palordrolap
@palordrolap@fedia.io
Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn't brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
- Comment on Someone's gotta say it 28 minutes ago:
in AmericaAnd you can almost cross out "with monopolies" too because there's a lot of tacit price-fixing in industries where there is competition.
- Comment on YSK that the First-Past-The-Post voting system allows a political party to gain an absolute majority with a minority of the votes 3 days ago:
PR will only work if safeguards can be put in place beforehand to prevent one or more parties (political or individual) in an alliance causing a complete government shutdown every time they don't get their way.
What are the odds, do you think, that such safeguards would be put in place when the larger political parties prefer FPTP?
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 3 days ago:
Yeah, you're right, the downvote was a bit harsh considering that I didn't do a deep dive on the matter.
I can't undo the bandwagon, but I can undo mine.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 3 days ago:
Well for whatever it's worth, you're welcome.
That "feeling adrift" sounds a little bit how depersonalisation and/or derealisation were described to me when I was trying to get diagnoses. I didn't feel like they fit my experience of mental illness at all (everything feels real enough (maybe too much), and I've never felt adrift), and I'm not a doctor so I'd be the last person to try to diagnose either in someone else, but they might be things for you to look into.
- Comment on Why are non-binary and asexual flags Wario and Waluigi colored, respectively? 5 days ago:
I don't think this is sexuality, it's politics. Wario is clearly a UKIP supporter and Waluigi is UKIP / Tory coded.
(all in jest of course. Or is it?)
- Comment on How does "DNS" work on the dark web? 5 days ago:
The NSA and GCHQ have both run their own TOR nodes and presumably already have an excellent understanding of how it works, so there's bound to be at least one person, if not an entire department, at the FBI who already understands TOR better than most of the people reading this comment.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 5 days ago:
I can't say they improved my mood much, so there wasn't a great deal to notice, but I have noticed a distinct lack in extreme lows since I started taking it.
The trouble with mood-altering and mood-stabilising medications (and behaviours if you count things like exercise) is that they can affect perception not only in the present, but about past thoughts and behaviours too, so spotting any obvious change might require some effort.
Case in point, it took me a long while to notice that I haven't been having the crushing lows, and part of me still believes that it's not the Vitamin D that's responsible.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 5 days ago:
Best as I can tell there's no evidence that Vitamin D and kidney stones have anything to do with each other, and in fact, there may even be scientific papers in existence that suggest the opposite is true, i.e. Vitamin D may help reduce the risk of kidney stones.
Caveat: This was based on a quick web search, not deep research, and everyone's biology is different. If you're getting kidney stones, check with an actual doctor.
- Comment on How many instances have you been orphaned from? 6 days ago:
Two. kbin.social and kbin.run (which was actually an Mbin by the time it vanished).
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Hey man, the line's gotta be somewhere, right? :p
- Comment on Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing 1 week ago:
Well, no, it wouldn't. The bods that make these decisions still live like it's 1950 and dream of an authoritarian future of masters and slaves.
What good is The Google or The AI when you're sipping champagne up an ivory tower or out on the ocean being waited on hand and foot on a gleaming yacht?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
we're 9 billion people
Either you're a time traveller, you like heavy rounding up or you know something the easily accessible parts of the Internet don't. Averaging the first three sites* that turned up in a search puts it around 8.25 billion at the time of writing
* Worldometer ~8.26b, The World Counts ~8.11b and Country Meters ~8.34b
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO Puzzled by People Being "Unimpressed" by AI 1 week ago:
So, there was this TV experiment where they served soup to a well-known scientist*, but, with his agreement, they stirred it first with an unused - and I stress unused - toilet brush.
He couldn't bring himself to eat it.
Metaphorically speaking, our world is full of amazing things but they're all stirred by clean toilet brushes. Sometimes, it's worse than that and they're used.
Do not want.
* Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he was later cancelled for being old and out of touch on women's issues among other things, which is kind of an example of this same trope when you think about it. His opinions and reactions on soup and food disgust aren't linked to any of that but you might be tempted to ignore the result because of it.
But then, that puts him in the same category as Louis CK and that's what I'm responding to. Food for thought.
- Comment on Google's new 'Aluminium OS' project brings Android to PC: Here's what we know 1 week ago:
Fun fact: "Aluminium" is the international / official spelling. But where Brits have to take the L, or rather the F, is with "Sulphur", because the international / official spelling of that is "Sulfur". The others aren't wrong, but they're not the standard.
Anyway, I wonder if the international spelling has anything to do with it. Or maybe it just follows better from Chromium.
- Comment on An entire PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory, even after a discount — simple memory kit jumps to $600 due to DRAM shortage, and it's expected to get worse into 2026 1 week ago:
Looks like DDR6 is due in 2027, so DDR5 prices will start to fall in 2-3 years when all the AI bros move over to DDR6 instead.
It might be sooner, but that would mean the AI bubble popped.
Meanwhile, here I am on a PC that's less than two years old with DDR4 in it. Works fine for my needs.
- Comment on Why do languages sometimes have letters which don't have consistent pronunciations? 2 weeks ago:
There's a reason kids in Spelling Bee competitions are allowed to ask for the language of origin of a word.
It can often give a hint that a certain sound is spelled an unusual way. The "Ch" of "Chemistry" comes through Greek where it's spelled with their letter "chi", which for reasons I won't get into, looks like our X.
