luciferofastora
@luciferofastora@feddit.org
- Comment on I've heard New Yorkers are devastated 5 days ago:
He’s not even in office yet and already knocking it out of the park and halfway across the city.
I just hope that trajectory continues.
- Comment on Fox star trashes Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan: ‘I do not like this idea’ 1 week ago:
If we are serious about housing, why not remove the 55 million people here on immigration visas who occupy homes that could go to Americans who have worked, fought, and bled for this country?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but how exactly are these immigrants making their living, if not by working (and, in places with lax safety rules, probably also bleeding) for a country that’s not even their own?
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 1 week ago:
Fun fact: pushing things into the sun is really difficult. Short version: imagine spinning a pendulum, then trying to slow it down, except the pendulum is 100kg (200lbs) and moving at 87 Mach.
Long version:
Anything launching from earth will have a significant orbital velocity around the sun by virtue of starting at the earth’s own velocity (~30km/s, about 67000 mph). That velocity makes it hard to actually reach the sun.
Consider that even the sun’s gravity isn’t enough to pull in the earth at that speed. Simply applying thrust towards the sun would have to amount to a significant portion of the sun’s gravity to make a noticeable difference.
So to reach the sun, you’d ideally have to get rid of that excess orbital velocity instead. That requires a lot of force, to put it mildly. That kind of force requires powerful boosters and a lot of fuel. Of course, getting those engines and that fuel up there also takes powerful engines and a lot of fuel. But the larger the rocket, the heavier it’ll be, so it’ll require even more fuel…
There’s a phenomenon dubbed the “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. It describes the problem that, at some point, the extra weight required to make a rocket more powerful is greater than the extra power it provides. That basically puts a limit on how strong a given engine can get. There’s a lot of work being done on getting them to be more efficient, so that limit is getting higher, but the bottom line is:
It would require an immense amount of resources to slow an object enough to toss it into the sun, and more resources to get them to that object in the first place.
Physics is a cruel mistress and a mean spoilsport.
- Comment on Norway’s mega wealth fund to reject Elon Musk’s $1 trillion Tesla pay package 2 weeks ago:
Reading this while waiting for HFW to load is an eerie coincidence. I very much would prefer to enjoy the post-apocalyptic world from behind the safety of the fourth wall.
- Comment on 3-bean soup 2 weeks ago:
I didn’t get along with soy milk either, but oat milk is my jam
- Comment on Please no, just stop 2 weeks ago:
Well, to be a little charitable, sometimes it’s text with numbers in it. I just need to figure out how best to extract the numbers from unstructured text, which is mostly tedious to validate.
Other times it’s text where there are supposed to be numbers, like the dates on invoices, which leads to really funny mixups when we look at the revenue per supplier and someone asks “Hey, we didn’t bring this supplier on until 2019, why are there revenues for 2012?” And the answer is “Because your invoice date is a manually entered text field and if you’re a quick typer, 2021 and 2012 are really close together.”
And then some times it’s questions like “How many customer service tickets do we get about X”. If X is a specific product name, odds are a simple full text search for the term gets most of them. If X is a general thing like “Office supplies” it becomes a nightmare really quickly.
- Comment on Please no, just stop 2 weeks ago:
Give it a shot. Asking, I mean. Don’t actually drink any concoction an AI brews up. The rate we’re going, it’ll come up with some combination of ingredients that’ll react, turn into a strong acid and physically change you into a chemical burns patient.
- Comment on Please no, just stop 2 weeks ago:
A Data Analyst’s reading of your comment:
I am misusing Google Sheets to plan my character builds in Final Fantasy Tactics
Oh?
I have entered all the information in the sheet by hand
Uh-huh
and it is mostly text
Eww
This information cannot be put into a graph of any kind.
Phew
People asking me to turn text into graphs are the bane of my life. Well, one of many banes, really.
- Comment on Please no, just stop 2 weeks ago:
Sorry, reality has outshitted your posting
- Comment on Pow-- 2 weeks ago:
I think the nuance is that Nazis ought to be acknowledged as being people, but not afforded any of the respects and graces the Nazis themselves deny others.
