queerlilhayseed
@queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
- Comment on YSK the phases of the moon 2 days ago:
It’s useful for flirting with a very specific type of nerd. Also I think it’s good for if you want to cast certain spells. And, unlikely though it may be, you could turn into a werewolf and it’s nice to be prepared.
- Comment on RFK Jr. food pyramid site links to Grok, which says you shouldn’t trust RFK Jr. 1 week ago:
I wonder how much HHS is paying Musk for that integration.
- Comment on New nickel-iron battery charges in seconds, survives 12,000 cycles 1 week ago:
It makes sense to me to have low power chargers on a UPS. Once your power comes back online, it needs to deliver enough juice to power everything plugged into the UPS plus the battery charger. A fast charger would be more likely to trip a breaker.
- Comment on Using the same abbreviation scheme as "internationalization" -> "i18n", the word "to" can be abreviated as "t0o". 1 week ago:
I’m still working on my first one, apparently :/
- Comment on Using the same abbreviation scheme as "internationalization" -> "i18n", the word "to" can be abreviated as "t0o". 1 week ago:
N0o one is happy about this.
- Comment on Using the same abbreviation scheme as "internationalization" -> "i18n", the word "to" can be abreviated as "t0o". 1 week ago:
I am so mad right now
- Comment on Using the same abbreviation scheme as "internationalization" -> "i18n", the word "to" can be abreviated as "t0o". 1 week ago:
haha same. I went years knowing from technical osmosis that it meant “supporting other languages” but I never knew what it represented or why it had numbers in it. There are so many acronyms in tech I think inevitably some of them fall by the wayside for everyone.
- Comment on Using the same abbreviation scheme as "internationalization" -> "i18n", the word "to" can be abreviated as "t0o". 1 week ago:
Still at a loss as to what “"Sk8er Boi” is short for.
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 33 comments
- Comment on Starting to think affluenza might be a real thing. 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think it’s as simple as there being “good people” and “bad people”, and that only the worst people are capable of extreme wealth. I think wealth just happens to some people. Some people are born into it, some stumble into it, a lot of people seek it out and a few of those people “succeed”, though I’d argue even then it’s mostly chance. Of the people who get substantial wealth, some give it away, some retire into a wealth cocoon and are never heard from again, some lose it, and some actively grow it because they love the feeling of gaining wealth.
I don’t know if it’s addictive in the same way that some chemicals are addictive, but I bet it’s addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive, and wealthy people get hooked on the feeling of “winning” more wealth. I also think that it’s not strictly wealth addiction, but power addiction, which is why some super wealthy people tend to extravagantly flaunt their power: building megaprojects, influencing or simply taking over governments, violating laws with impunity, forcing the working class to work in extreme conditions if not outright enslaving them, etc. The use of power is their drug and they won’t stop themselves because they can’t. Does that make them bad people? It makes them harmful people who need intervention, the same way an alcoholic needs intervention before they get behind a wheel. I feel bad for kids born into wealth, who never had the chance to just be a human without the veil of power being drawn between them and the rest of humanity. The Don Jr.’s of the world. That doesn’t excuse their actions, nor does it mean that they don’t need to be stopped. But I think it hurts us to think of them as fundamentally “bad” in the same way I think it’s unhelpful to categorize alcoholics as “bad”. The real horror is that the monsters are just like us, and treating wealth hoarders and power addicts like they’re a different, less human kind of human is the same thing that they do to rationalize their own abuses.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Will no one rid me of these troublesome conspiracy laws?
