AFKBRBChocolate
@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world
Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 3 hours ago:
Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it’s only recently that they’ve been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn’t there to pull it off.
Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They’re reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that’s mostly because it’s pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 3 hours ago:
I’d say that’s more of the excuse/rationale for it. The underlying reason is hot much not expensive it would have been to do otherwise.
- Comment on When they tell you "oh of course it's safe" they are lying 5 hours ago:
Sharing an overly personal story because I think it’s funny.
When my first marriage was swirling the drain, and my wife and I hadn’t had sex for a number of months, I was visiting my parents, who were in their late 60s at the time. I noticed that my mom kept getting up to go to the bathroom, so I asked my dad if she was okay and he said she had a yeast infection that was bothering her and they didn’t know what to do about it. I told him that those were generally pretty easy, she can get a cream that will take care of it in about a week. Not much else to it other than avoid sex for a couple weeks.
My dad looked incredulous. He said “A couple WEEKS? Like two full weeks? No sex at all for TWO WEEKS? If we don’t do that, will it go away on its own?” My dad, pushing 70, was having a hard time coming to grips with the thought of going two weeks without sex, while I was in my 20s and hadn’t had sex for four or five months.
I remember driving home and thinking, “Well there’s something I didn’t need to think about.”
- Comment on Trump surgeon general pick involved in gun accident that killed her father at age 13 3 weeks ago:
That would be pretty hard for a thirteen-year-old to move forward from. I know I would have blamed myself at that age for killing my dad, even though it’s crazy that a loaded gun was in a shelf in reach of a kid, apparently without even the safety being on.
Her predecessor was big on reducing gun deaths. I wonder what Nesheiwat’s views are, given that incident.
- Comment on If Orange Dickhead dies before taking his oath again will sucession still be applicable? Like Vance the new pres and Johnson the new VP? 1 month ago:
That’s only after the electoral college votes.
- Comment on Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google's Gemini for help with his homework 1 month ago:
Isn’t this one of the LLMs that was partially trained on Reddit data? LLMs are inherently a model of a conversation or question/response based on their training data. That response looks very much like what I saw regularly on Reddit when I was there. This seems unsurprising.
- Comment on Sleepy Bees 1 month ago:
For those wondering, this appears to be true. Most sites that say it all reference the same person, whose study doesn’t seem very scientific, but I found this much more controlled study that did indeed replicate the conclusions.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
I wonder if that’s related to a user base that skews heavily toward techies.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
I did, thanks.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
Completely agree. I personally I’m fine with the trade-off I made. There’s even some benefits to a smaller site. I remember on Reddit there were lots of times I didn’t make a comment, even when I had something to say, because there were already literally thousands of comments, some with thousands of upvotes, and I figured anything I said would be lost in the din. Here, if you’ve got something to say, it’s very likely to be seen.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
For sure, though that really doesn’t solve the problem. If I’m really into sports-themed shot glasses, making a post in a community for drinking ware, or for sports merchandise, isn’t going to mean I get more content about sports shot glasses, and it doesn’t increase the number of people on the site who have something to say about them. On a platform with millions of users, there might be enough other people with the same interest to generate a critical mass of content.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
Right, exactly. And let’s not forget that a healthy percentage of all online communities is made of lurkers who don’t really want to post at all, but they enjoy reading stuff they’re interested in.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 months ago:
This is kind of bullshit. On a big platform, like Reddit, where there are orders of magnitude more users, the likelihood is that there are a good number of people interested in whatever niche topic you want. That’s a draw for a lot of people. I left Reddit for Lemmy for good, but we’re just not up to that kind of user base.
And it’s not zero effort to get a community going and keep it active, especially with a small user base. It’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want a place that discusses their niche interest without wanting to be responsible for running that place. It doesn’t make them bad or lazy.
- Comment on How to improve your Lemmy experience 2 months ago:
I agree, I’d like to be able to block a community from the main page as well. I have no issues with things like gay porn, but it would be nice to be able to block it from my feed without having to open the community.
- Comment on How to improve your Lemmy experience 2 months ago:
I have no issues with any of them. I don’t think I’d be a frequent Lemmy user if that’s all there was though.
- Comment on How to improve your Lemmy experience 2 months ago:
You must get nothing but memes, Linux, and porn.
- Comment on Magic Mineral 2 months ago:
My dad was a contractor and he had a big sheet of it in the garage that was leftover from some job. It looked kind of like a sheet of drywall, but was grey and rougher. I used to take it into the back yard with a little blow torch and and lay on it while I melted metal things. I was probably ten to twelve at the time.
It was a different time.
- Comment on I always get them confused. 2 months ago:
The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.
Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.
- Comment on I always get them confused. 3 months ago:
Oh, it’s fantasy
- Comment on I always get them confused. 3 months ago:
I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.
- Comment on Burning Up 3 months ago:
The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.
But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.
- Comment on Ladies and Gentlemen, the sate of AI. 3 months ago:
Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.
It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.
- Comment on Ladies and Gentlemen, the sate of AI. 3 months ago:
LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.
- Comment on Why do boomers hate squirrels so much? 3 months ago:
That’s the same thing racists say when they get to know a minority.
The way people talk about boomers here is pretty awful, and it wouldn’t be tolerated for any other group.
- Comment on Why do boomers hate squirrels so much? 3 months ago:
We don’t? Boomer with bird feeder who loves squirrels.
I don’t think it’s age related.
- Comment on Toot toot 4 months ago:
Agreed, and it’s sad. I mean, I work at a highly technical engineering company. Everyone has at least a BS, and this guy was probably in his 60s with 30+ years of experience. Yet here he was repeatedly farting by a woman because they had a disagreement. It shows you that age and education don’t guarantee maturity.
- Comment on Toot toot 4 months ago:
She wasn’t interested in suing, she just wanted him to stop farting in her doorway. I didn’t know the guy, so I started by talking to his manager, who talked to the guy. Sounds like he initially tried to deny it, but in a way that made it clear he was doing it on purpose. His boss was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be tolerated and it never happened again.
Some people are so weird and petty.
- Comment on Toot toot 4 months ago:
I had a female employee come to me to complain years ago. She had had a disagreement with an older male employee (thankfully not mine) some weeks prior, and since then, every time he walked by her cube, he’d pause at her doorway, fart, and then keep walking without saying anything.
She at least was aware of how absolutely ridiculous it was, but legitimately didn’t think it was something she should have to deal with. One of the stranger management issues.
- Comment on How do I get in touch with the creator of lemmyworld or the one who was the first to create the fediverse? 4 months ago:
Yeah, seems like a bad idea all the way around. Not sure Reddit would want it either.
- Comment on How do I get in touch with the creator of lemmyworld or the one who was the first to create the fediverse? 4 months ago:
That’s a really strange “or.” .world has only existed for about a year, since the big reddit exodus, and it’s just an instance, running Lemmy software on a server. The Lemmy software was first released five years ago, but that wasn’t the beginning of the fediverse. Like all fediverse apps, Lemmy makes use of the Activity Pub protocol, which came out like a year earlier.