merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
It sounds like you’re saying “reaction” is something that happens in the head, while I’m saying “reaction” is something that happens in the body.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
Would your reaction time change? Maybe the neurons in your brain would be going at super speed, but maybe your peripheral nerves would still be slow. So, the time between hearing something and the signal getting to your brain would still take ages. Or, the light would hit your eyes, but it would be a long time before that was processed into a signal your ultra-fast brain could use.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
I once read a news article about a woman who had Eidetic memory (a.k.a. photographic memory). It made her life shitty. She was never “in the moment”, because everything triggered a memory. She could never forgive anybody for their past slights, because they were always fresh in her memory. It wasn’t the ability to recall anything you wanted whenever you wanted to. Instead it was the condition where you constantly had detailed memories flooding in when something you saw, smelled, heard, tasted, felt, etc. triggered a memory, or a dozen memories.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
I like to imagine that this is what it’s actually like for The Flash, or Quicksilver or another speedster:
Sure, you can move super fast, but to do that, your thinking also has to speed up to handle that fast movement. So, it’s more like everything else in the universe slows down except you. Now, it’s still an amazing power, but think about those times when The Flash uses his super speed to build a brick wall nearly instantly, or to read every book in the library in the blink of an eye.
To you, building that brick wall takes what feels like a week. You’re running at what feels like 30 km/h to get a handful of bricks. It feels like it takes you about 20 minutes to get to the place with the bricks. You run them back to the place you’re building the wall, you put them into the wall. Then you run another 20 minutes to get the next load of bricks. While you’re doing this boring wall building, you can’t chat with anybody, you can’t listen to a podcast, you’re just stuck doing manual labour for what feels like a week without any distractions or entertainment.
If you speed-read every book in a library, that feels like it takes a month. Hopefully you like reading dry reference books, or whatever it is you’re reading, because that’s all you get to do for however long it takes. Someone watching you might see you flipping through the pages in fractions of a second. But, to you, it still feels like it takes 2 minutes or so per page, and that’s if the material isn’t difficult to understand.
Maybe super speed needs to come with super autism so that you get really engaged in these tasks and don’t mind sinking what feels like days, weeks or months into one monotonous thing.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
You can’t actually change time, just your perception of time. Your muscles don’t move any faster. If someone is throwing a punch at you and you slow down time, you can appreciate the fist moving at your face for an hour of your slowed-down time, but you still can’t dodge the punch. If you speed up time, you still need to eat, sleep, and perform other bodily functions. So, instead of getting hungry every few hours, you get hungry in what feels like seconds. And, since you don’t have super-speed, you need to slow time back down again so you can eat.
It might still be a power worth having, but it’s not as awesome as it might seem at first.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
You can only make small changes, and it doesn’t always work. So, you don’t actually know if you have the power or if something slightly improbable happened.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
IRS audits, people kidnapping you and/or your family to get at your money, an inability to know who likes you for yourself and who just wants your money…
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
Like misspelling “undo”?
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
Flying has its own built-in side effects.
Every time you take off, there’s a pretty good chance that people nearby will notice. The government will want to study someone who has the ability to fly, so they’ll start surveiling the area. Within a short time they’ll figure out who you are, and you’ll be captured and eventually dissected.
And, that’s assuming your flight superpower comes with the ability to breathe at high altitudes, the ability to resist the cold you’d be exposed to by flying, the ability to see while flying without having your eyes dry out, etc.
- Comment on Let's play this game again 1 week ago:
Whenever you do it, the fact you’re reading someone’s mind is announced loudly in their mind and in the minds of anyone nearby.
- Comment on I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers 4 weeks ago:
Everyone around him must hate him so much, to allow him to go out in public looking like that.
- Comment on I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers 4 weeks ago:
“The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends.”
This is Zuckerberg, claiming it’s normal not just to have only 3 friends, but fewer than 3. This is telling on yourself even more than “Women’s orgasms aren’t real because no woman I’ve ever been with has had an orgasm.”
If he counts his wife in that list of “fewer than 3 friends”, how many friends does he actually have? I get that being ultra rich means that often you can’t be sure who’s actually your friend, and who’s just there for the money. But, still, he should at least be able to count a handful of friends. I’ve known my 2 best friends since before I was 5 years old. Surely if Zuck had a normal childhood, he should have people who were his friends long before he got rich, who he can be sure aren’t just there for his money. If he doesn’t, it strongly suggests he was either a pretty awful kid, or he led a really weird life growing up and was isolated from anybody who could have become a friend.
