ameancow
@ameancow@lemmy.world
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Also, any effects we may have on arthropod selective evolution by randomly killing visible spiders is going to be vastly overshadowed by the very rapid and immediate changes we’re making to the environment broadly.
We would need somewhere between centuries or millennia of very predictable and consistent behavior killing visible spiders before we saw any change to their overall behavior, meanwhile we’ve all but destroyed the ecosystem at their scale anyway, which is going to have vastly more dramatic impact on populations and evolution, assuming they survive at all. When was the last time any of you remember getting your windows covered with bugs after a summer drive?
- Comment on Mama! 1 day ago:
You’re also made of 30-trillion little microscopic machines with vastly more complexity each than even the most fantastic clockwork we’ve ever devised, that are each working in harmony with each other, creating a vast machine that is continually breaking itself apart and rebuilding itself from parts of its environment as it moves through time and space.
And somehow you can breath either manually or automatically without breaking a stride.
- Comment on Mama! 1 day ago:
“Where is the Galaxy taking us?”
Towards the andromeda galaxy which is over twice the size of the Milky Way. We are hurtling towards each other at about a quarter millions miles per hour.
For thousands of years after you die, that little fuzzy spot near Cassiopeia will slowly get larger and larger in the sky, and in about a four billion years, long after the Earth’s oceans have dried up and the sun is a giant, reddish monster hovering in the sky, and our magnetic field will have long since died out, our atmosphere will have been mostly stripped away and the weather will feel like being on the highest mountains in an oven, the night sky will be covered with a dazzling display of the Andromeda galaxy overhead, spiral arms visible with the naked eye stretching from horizon to horizon.
We will merge, in a series of passes through each other, with almost no stars actually colliding most likely, although a good number will be ejected into the emptiness of intergalactic space, and will finally settle into a new shape, and may trigger a new phase of star formation as new clouds of gas and dust collide and collapse in the new super-galaxy.
- Comment on Ice fishing today for what will probably be the last time this century 1 day ago:
climate change is a reality
In fact, this is why we changed the term from “global warming” to “climate change” because over long periods of time, the globe will warm up more and more, but as the climate changes we will see extremes in both heat and cold and precipitation and other weather events as time goes. We’re likely going to see ice-fishing in places that never had snow before and winter wildflower blooms in northern countries.
- Comment on On Venus. 3 days ago:
This whole post seems like bait for drawing out nationalists.
It utterly ignores the vast, vast spectrum of space exploration and discoveries that many other nations have contributed, as well as the US’s ongoing progress towards a permanent space presence after the USSR collapsed. And all it, from the advancements of Russia in the 60’s and 70’s up through today to India and China and ESA exploring our solar system as the US collapses er, scales back from the frontier of science and exploration. It’s all worth celebrating and being glad happened in our lives so we get to see amazing sights and learn amazing things about our local space neighborhood.
If you take pride in shit you didn’t personally do and feel others are inferior for not achieving your own measure of success, you’re setting yourself up for being a mindless chud and girls will never touch your weewee.
- Comment on Why does everyone here think they're autistic or ADHD? The memes all describe normal human foibles. 6 days ago:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of forward time-travel, it’s that the future is consistent about only one thing: that there’s more of everything.
Our future is going to have great hardships and weird politics and disasters and suffering, but it will also have more wonders, miracles and everyday concepts that would seem utterly alien to us presently. People in many places will die of easily preventable diseases because of income inequality, that’s a norm. But those easily-preventable or treatable diseases will be things like cancer or heart disease.
You will have a an ocean of cheaply made “AAA” game titles being pushed out by the EA/Trump/Saudi conglomerate, sure. But you will also have totally new experiences being experimented with as AI matures and creates new ways to generate worlds on the fly, things like video cards will slowly start becoming obsolete as new ways of creating virtual environments are experimented with.
It’s going to get harder and harder to keep up with changes too. Trust me on this, there’s no avoiding it. Just find a niche in life you enjoy and ride it out.
- Comment on Why does everyone here think they're autistic or ADHD? The memes all describe normal human foibles. 6 days ago:
People have stopped socializing, at least not in a real, meaningful way. Discord groups of other shut-ins feeding off each other’s insecurity doesn’t count.
