merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on TRUMP 1 week ago:
Why do dumb people think it’s “all of the sudden”?
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 1 week ago:
Whereas you prefer to avoid any kind of thinking in case it makes your brain warm up slightly.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 1 week ago:
These guardsmen were ordered to deploy against America
No, they were ordered to deploy in America, and ordered to protect federal buildings and “maintain order”. There’s nothing illegal about that order, or treasonous about following it. They’ve been used that way plenty of times before. Generally when they’re deployed following a natural disaster, one of the things they’re there fore is to deter looting. The whole “natural disaster” bit seems the main thing that the National Guard does these days. Then there are other times where they’re deployed to maintain law and order: the 1992 LA riots, the 1968 riots after the assassination of MLK, etc.
There’s nothing treasonous about that. And the orders authorizing those deployments aren’t illegal orders. If you were one of the racists who wanted to attack MLK’s march from Selma to Montgomery, you might have felt that the national guard preventing you from attacking the marchers were “race traitors” or evil, but history would have shown you were wrong.
In this case, history will probably show that the guard stood around looking tough, maybe made a few arrests. Some of those arrests will historically be seen as violating the first amendment, but some will be seen as normal, boring legitimate arrests. There will probably be some protesters beaten up, but that’s almost certainly going to be the cops rather than the national guard.
Maybe, at some point, an order will come down to load live ammunition and start shooting protesters. If that happens the soldiers who follow those orders might be considered “evil”, but I imagine many won’t follow that order because they’ll see that as stepping over the line.
Also, you really need to read up on the actual definition of treason.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 1 week ago:
These are evil people arriving to do evil things.
They’re members of the national guard. The typical enlistment period for the National Guard is 8 years. Many would have joined under Biden, and are probably still required to serve out a number of years. If they don’t, then they might have to suddenly pay back the tuition benefits or something. The military, Guard included, isn’t normally something you can just quit if you don’t like how things are going.
ICE employees? That’s another matter. You had to voluntarily join ICE, and many of them have joined in just the last few months. They knew what they were getting into. They’re wearing masks to hide their identities, and all the bad incidents I’ve heard of (people being shot by rubber bullets, being thrown down and injured, etc.) have been ICE not Guard.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I think it’s both. It lowers your inhibitions and lets you do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do: dance on a table, go home with a stranger, call up an ex, etc. But, it also breaks the inhibitions on the various random thoughts people have that aren’t “hidden desires” but are just intrusive thoughts.
For example, “I didn’t want to sleep in a wheelbarrow”, sure. But, you did want to lie down. And, the wheelbarrow was right there. Once you were in the wheelbarrow, you didn’t want to sleep there all night, but you did want to relax for a bit.
So, it’s not like “I want this outcome”. It’s more like there were a lot of small steps between here and there, and a rational brain would have put a stop to things along the way, but a drunk brain doesn’t second guess a lot of those small decisions which result in one big outcome like sleeping in a wheelbarrow.
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 1 week ago:
If you understand how LLMs work, that’s not surprising.
LLMs generate a sequence of words that makes sense in that context. It’s trained on trillions(?) of words from books, Wikipedia, etc. In most of the training material, when someone asks “what’s the name of the person who did X?” there’s an answer, and that answer isn’t “I have no fucking clue”.
Now, if it were trained on a whole new corpus of data that had “I have no fucking clue” a lot more often, it would see that as a reasonable thing to print sometimes so you’d get that answer a lot more often. However, it doesn’t actually understand anything. It just generates sequences of believable words. So, it wouldn’t generate “I have no fucking clue” when it doesn’t know, it would just generate it occasionally when it seemed like it was an appropriate time. So, you’d ask “Who was the first president of the USA?” and it would sometimes say “I have no fucking clue” because that’s sometimes what the training data says a response might look like when someone asks a question of that form.
- Comment on Poor salmon 1 week ago:
A schwa is a vowel sound. It’s the sound English uses for unstressed syllables. It sits right in the middle of the IPA vowel chart, which basically means it’s the easiest sound to make. Your tongue is in a central position, and your mouth isn’t open wide or closed.
