manga adaptation cancelled 2 months ago:
I’m not really sure what compelled me to read this; I guess I wanted to see the quality of what won the contest.
So an office lady dies of over-work and gets reincarnated with magical organization skills which she’s called on to use in aid of the nation. I was kind of hoping this would go the cozy route of her organizing a healthy society with education and healthcare and all that, but she just immediately starts doing accounting work for the king, exposing embezzlement schemes. What a fucking tool. As if the entire aristocracy isn’t designed to extort the peasant class.
I quit reading after that. It felt like what you’d expect to get if you fed a program heaps of fanfics and asked it to output the average of them.
- Comment on Off the Rails 2 months ago:
How so? (I’m assuming OOP is using the common definition of “animal” to exclude humans.)
- Comment on OpenAI's ChatGPT ads will allegedly prioritize sponsored content in answers 2 months ago:
ChatGPT already shills products; it just does so semi-randomly and usually at the behest of the user. I think this could actually push users away if it prioritizes paid content over tailoring itself to the user, which would be a weirdly positive outcome.
To make a simplistic example, take someone who’s into aluminum foil to block mind control waves. If ChatGPT won’t shut the fuck up about Reynolds Wrap and links to where you can buy Reynolds Wrap, that might be a tipping point that gets them to close the app. Which won’t make them all better, but at least they wouldn’t be using AI to get worse.
ChatGPT might finally be made incapable of discussing harmful topics if advertisers don’t want negative associations, giving Sam Altman the monetary incentive he needs to pretend he gives a shit about human lives.
- Comment on All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought. 2 months ago:
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 months ago:
That’s not a problem. The idea is to define practical categories along the spectrum of consciousness so that they can be discussed without having to re-define terms prior to every discussion. There’s no reason any given organism should or shouldn’t fall into a particular category except for its properties directly regarding that category.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 months ago:
I think the big dividing line between what many animals do and what cells or plants do is the ability to react in different ways by considering stimuli in conjunction with memory, and then the next big divide is metacognition. I feel like there should be concrete words for these categories. “Sentient” and “conscious” have pretty much lost meaning at this point, as demonstrated by this discussion’s existence.
I will call them reactive awareness, decisive awareness, and reflective awareness in the absence of a better idea.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 months ago:
Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self
I don’t know whether this applies to plants and fungi, but it applies to just about every animal. There’s a minimum basic sense of self required in distinguishing one’s own movements from the approach of an attacker. Even earthworms react differently when they touch something vs when something touches them.
- Comment on Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as “End-to-End Encrypted” 3 months ago:
end-to-end
- Comment on 3 months ago:
Ferengi females have smaller lobes, implying that this is a sexually-selected trait and that the small ears of other species’ females might be a huge turn-on. We already make art of alien species that have massive dump trucks and extra boobs.
Teratophilia and furries also exist. What people are attracted to isn’t necessarily what God intended.
- Comment on mmm... tastes like chimkin 3 months ago:
Everyone eats baby birds. They’re full of delicious little bones, which plants are famous for lacking.
- Comment on I dunno 3 months ago:
- Comment on I dunno 3 months ago:
But there is logic behind them.
1+2+3=6 and 2+3+1=6 also.
But 1+23 and 23+1 won’t come out the same if you do the calculations in just any order. It’s not always possible to order them left to right like in the second version, and if we use parentheses for everything we can end up with an illegible mess. I actually tried to type an example of how silly it could look and lost track of my own parentheses nesting before I got very far.
Do you have any other suggestion for how to notate an equation which would make memorization of PEMDAS unnecessary?
- Comment on I dunno 3 months ago:
I sometimes like to add unnecessary parentheses or brackets to section things off and improve legibility, but I don’t do any math stuff collaboratively, so I have no idea whether others would find that disruptive or helpful.
