tunetardis
@tunetardis@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 6 days ago:
That’s a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing. My mom was an avid gardener also. I miss her so much!
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 6 days ago:
Oh man, you sound like my mother! She was actually Japanese and grew her own tomatoes. She was always forcing them on me, saying Ne, umai-deshou! (See? They’re full of umami!)
I actually like cooked tomatoes in all forms, but there is something in the flavour profile of a raw tomato that turns me off.
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 6 days ago:
That is fascinating! You should do an AMA.
I would love to see fewer monocultures at the supermarket. I have noticed lately that a number of new apple varieties have been popping up, at least where I am in Canada. I keep hoping for some kind of craft beer-like renaissance in produce where there is a lot more to explore and rabid fandom over particular varieties.
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 6 days ago:
Ah that would certainly explain it.
My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it’s as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven’t been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
- Comment on Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old? 6 days ago:
The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?
So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…
- Comment on We should have elections with no candidates. 3 weeks ago:
I tried one of those surveys before the last election, and it concluded that I was most closely aligned with the Green Party. Alas, they don’t have a chance in Hell where I am. They are so far off the radar I wasn’t even aware they were fielding a candidate in my district. But it does make me wonder though. If such surveys actually informed how people vote, would the balance of power shift? I think it would help if our voting system (I’m in Canada) changed to something other than first-past-the-post?
- Comment on Lemmy should have a community called lemmy_guess 3 weeks ago:
Oh wow thank you so much!
I got super busy today and only just got back on now to see the idea seems to have some traction. I will try to post/comment there to get ball rolling.
I was thinking actually, you could have posts that, like I suggested, describe a strange situation and invite people to speculate on how it came about. But you could also give some sort of narrative that describes the circumstances instead and leads up to a point where you go “…and you’ll never guess what happened next!” or something to that effect.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 30 comments
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I find as I get older and my vision is not what it once was, I need bigger screens with good contrast but don’t care so much about resolution. I think it was on the show Corner Gas where they were talking about how big a screen you should get and concluded the size in inches should match your age. That made me laugh but I have to confess now there may be some truth in that…
- Comment on Why is space 2 dimensional? 1 month ago:
It’s been a long time since I got my astronomy degree, but your version is what I recall also. Whatever small rotational perturbation in the initial gas becomes more pronounced as it coalesces in on itself and defines the plane of the star system. Planets form within this plane after it is defined, and they all travel in the same direction around the star.
Regarding galaxies, the most common spiral ones like our own Milky Way follow the same principle at a larger scale. But there are also elliptical galaxies, not to mention irregular ones. In an elliptical galaxy, there is a more random movement of stars in a cloud around its core. So they look more 3D I guess, to go back to what the OP was asking about. I seem to recall the most accepted explanation for how these form is from the aftermath of a collision between 2 spirals? So presumably, when our galaxy collides with Andromeda in several billion years time, the resulting combined galaxy may emerge as an elliptical?
- Comment on If Jesus can turn water into wine, but wine is still mostly made of water, can Jesus apply his powers recursively and create more and more concentrated wine? 1 month ago:
Can he put actual kombu (as in Japanese kelp) into kombucha?
- Comment on If Jesus can turn water into wine, but wine is still mostly made of water, can Jesus apply his powers recursively and create more and more concentrated wine? 1 month ago:
Yeah, I rolled a d20 and can confirm. Wow, critical miss!
- Comment on If Jesus can turn water into wine, but wine is still mostly made of water, can Jesus apply his powers recursively and create more and more concentrated wine? 1 month ago:
Probably, but he had to leave something for bored celibate monks to do. There are worse callings than to devote a lifetime to finding all manner of ways to fortify wines.
- Comment on Getting into the Senate is the politician equivalent of an academic getting tenure 2 months ago:
But doesn’t it resolve the vote-splitting problem? For example, a common scenario here is you have a right-wing candidate winning in a a left-leaning district because the left’s vote is split across more than one political party. Wouldn’t a ranked system solve that dilemma once all the dust has settled?