Many letters in English words tend towards being pronounced as a “schwa” when they’re not the key syllable in the word.
For example, if you say “I gave him a present” the first ‘e’ in “present” is emphasized and the second isn’t, so the second tends to be pronounced as a “schwa”. But, if you say “I had to present the documents”, it’s the second “e” that is emphasized, and the first one turns into a schwa.
It’s also why the English article “a” and “the” are both frequently pronounced the same way (as a schwa) despite using different vowels. The articles “a” and “the” are very rarely emphasized in a sentence, and words that aren’t emphasized have their pronunciation drift towards the easy-to-pronounce schwa.
It’s the first syllable in “salmon” that’s emphasized, so the second isn’t really pronounced as an “o”, (whatever that means) it’s pronounced as a schwa instead.
- Comment on Poor salmon 1 week ago:
In Kiwi English the “u” in “focus” and the “i” in “kit” both have the same vowel sound and they’re both roughly a “schwa”. That’s brave.
- Comment on Poor salmon 1 week ago:
More “samun”, (/ˈsæmən/) because the last syllable turns into a “schwa”, the default unemphasized vowel sound in English.
- Comment on Asking for a chocaholic friend 2 weeks ago:
I think you can combine the two. It’s basically places where anybody capable can easily become a grad student and have enough spending money as a grad student to buy chocolate whenever they want.
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 3 weeks ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 3 weeks ago:
That only works if people use it.
For some reason, people have stuck with Twitter. But, the users of TikTok are not the same as the users of Twitter, so who knows, maybe they won’t stick with it.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 3 weeks ago:
the media just repeats it
The media reports on it, attempting to do so from a neutral point of view.
I actually appreciate that the professional media is still attempting to stick to a neutral point of view. If they abandon that, you get media like MSNBC and Fox News where every single news story is discussed from a certain political point of view. That just sorts people into camps that listen to the news source that agrees with their perceived notions, which then radicalizes them even more.
If people can’t agree on a basic set of facts, then there’s no point to having a democracy. A media that covers the facts with as little bias as possible is essential to that working.
That isn’t to say that I think the media is doing a great job. The big media companies that are owned by the oligarchs are doing especially badly. When Trump does something like this, responsible media that’s attempting to be unbiased should at least connect historical dots, like other times that presidents have threatened the media, and what the results of that have been.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 3 weeks ago:
So, Trump effectively nationalized TikTok, valued at $300b. He sells it to friendly oligarchs for $15b. So far, this is basically the post-USSR playbook, and how Roman Abravmovich, Alisher Usmanov, Vladimir Lisin, etc. got so rich.
But it might piss off his oligarch buddies if he drives all the users off TikTok making what seemed like a steal into something worthless instead.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 3 weeks ago:
Teen Vogue is killing it right now. For example How ICE Raids Are Making It Easier for Civilian Men to Assault Immigrant Women
- Comment on save the planet 🌎 3 weeks ago:
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
live air traffic showing the thousands of planes currently in the air over the US
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 3 weeks ago:
90% of the time I’m using garlic I mince it. The other 10% it’s thinly sliced or just crushed.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 3 weeks ago:
I’d be interested to see what that is. It seems like it would be hard to make that work because securely gripping the thing you’re chopping is an important part of using a mandoline.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’ve used a mandoline to do it before. Frankly, that’s really the only way I’d do it these days. But, even then, it’s a lot of work and it’s hard on the eyeballs. Plus, mandolines are scary. I know what not to do when using one, but it’s like a fear of heights. Even if you know you’re doing it safely, it’s still nerve wracking. Maybe if I had a chain-mail glove I could do it without fear, but I don’t have one.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 3 weeks ago:
they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.
I don’t think the distinction between “taste” and “flavour” is the right way to frame it. Raw onion on its own can be overwhelming. If you eat a hamburger with raw onion on it, the amount of raw onion per bite will be pretty small, and it will be one taste in a whole bunch of other tastes. Your kids probably wouldn’t like eating pure salt, or pure pepper either. But, food with some salt tastes great.