- Comment on US approves major new arms sales to Israel worth $6.67 billion and to Saudi Arabia worth $9 billion 3 weeks ago:
I am so fucking tired of my taxes being used to kill people so rich assholes can take their land and resources.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
I think oppressors have a conscience already, they’ve just been taught to ignore it or accept exceptions to it. Or rather, I think it’s more that oppressive leaders are in on the game, but the vast majority of their coalition has to be hoodwinked into following along. Look at the modern American news media machine: we kind of forget how expensive it is because it’s also profitable, but that’s a huge amount of concerted effort directed at making white americans afraid of and angry at non-white people. If people were just naturally OK with oppression none of that would be necessary, they would just do it and not bother trying to justify it with scare tactics. It’s also fragile to argument, which is why books get banned and civil rights leaders get assassinated.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
Have there been cycle breaks? I’m not trying to be combative but I am curious to know what examples you have in mind. I don’t think human history has ever seen a break in the cycle of violence as I would define it. The active bloodshed has waxed and waned over the centuries, or at least moved from place to place, but violent oppression has been alive and malignant in every chapter of human history that I can think of.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
That’s a hard question and I don’t know. I don’t know that a strictly nonviolent movement can work if there’s a critical mass of oppressors who believe that those they oppress deserve to be oppressed. I think the theory of nonviolent resistance is built on an assumption that, deep down, we all know that what oppressors do is wrong and that there is a contrivance of convenience that allows oppressors to except themselves, or simply ignore that knowledge. I don’t know if that deep down knowledge is universal. But I know from personal experience it’s quite easy to ignore it, especially when one’s own life is hard, or when the oppression is mostly hidden from view, or simply when the problem of oppression seems overwhelming and unassailable. I believe that most people who don’t try to resist oppression either disapprove but feel helpless in the face of it, or they benefit from it and therefore try to justify it, or usually a combination of the two. If that belief is correct, then the answer I think is one of education. Give people the tools they need to fight nonviolently: Educate about local elections, form citizen watchdog groups, show how propaganda uses common tropes to reinforce ideas about the “inherent criminality” of the oppressed, teach the history of how oligarchs use flunkies like trump to implement favorable policies while deflecting blame onto minorities, and the million other things that people need to know to have a well functioning society. Use shame to dislodge the privileged from their comfortable niches and force them to answer for the consequences of their actions or lack thereof.
I think, especially now in America, this seems so far away that even to seriously consider it seems fanciful. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re at the point where violence is necessary to jerk us back from the cliff of autocracy. It certainly seems like trump and his goons want a fight, and it seems likely that sooner or later they’ll get one. But I don’t think violence can be solved with violence, and even if America goes through some violent convulsions I don’t think they’ll end us in a place where we aren’t doing violence to each other. Nonviolence requires nonviolence.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 4 weeks ago:
Yeah. The question is whether to work to continue the cycle or work to break it.
- Comment on The longest finger is typically in the middle of the hand but the longest toe is typically at the end of a foot 5 weeks ago:
There’s something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 5 weeks ago:
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
- Comment on The highest-rated games and what the people say 1 month ago:
The fun thing about art criticism is there’s no barrier to entry. Literally anyone can do it.
- Comment on The difference between a Collection and a Hoard, is "Standards" 2 months ago:
That, and I occasionally pull things out of the pile then put them back on top, so they slowly organically sort into having the most frequently used things on top. I also have multiple piles that organically evolve into specializations. For example, I never intended to have a “old specialized cables” pile, but it emerged from the bottom of the “old hardware I seldom use” when I transplanted all the top stuff into a new discrete “electronics I might salvage someday” pile. It’s not a good system 🙃
- Comment on The difference between a Collection and a Hoard, is "Standards" 2 months ago:
I organize my collection via emergent ontology.
- Comment on Fun Otter Fact 2 months ago:
I tried but for some reason they keep cavorting in the sun and water all day.
Maybe they are trying to teach me a lesson.
- Comment on The richest people in the world are morally bankrupt 2 months ago:
I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel.
(n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 2 months ago:
In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names:
,,, and. - Comment on What do you feel lucky forabout? 2 months ago:
Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn’t as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/
- Comment on What do you feel lucky forabout? 2 months ago:
I met my partner when we were both in our early 20s and we clicked very quickly. Growing up and through my teens I assumed I would never settle down into a long-term relationship. I didn’t really have a good idea of what a long-term relationship would even be like for me; I certainly didn’t want to wind up in a mutually-resigned tolerance that my parents resolved into. Then for a while after we got together I (fortunately privately) assumed that we were too young and it was too good to last and that things would eventually fall apart but (so far) we’ve just never gotten tired of being around each other. We’ve had a few rough eras, actually in one of the scrabble periods now, financially, but as for the relationship itself we’ve been together almost 20 years now and going stronger than ever. Still rather in awe that it worked out this way when I think back on it. Feels very lucky.
- Comment on Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats 2 months ago:
Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of it’s previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.
- Comment on How do you respond to unwanted advice? 3 months ago:
It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.
- Comment on If we ever find a planet with life in it, we could never set foot on it, because the interaction of the two biologies can have unpredictable consequences 3 months ago:
Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.
- Comment on A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics 3 months ago:
Thanks for doing the moddin’ 🤠🤏