- Comment on Getting into the Senate is the politician equivalent of an academic getting tenure 2 months ago:
I think the Canadian system is very much modelled after the UK?
That’s interesting about Australia though. Btw I understand Australia has a ranked voting system in elections? Curious about how well that works. Our first-past-the-post is a nightmare with vote-splitting sending the “wrong” representative to the capital.
- Submitted 2 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 9 comments
- Comment on Is there a difference in meaning between the words *people* and *persons*? 2 months ago:
Sometimes people will say “That person’s name!” or “Those group of people!” in anger. “That Donald Trump! How dare he claim immigrants are eating pets?” to give you a current example.
When spoken of a family member or mutual acquaintance with a chuckle, it means more like “That person has some strange quirk but what can you do? We still love him.”
For example, you might hear “That dog! Always chasing his own tail.” So I think this is likely what you were getting from that conversation? It’s certainly not a criticism of your use of the word “people”.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
You know, I’m not actually quite sure what I’m doing, but I can tell you I am not looking at the keyboard. I suppose it’s similar to how I play violin? I don’t look where at where my hand is but it shifts to different positions depending on what makes the most sense for the pattern I’m trying to play, and yes, a different position does imply a different fingering to reach the same notes.
When learning to program, I initially tried to follow the touch typing guidelines, but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them. And just as with music, there are patterns. In programming, you may frequently need to type
{},:=, or even something like ‘{}’, and flailing around with the pinky is a good way to give yourself carpal tunnel. So your right hand learns to shift to hit those keys using a combination of fingers. - Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.
One thing that’s really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 2 months ago:
I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 2 months ago:
You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.
That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 2 months ago:
Anyways, did I miss anything?
I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.
A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.
The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.
Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.
- Comment on First of its kind 'energy dome' storage project takes another step forward in Wisconsin 2 months ago:
Spent breakfast researching this:
- the plant would store 200 MWh
- given the 10-hour figure, one would assume it can feed up to 20 MW to the grid at any time
- they have already built a 4 MWh pilot plant in Italy
- the utility has also been building lithium-ion battery farms, so it stands to reason they see enough potential in this approach to continue pursuing it
- compressed CO2 storage has advantages over compressed air in that it can be stored indefinitely at ambient temperature and has a higher energy density in liquid form
- it has disadvantages in terms of plant safety
- Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say 2 months ago:
Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?
- Comment on Can you "change" the environment in your "local" area? 3 months ago:
I think with 50 acres, you should be able to do a lot to combat the urban heat island effect. I say this based on my bike commute which alternates between suburban subdivisions and trails over conservation land. The trails always feel noticeably cooler, even where there are no trees casting shade. The coolest spots do tend to be where have trees and/or water nearby, but even open fields feel cooler.
- Comment on if you ever had to start consuming low fat dairy and cheese due to high cholesterol, did your ldl cholesterol levels decrease? 3 months ago:
Tbh nothing lowered it for me until they put me on a statin. Genetics are a bitch. But maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough diet-wise? I don’t know.
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 3 months ago:
Yeah that sounds awesome!
I was just trying to say that once you privatize something like a mall to make it housing or whatever it is, you will never get it back. The city or some public trust should hold onto the property. What you actually do with it depends on what would be best for the community I guess?
Being a Canadian, just having some indoor places where you can gather in to get out of the cold in the dead of winter is something I don’t think we should give up.
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 3 months ago:
As I GenX, I would prefer seeing them made into some sort of public space? We are losing a lot of that, at least where I live. Indoor space in particular.
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 4 months ago:
I know a google engineer who was saying they’re having to update their code bases to handle > 16 exabytes of storage, if you can imagine. But yeah, that’s storage, not RAM.
- Comment on What's your favourite era for video games? 6 months ago:
Aw man that’s a good list!