Having said that, fried onions are a whole different game. After 5 minutes the onion loses a lot of its potency and gets a bit sweet. After 30 minutes it’s basically a very slightly pungent candy. For a French Onion Soup, you can cook them for up to 2 hours before they’re ready. A pot that’s full to the brim of raw onions reduces down to a thin layer at the bottom, and they taste more like gummy worms than onions at that point.
Onions raw to fully cooked for a french onion soup.
I love French Onion Soup, and occasionally make it. I’d make it more, it’s just that slicing up more than a kilogram of onions is a whole process. It’s so difficult it makes me cry every time I do it.
- Comment on Cooking 😋 3 weeks ago:
There’s a common joke about that. It goes something like: “A [Ukrainian] starts frying onion and garlic in a pan and only then starts thinking about what they want to make.”
[Ukrainian] can be substituted for most other countries, to be honest.
But, to be real, garlic shouldn’t be fried for that long IMO, so I’d only put in the garlic about 30s before I was ready to start adding all the other ingredients. But, with the onions, I’ve actually started onions more than 30 minutes before figuring out what else I wanted to make. That way they have a chance to get good and caramelized. That doesn’t work for every recipe, but it works for a lot of them.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 3 weeks ago:
I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
- Comment on This is art 3 weeks ago:
It’s great when art is so bad that it’s hard to tell if the artist is trolling or just terrible.
- Comment on This is art 3 weeks ago:
I love that story so much. Normally artists who work in bronze know what they’re doing. It’s much less forgiving than say clay. So, you’d think just by the fact it’s a bronze statue it’s going to be pretty good. Then, throw in that the model for the art is incredibly good looking. This isn’t a case where an artist has to decide whether to portray an ugly person accurately, or to make them better looking. Ronaldo already looks like a statue come to life. And yet…
- Comment on Steady 3 weeks ago:
Yes, if the heart rate were 60, that would be a lot more suspicious. Even if the procedure hasn’t started yet, I’d expect the subject to be fucking scared. I don’t know if the O2 saturation makes sense for what’s happening, but it might. If your entire body is being taken over by a symbiote, any readings might be possible.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 3 weeks ago:
Whichever version you use, it doesn’t really make sense. The para part, sure. But “cetamol”? I guess you can can smush two of the words together and go from “para-acet” to “paracet”. But, the “amol” ending? It seems to be borrowing the “am” from amino, and the “ol” from the end. But, that’s a weird set of letters to borrow, and weird to not borrow the full “amin” from amino and not borrow the full “enol” from phenol.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 3 weeks ago:
Both are slightly less clunky words created from the corpse of “N-acetyl-para-aminophenol”
“Acetaminophen” takes the “acet” from “acetyl” and “aminophen” from “aminophenol”.
“Paracetamol” takes the “para” part, and then a few other random letters that don’t really make sence. “cet” from “acetyl”, and maybe “am” from the start of “amphenol” with the “ol” ending from the same word, ignoring that it ends in “nol”?
- Comment on proof of wormholes 3 weeks ago:
I knew someone who lived in Switzerland. Switzerland isn’t part of the EU, Sweden is. That meant that a lot of online shopping sites for EU residents would ship to Sweden but not Switzerland. So, he would ship to his address, but in Sweden. The nice folks in Sweden would say “gosh, another person once again confused Sweden and Switzerland” and forward the shipment to Switzerland, and he’d get his stuff.
- Comment on proof of wormholes 3 weeks ago:
Meanwhile pregnant women might avoid the safest pain reliever available
More importantly, the safest fever-reducer available. Fevers are actually known to be damaging to fetuses, unlike acetaminophen.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 3 weeks ago:
Back then, an internet (lower case “i”) was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
That’s what I was told too, but I never once encountered anybody who used the small-i “internet” term. I heard “network”, or “intranet” or often topology-related things like “the token-ring network”. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect that small-i “internet” was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.