The lack of socialization means a lack of social validation so to feel any value at all, we all have to figure out how to carve out new identities in a much more lonely and dark world. Self-diagnosis of conditions and syndromes can give you insulation from criticism and give you a sense of community and belonging, so less effort is placed on managing or treating the condition and more effort is placed on affirming and defending your condition.
I’m not saying the conditions aren’t real, they exist on a large spectrum that almost everyone falls on to some degree, but what’s changed is the view of the conditions or syndromes as an obstacle to life that needs to be managed or beat. Instead it’s a badge of identity that people work to justify and preserve, often without realizing it.
I’ve been in and out of the mental health system for years, I’ve done it to beat depression and anxiety and have made great strides by accepting the hard truths of the things I need to do to make it easier to live with problems outside my control. But these are tools I embraced because I wanted to go outside, meet people, be more social and have more opportunities.
Not a lot of young people want any of that, they’ve been disillusioned by the promise of the future because the internet just feeds them the bleakest picture of the world that it can, and people don’t generally seek out balancing perspectives on their own, and even resist any attempt to tell them that there’s a lot of important reasons you might want to stretch your mental and social muscles.
Nearly everyone I talk to under the age of 25 or so says they can’t imagine living past 40, with many saying that they actively have plans to not live past 40, which blows my goddamn mind.
Every single one of you whiny, nihilistic shits out there is going to hit age 40 and say “Oh fuck, what have I done with my life?”
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Between the censoring of “fuck” the usage of “anw” and the font changing inexplicably for the word “calculus” the meme’s potential at humor was basically thrown in the garbage. If formatting and spelling makes you stumble that much you lose comedic timing.
- Comment on Yes I know it doesn't work like that 2 weeks ago:
Okay, but what exactly are we trying to get to? Ya’ll think there’s frosting and gummy bears down there? Ancient pirate treasure?
There’s no sharp cutoff point, at a certain point the crushing hot rock that flows like bread dough starts to flow more like syrup, then just down for thousands more miles of more heat and more pressure.
- Comment on awooga hubba hubba 2 weeks ago:
e216
Because of this comment, I learned that e216.com is for sale for around 3k USD. Holy carp, when did obscure, meaningless domain names get so expensive.
- Comment on Gotta Catch 'Em All 3 weeks ago:
This gives me the vibe of a meme someone would share on their midwest neighborhood’s Facebook group to “prove” that Medical academia is a scam, right next to a list of “chemicals” they put in your shampoo or pet food or something.
It’s a funny little snippet but doesn’t “mean” anything. Words are silly and names for things can be hard to invent.
- Comment on Gotta Catch 'Em All 3 weeks ago:
Basically American medical academia in the next 10 years.
- Comment on Sea Level 3 weeks ago:
The Moon is so far from the surface of Earth you can comfortably fit every single planet in the solar system between Earth and the Moon.
This would lead to a cataclysm and people would generally disapprove of you doing this, but the point is there’s space in space.
- Comment on How do you "feel" gender? 3 weeks ago:
As a cishet man, I don’t. I recognize it, I know my social expectations, I know what the unwritten “rules” are and I am just “comfortable” with it. In that it doesn’t bother me enough that I want to change anything.
That doesn’t mean I “feel like a man.” I don’t know if there’s such a feeling. It’s words we use to describe having comfort with your life and situation, and I bet there are very few men or women or anyone else who feel that sensation all the time. Even though I feel comfortable being a man, there are so, so many things I don’t understand, but cannot change.
I would say the way I feel my gender the most is physically and sexually. Without delving too deep into the horny-pool, all I can say is I feel like a man in sexuality. I feel very “male” urges tickling the back of my mind which are very pleasant to indulge in the right circumstances. I have attractions and desires that line up with being heterosexual male and that’s probably the only place where I enjoy maleness.
Everything else? It just feels like wallpaper, and I don’t care. I wear a beard because I know there are people who like beards and have decided I look better displaying facial hair, but I don’t stroke it and say “damn, that’s nice man-hair.” I would feel better smooth shaved but it makes me look like gumby.
I am the first downstairs with a gun when someone hears glass breaking, not because I like being first in line for danger, but because I know I am larger and well-trained and can probably survive an injury better than smaller humans around me that I care about.