- Comment on Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings 2 weeks ago:
Uncritical application of DEI methods without due consideration for the objectives isn’t reasonable.
But signing a contract that says “if you do anything we can construe as DEI we can demand payback of all the support you falsely relied on” is like stepping on a landmine and hoping the fuse stops working before you have to step off.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 2 weeks ago:
So it’s not hard to see how this new definition came about but it is, still, sort of just plucking the word and modifying it to a very different context
I think the difficulty here is the assertion that this “unc” stems from black slang rather than a parallel evolution. After “bro” and “cuz” made it into wider adoption, the pattern of taking the first syllable or so off a term for a relative is familiar.
Unrelatedly, the image of the weird uncle spouting bullshit is a cultural meme in at least those parts of the (presumably mostly white) Internet I’ve been exposed to. The subjectively most common forms I see are holiday season complaints about uncles being racist or conspiracy nuts.
That is a very different image of uncles. Combining it with the aforementioned pattern of taking the first syllable to refer to people of a vaguely similar persuasion will lead to a derogatory meaning of “unc” that may well have developed entirely independently of the more respectful sense you mention.
Hence, I’m inclined to believe it’s more of an unfortunate coincidence than a corruption of an originally benevolent term. Either way, it’s unfortunate to have an otherwise positive term associated with something negative, whether by accident or by ignorant misuse.
more community-destructing than community-building
In some sense, that destruction of community may precede the term. If my reasoning above is correct, the term refers to a type of person one would rather not share a community with.
Also, thanks for asking, rather than downvoting; it’s (obviously) not everything but there’s a non-negligible segment of Lemmy that just seems to have an emotional tantrum every time race comes up.
There’s an odd discussion space around the topic, where even the way you treat it becomes a discussion of its own that I don’t wanna get into right now.
However, one part of it may be that people afford the meaning of words different weights. You comment on how slang becomes trivialised, turning into buzzwords rather than proper language. I’d counter that this seems to be a feature of mainstream communication in general: Words (with some exceptions) are treated more lightly, and as we trust the other to catch the intent of our statement, we also throw them with less care.
That doesn’t mean a word I throw lightly also becomes weightless to others, and I suspect that’s where part of the conflict stems from: When you say “this was taken from black culture”, that feels like an accusation of appropriation and racism. If I adopt a word without any intent of disrespect and then get (or feel) accused of saying something racist, I get defensive because that wasn’t my intent. But the way I said it might still have hurt others, and the fact that I said it carelessly is no help.
I think I first saw that disconnect in the discussion around the N-word: To many white people (including myself), it doesn’t have much weight anymore. We don’t hold the contempt that it used to be an expression of. However, to many black people voicing their thoughts online, it seems to still have the sting of centuries of oppression and disparagement. They don’t – can’t? – separate the intent from the vessel that carried it.
The switch of perspectives isn’t intuitive. But it’s worth learning.
I’m curious to learn and to hear the experiences of others. Whatever thoughts I may have are coloured by my own biases, my upbringing, the social environment I live in. I’d rather ask, converse and risk offending out of ignorance than to assume I know the answer and probably end up offending out of negligence.
Avoiding conflict also avoids the lessons we can learn from it. If we take care to avoid lasting harm, we can “play” conflict and learn to avoid actual conflict in the future.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 3 weeks ago:
How so?
- Comment on Ok, boomer 3 weeks ago:
I feel like there is always some level of condescension when talking about other generations of slang and I wonder why. There’s a smack of snark to the redundant duplicated repetition of “hot hip fan-didly-tastic” and “sleek Gen-Z packaging”, and “cringe” is obviously derogatory. Can’t we casually accept that “the new slang is” what it is, and set an example for the younger ones in turn?
Couldn’t contemporary colloquialisms coexist comfortably?
- Comment on I am always prepared to move into this version of life 3 weeks ago:
No, they don’t.
Microsoft wars on the other hand…
That is also a joke. Don’t base your identity on brands, technologies or corporations; not even on hating them. Base it on values and moral convictions, then judge the rest by them.
- Comment on Manic Stew 3 weeks ago:
I was trying to make a joke of my own, juxtaposing my own use of “being autistic” with the prior assertion that “autistic” isn’t a symptom. I suppose it didn’t land. Sorry about that.
