AbnormalHumanBeing
@AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.
- Comment on 2 hours ago:
I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.
- Comment on Since we're doing magic eyes now... 5 days ago:
Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the “looking through the image” technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there’s people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.
Basically it’s about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.
I love the Wellington here viewed the “wrong” way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.
- Comment on Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? 5 days ago:
A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.
So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.
- Comment on Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? 5 days ago:
It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study
Some key paragraphs:
Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.
Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.
After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.
The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.
But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.
- Comment on Since we're doing magic eyes now... 5 days ago:
I can only do parallel-view, not crosseyed, those look so surreal that way (inverted height/depth basically)
- Submitted 6 days ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on PieFed.World is now open 6 days ago:
Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.
As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.
- Comment on It's just loss. 6 days ago:
Dude… you are literally claiming A) that I am vegan when I explicitly wrote that I am not, and B) that I am “not open to alternatives”, when I myself mentioned two aspects concerning how animal raising can be done sustainably, only that that is not what our current system favours due to reasons of maximising profitability.
- Comment on It's just loss. 6 days ago:
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it’s still valid to bring up as an argument, “X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years” is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and “waste” from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably … but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
- Comment on PieFed.World is now open 6 days ago:
Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).
A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!
- Comment on Neat tech, isn't it? 6 days ago:
OI! DAT PYUNEE HUMEE’Z NO PROPAH KRORK IT IZN’T!
- Comment on Fediverse Canvas Event 2025 live stream 6 days ago:
You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷
If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.
- Submitted 6 days ago to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org | 1 comment
- Submitted 1 week ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 6 comments
- Comment on Morning break out of my pond for a butt and a coffee 2 weeks ago:
Luckily for us, that seems to be some piss-weak nearly-water coffee.
- Fireside Fedi Show - Episode 28 - Franzo - Peertuber, Musician, Libre Gamer and Developervideos.abnormalbeings.space ↗Submitted 2 weeks ago to foss_gaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Microsoft 'exits' Pakistan after 25 years (post by Jawwad Rehman, who established and led Microsoft’s Pakistan subsidiary.) 2 weeks ago:
Could that be the common ground for the India-Pakistan conflict to come to an end?
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Is the Fediverse stalling? 2 weeks ago:
That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
- Comment on Feels like something this community would like to know 2 weeks ago:
Oh, woah, that link got mangled somehow - should be fixed now
- Comment on Feels like something this community would like to know 2 weeks ago:
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to foss_gaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on If government hackers can infiltrate big companies, why not hack normal people? 3 weeks ago:
Also, one can lead to the other. If you catch the right fish with a scam, they may just unwittingly give you a way in to an institution. Only the latter would make the news, though.
- Comment on An ambitious Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod's first build is up and running, and its devs are teasing demo news soon 3 weeks ago:
I had been wondering when the first big campaign-style mod for the game would hit, stoked to hear more! As a side note: I get why, but I’m still kind of sad that projects like this seem to use Discord as their main space.
- Comment on An ambitious Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod's first build is up and running, and its devs are teasing demo news soon 3 weeks ago:
Oh, just a casual stroll of the “show only adult” section on Nexus Mods for BG3 can show you what people will come up with, if “normal nudity” is already in the game.
- Comment on European Graphic Novels+ is moving to PieFed.Social (link & info in post) 3 weeks ago:
Looks good, and should remain visible that way on other instances after lemm.ee goes down!
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 0 comments