I am the one who does the “guy things” because I am the guy. When I (rarely) get support or reward for specifically male things, it feels good but I don’t connect it with my gender. I don’t even know what that means. I feel more like I happen to be in this body in this culture and need to do the best I can with it, and feel no strong urge to change that dynamic. No glaring discomfort, but also no real sense of “identity” about my gender.
Honestly, maybe it’s because I keep the company of people with a few more brain-cells than the stereotypes you see in media, but my male friends are usually the same. We don’t “talk like guys” together, if anyone tried that they would get stared at. Most of our conversations are about healthcare and problems with our homes or backs or family members, real-world, material issues with life more than our gender roles. Most men I know are just “people inhabiting male bodies and roles” and I don’t think that’s rare, I think it’s largely what most people feel.
There are things I recognize that are deeply painful about my gender role, as well as things that give me benefits. If I let myself feel anything at all, it would be a level of despair that no matter what else happens, there is an expectation on me that I will have to work, solve problems and do the hard things in my family/social circle that people who do not identify or “feel” like men don’t have to do. I don’t get that part on a broad, social level.
- Comment on does this count as a science meme? :3 3 weeks ago:
I had a slew of therapists in my adult life, some were amazing, some were… less so.
My last therapist had me down for 30 minutes a month, and spent the majority of every session telling me what his unique, special “approach” to therapy was, his tenants and his approaches, and then how he covers it in detail in his upcoming book and new Youtube channel.
My parents and life growing up was more than a disaster, it was a cult-like situation, but it’s very hard to find anyone who wants to talk about it or address it, I assume because it’s complicated and difficult to find an entry for in the DSM5.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 4 weeks ago:
I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.
I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.
I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 4 weeks ago:
That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 4 weeks ago:
I really really really want to like this game
Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.
Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.
Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 4 weeks ago:
I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game
Are you me?
I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.
I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 4 weeks ago:
The beach is a nesting ground of vast biomes of creatures, singled-celled, through to vast arrays of worms, some parasitic, all the way up to burrowing arthropods like sand fleas and their many, many cousins. We don’t usually have problems with any of this stuff when we swim or hang out on the sand because… and I cannot stress this enough, we do not eat things we find in the sand.
Please do not eat things you find in the sand.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 4 weeks ago:
Laughs softly in the spreading American corporate virus
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 4 weeks ago:
No but they will have an entirely squirrel themed Magic deck.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 4 weeks ago:
Compare this percentage with how many are MAGA and you start to see a distinct pattern.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 4 weeks ago:
People are far more scared of inconvenience than death.
Most people would rather put their pet down than have to care for them in some new way that requires money and attention, and this is what people who don’t understand autism think it is, like they will have to strap their dogs into a special chair and spoon-feed them.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 4 weeks ago:
No, and I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.
I had a brief, fanciful idea a few years back that if everyone starts using AI that it would help increase personal education and knowledge throughout the world.
That worked out as good as the feeling I had back in the mid 90’s where I said “Wow, if everyone has access to all this information, the future generations of this world are going to be fantastically intelligence, we will have starships by the time I’m old!”
We might need to accept and start compensating for the hard fact that we are just complex apes and have fundamental limitations as populations. It might not get better. We might make more new things and we might create new ways of living, but we’re always going to be spiraling around our own limited cognition and our survival instincts that make us forget to think.
- Comment on Let's stick with just the one observer from now on, then 4 weeks ago:
Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.
Yes and no.
The essence of what you’re saying is correct, but there’s still a “black box” area that we can’t measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what’s happening before waveform collapse.
This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it’s not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don’t have.
Example: let’s say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite.
Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.
- Comment on Let's stick with just the one observer from now on, then 4 weeks ago:
Since like, everyone gets all their understanding of the world from goddamn memes now, I think it’s worth pushing back on or clarifying.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
I’m not policing shit, but it paints an impression that you might not be aware of if you care about people’s impressions.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
I can’t imagine using the word “normie” unironically in 2025.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 4 weeks ago:
A lot of people get called “idiots” but that doesn’t mean I can’t actually differentiate who’s really an idiot.
(There is a subtle subtext in this reply, see if you can catch it.)