- Comment on Got 'em 3 weeks ago:
Some ancient Greek nerd calculating the earth’s circumference by measuring shadows: Am I a joke to you?
- Comment on Manic Stew 3 weeks ago:
Delusion + whatever you ate
- Comment on Manic Stew 3 weeks ago:
That’s a neurological condition, not a symptom, or am I being needlessly autistic about exact semantics?
- Comment on If websites are slow for you, this is why, AWS is breaking everything 3 weeks ago:
I’d argue you cna never fully escape the problem of enshittification, unless you produce and maintain everything you use by yourself. Given how much of what we need today requires specialist labour and how impossible it is to be a specialist in everything, chances are you’d be trading enshittification for plain shit.
But using Debian at least shuts down one source of enshittification. Just because perfection can’t ever fully be attained is no reason not to try and get as close as you can.
- Comment on i hunger 4 weeks ago:
For anyone not familiar, they’re referring to !ich_iel@feddit.de, which originally (and literally translated) is the German version of me_irl, but I have no idea what me_irl is like these days, so no clue if it’s still a good equivalence.
- Comment on Bats taxonomy 4 weeks ago:
Nah, see, they’re native to southern Siberia. That’s why people don’t find them: you’d never know to look for wombats in Siberia.
- Comment on some days i cant even 4 weeks ago:
My grandpa apparently went to war with the municipal council over his unmown meadow. Had a decent piece of land with wild flowers and grasses and all that. The story was told to me second-hand about 15 years ago and is at least 30-40 years old, but if I got it right, he mowed that land once per year in fall.
The council wasn’t happy with that, because he was supposed to mowed it twice per year, once in spring. Grandpa refused to cut down the flowers in their bloom, both because of all the things living in and off that and because pretty. Stern letter, discussions in person, deadline was set and went by. All the while, the “unkempt” non-lawn grew.
Eventually council imposed a fine. Obviously, a fine is supposed to compel a change in behaviour, but they couldn’t set deadlines tight enough or the initial fine high enough to actually hurt him, so he just paid his “fuck your lawns” fee year by year.
I believe they gave up at some point, but I’m not sure whether that’s just wishful thinking. In any case, that meadow was still growing wild and free when I was old enough to assist in the yearly mowing, long after his death.
Obviously, we can’t all afford to stick it to the local bean counters that stubbornly, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 5 weeks ago:
Samsung’s pre-installed photo apps do that by default, I believe, unless you spot it and go digging where to turn it off (which seems do differ between some models, if I recall correctly)
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 5 weeks ago:
LLMs are the embodiment of “close enough”. They’re suitable if you want something resembling a certain mode of speech, formal tone or whatever without having to write it yourself.
When using it to train other LLMs, you’re basically training them to get “close enough” to “close enough”, with each generation getting a little further from “actually good” until, at some point, it’s just not longer close enough.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 5 weeks ago:
Me when I get a request for PII pertaining to a suspected corruption case: Have one of our corporate lawyers give me a written and explicit statement of what data I’m supposed to send to whom or get bent. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole and gloves unless I have a legally solid affirmation that what I’m doing won’t come back to bite me, and that our workers’ council knows about it and will back me up.
I’m reluctant to even confirm that I can get that information in the first place. I mean, I’m the one with full access to the audit tool, so I probably do, but I’d have to access that data in the first place to check. I don’t think that anyone would notice or care so long as I don’t share that information, but as you said: dangerously radioactive; don’t touch if I can help it.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 5 weeks ago:
Well, there’s a free bonus in the fact that unhealthy people also require more healthcare. Probably not intended, but you’d have hard time convincing me that it’s an unwelcome side effect.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 5 weeks ago:
It’s fine, that’s just writing in first person perspective as rhetorical device.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 5 weeks ago:
Maybe they did. Once. Long ago. Because the tester was even less fit and the only criterion was if a bunch of 17-year-olds could outrun a 60-something with a 40 years of military-sponsored junk food headstart and was half out of breath just shouting “ready – set – huff Go!”
- Comment on 1919 (correctly) 1 month ago:
Does she always hold her breath and listen?