- Comment on Saint > Pope 4 weeks ago:
I still can’t get over that his policies are the result of what he watches on TV. I’m not talking about his watching the Sunday morning political shows. I’m talking fictional movies in prime time that result in new US policies.
At 9pm on Saturday WLRN aired “Escape from Alcatraz”. On Sunday another Trump policy was announced: he was re-opening Alcatraz prison.
This is at least the second time that people have figured out what Trump was watching on TV to cause him to issue a new crazy edict.
- Comment on Right-leaning Australian opposition leader loses election, and seat 4 weeks ago:
Is he going to step down, or is he going to force someone else to give up their seat?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
That’s not something that can be solved by changing interest rates. To increase wages you need unions and for those unions to go on strike.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
I don’t remember what did it for me, I switched a while ago. But, I do clearly remember one time when I had the kind of moulded earphones that go really deep in your ear, and I caught the cable on something, and they got yanked out of my ears. That was pretty painful.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
Why are you so deep in your own bubble that you don’t believe that someone could simply prefer wireless? If that’s the case, you should get out more, meet more people, expand your horizons.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
Ooh, BUUURN! BUUUUUUUUUURN!!!
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
I’ve never lost one in at least a decade of using them. But, I don’t use the kind that just balance on the edge of your ear.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
Wireless means you plug it in occasionally, maybe once a week.
If you don’t value the convenience of wireless headphones, that’s great for you. For a lot of people, the cable is a real pain in the ass. It gets tangled up when it’s off. It gets caught up on things when it’s on, etc.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
If you’re listening to podcasts or music, latency doesn’t really matter.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
Yeah, it’s a risk. But, there’s also a risk of getting your wired earbuds cord caught on something. I’ve had that happen and it yanked the phone off the table and sent it crashing to the floor. I’ve also had the buds get yanked out of my ears multiple times.
If I lived somewhere where winters were mild, I might still use wired headphones. When you only have to worry about a t-shirt or something managing the cord isn’t too bad. But, when you have to manage a hat, scarf, coat, etc. there are just too many things to get in the way of the cord.
- Comment on The Circle of iLife 1 month ago:
You know what’s easier than a cable? No cable.
I’ll give you sound quality, but the whole reason that wireless earbuds took off is the hassle of wires.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
Because it would be nice to have a card number that looked plausible that could be used in movies. Imagine if every phone number in a movie had to be (555) 555-5555. It would break your suspension of disbelief.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
Too bad the Visa and Mastercard ones are so obviously fake.
- Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 1 month ago:
You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 month ago:
It doesn’t seem to be the case, but it would be interesting if there were CC numbers that were meant to be used in movies, similar to how 555-XXXX phone numbers are never real.
- Comment on Determining the reason no one replied to your Lemmy post. 1 month ago:
It’s a different model.
Mastodon, like Twitter, is a person-centered setup. You can use hashtags, but most people don’t. You follow people not communities. As a result it’s basically microblogs, where most people are just posting into the void. Celebrities are followed more, so they get more replies, so there are more conversations. But, fundamentally it’s not really inviting interactions.
Lemmy, like Reddit, is a topic-centered setup. It has a bunch of communities and people post something because they think it might be interesting for people who are also interested in that community. Every post is basically an invitation to have a discussion about something.
I think the friction to posting something on Lemmy is slightly higher, but when you do, it’s more likely to generate comments.
- Comment on Determining the reason no one replied to your Lemmy post. 1 month ago:
Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments.
By my count, this comment will take your post from one with 12 comments to one with 13 comments, therefore I’m conferring on you the title of “good post”. Congratulations!!
However, I’m assuming that you’re including your own comments in the comment tally. If you’re not, then your 2 comments so far to this post don’t count, and you’ll only be at 11, and therefore “not good”.
If you are counting your own comments on your own post, can you juice the numbers by adding lots of comments? In other words, can you make a post good by interacting with the people who are interacting with the post? Like some kind of um… conversation? Sounds like cheating to me.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 month ago:
I’m saying it is necessary to achieve the aims of the GPL.
Until copyright no longer exists and everything is in the public domain, as I said.
How are you going to enforce the GPL in a world where copyright doesn’t exist?