Kids in a spelling bee wouldn't need to ask about "Chemistry", of course, but there may be other examples where that would be useful.
- Comment on Looks like now Mbin, at least on mobile, mixes threads and microblog posts 2 weeks ago:
The posts that I've seen so far seem to be lacking context that's available when visiting the original on the home instance.
That is, these posts look like the first comment made by the OP in a thread below their main submission, but the main submission isn't visible.
Very disorienting. I hope there's a fix on the way.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
OP seemed to suggest that these dreams are, or quickly get to being, beyond their control. Nonetheless, even daydreaming at the wrong time can be perilous.
I say this as someone who has never had good attention control.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Frankly, I'm torn on this one. I have a few fantasies that I like to pretend are real because I think they prevent me from falling off the edge into the chasm of complete insanity, while at the same time recognising that it's not strictly sane to maintain the fantasy in the first place.
But this is something I consciously maintain. There are no elements completely beyond my control like visual hallucination.
The closest I get is the occasional flash of something I've been doing for a while if I close my eyes (basically the Tetris effect ), and maybe the occasional auditory equivalent if it goes quiet.
And yet, in my dreams I've had full blown conversations with people where I haven't expected what they're going to say next, so I suppose if all the above combined into one, I might have a similar experience to you, OP... but then I'd have to strongly considering contacting a medical or psychological professional.
Lapsing uncontrolled into a dream - however comforting that dream might be - when out in the world, could be dangerous for you or people around you. Imagine if you're driving. Or controlling some other form of machinery. Or heck, even pushing a shopping cart.
- Comment on Native Americans? 2 weeks ago:
You're confusing two things.
The aboriginal peoples of North and South America (the continents) are descendents of Asiatic people who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last ice age. That was over 10,000 years ago.
These include, but aren't limited to, the Canadian First Nations - both inland and Inuit, many nations of Native Americans in North America, and in South America, the peoples of the Amazon, the Maya (who still exist), the Incas, Aztecs and so on.
Then, from roughly 500 years ago and then for a century or three, there has been a significant amount of admixture both genetically and culturally with Hispanic colonists that came over the Atlantic from Europe.
- Comment on Firefox 145.0 3 weeks ago:
On the one hand, the PDF editing feature could be useful, but on the other, it's a sign of yet more feature creep and I don't know whether I'm justified in feeling concerned about it.
- Comment on what is the best fruit to leave in a fridge? 3 weeks ago:
Left field answer: Any dried or dessicated fruit, e.g. sultanas, raisins, currants, cranberries, candied peel, etc.
... I did not intend those to be in reverse alphabetical order, but that's how they came out.
Wasteful consumer answer: Tinned (in juice) or those fruit cup things.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 3 weeks ago:
Oh! This must be the guy who was called out on that exact thing and it gave him serious pause before he was able to jump-start the bullsh-tting part of his brain.
- Comment on If animals could speak English in what foreign accent do you think that a certain species would certainly have ? 4 weeks ago:
Ask the British (and apparently Australians too) about that and we might say meerkats are Russian on account of a very popular set of insurance TV advertisements.
That said, I haven't watched TV in earnest for a few years at this point, specifically before Russia fell from favour, so I'm not sure whether that's affected their popularity or not.
And I have no idea what we might have said prior to the ad campaign.
- Comment on An in-space construction firm says it can help build massive data centers in orbit 4 weeks ago:
In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.
- Comment on Is it weird to simultaneously feel love and hatred towards parents? 5 weeks ago:
As I have said at least a couple of times in the past, I love my parents but I can't live with them. Small doses are fine, even pleasant. Heck, I visit most weeks, but long term? Nope.
- Comment on Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands 5 weeks ago:
There's an ancient rule along the lines of "If a new invention can be used for sexual purposes, then it will be used for sexual purposes."
Internet Rules 34 and 35 are descendents of this rule.
People who don't know are due a rude awakening.
- Comment on Is there an anti- sleep-paralysis device? 1 month ago:
Try to take deep breaths. If it's low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.
Alternative if your brain/body won't allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.
The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you're in an altered state of consciousness.
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 month ago:
This actually got me to check something.
I used to spend a lot of time in a location where all of the satellite dishes seemed to point towards a major non-satellite broadcast mast. People in the area were, and probably still are, somewhat suspicious, because that's where their regular roof aerials also point.
However, that mast happens to be largely south, or, you might say equator-wards of there. In the same direction as a ring of satellites orbiting above the equator, perhaps.
So I've just been on street view to check for satellite dishes roughly an equal distance south of the mast. They also point south. Regular TV aerials point the other way, to the regular broadcast tower.
Suspicion debunked!
- Comment on Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it 1 month ago:
Are you sure? They're both unvoiced th, which is what thorn is for if you intend to distinguish.
I can't tell whether Old English used eth for those words early on - though the unvoiced quality in modern English makes that seem unlikely. Did we also devoiced them? Eth died out fairly quickly in favour of thorn in all cases, voiced or not. Possibly because its name is "eþ" not "eð". It doesn't even use itself. (Though, ironically, 'w' also doesn't and it replaced ƿynn, which does.)
There was another commenter - actually might have been the same guy, I'm not all that sure - who did use eth for voiced instances, to similar controversial effect in comment sections.