AFKBRBChocolate
@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world
Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023
- Comment on What happens if I eat a box of paper clips before an MRI? 2 days ago:
They wouldn’t do the MRI because they’d be ripped through your body
- Comment on Is there a less stinky way to cook broccoli? 5 days ago:
Honestly, broccoli is wonderful microwaved. Put it in a covered dish with just a little water. For a couple servings, I do on high like 2.5 minutes. Easy to adjust the time to get it just the way you want it. You can’t get it crispy that way, but it’s basically like perfectly steamed.
- Comment on Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month). 1 week ago:
Thanks! Even though we’re ten years apart, I think we’re together on the tail end of the Lemmy age bell curve. It’s nice to have company.
- Comment on Can I still consider myself a “young woman” after I turn 24? I turn 24 in March (next month). 1 week ago:
It’s all relative. I’m 62 - from my perspective you’ve only recently gone from being a girl to being a woman, so for sure a young woman. Of course in ten years I’ll be 72 and you’ll be 34, and I’d still call you a young woman.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 1 week ago:
I remember our first personal computer had 40 columns on the screen, but we ended up getting an 80 column graphics card for it.
I taught myself basic, but the first language I took in college was fortran, and it was on cards. A bit of an aberration: they had moved on to somewhat more modern equipment, but the lab was being upgraded, so they reverted you the card system for a semester temporarily. It was out of date, but not wildly so at the time.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 1 week ago:
Well, it might or not be a line of code - depends a lot on the language. It’s 80 bytes, and a byte is one character. You could have continuation cards if your line was more than 80. That wasn’t ever needed for assembly language, rarely for Fortran, but very common for COBOL.
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 2 weeks ago:
Seems about right. One card had 80 columns, a byte for each one, so 5,000,000 bytes divided by 80 would be 62,500 cards.
- Comment on Giving the neighbors a laugh 2 weeks ago:
According to translate, the side of the van says “Home delivery service, we always come.”
Does that pun actually work in both English and German?
- Comment on eggs in japan 3 weeks ago:
The protective barrier is true, but you’re either making assumptions about the rest or you’ve been misinformed. There really aren’t major issues in any of the developed countries today, but the washing and refrigeration is still the safest with the longest shelf life. It isn’t the condition the chickens are kept in - there are countries where it’s much, much worse than in the US - it’s just that chickens very easily carry salmonella.
Many years ago, more countries washed, but there were some escapes, especially one from Australia with the eggs exported to the UK, and it got a bad name, so some countries dropped it, but the US figured out how to make it work consistently. Most countries require chickens to be vaccinated, but the US hasn’t needed to because of the washing and refrigeration.
Lots of good info online. Here’s a USDA article on it, and here’s a higher level NPR piece.
- Comment on eggs in japan 3 weeks ago:
It’s just two different strategies for avoiding salmonella. The US method has worked very well for a very long time. So much so that other countries did adopt it, at least for a time, but it requires an infrastructure that can keep the eggs refrigerated through from processing to consumer, which isn’t trivial.
- Comment on xkcd #3033: Origami Black Hole 1 month ago:
Huh, I’ve always thought that a black hole required a lot of mass, not just a lot of density. Apparently not true?
- Comment on When they tell you "oh of course it's safe" they are lying 1 month ago:
I understand why it looks that way from good reaction, but there was nothing my dad wouldn’t have done for my mom. I’ve never seen two people who loved each other more completely, trusted each other more thoroughly, or gave a bigger priority to each other’s happiness. But apparently they had an awful lot of sex.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month 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 2 months 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? 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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. 4 months ago:
I wonder if that’s related to a user base that skews heavily toward techies.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 4 months ago:
I did, thanks.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 4 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. 4 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. 4 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. 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 months ago:
You must get nothing but memes, Linux, and porn.
- Comment on Magic Mineral 4 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. 5 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.