ameancow
@ameancow@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why did Thanos, with the power of all the infinity stones, never think to try doubling the amount of resources in the world? 2 hours ago:
Much like how they dumbed-down the original story for The Matrix, they decided that a romance with Death wouldn’t sell as many action figures I suppose. Gotta keep dem stories 2-dimensional.
- Comment on Oh no my harvest is too bountiful 4 hours ago:
Like furries but they got a thing for reptiles instead of mammals.
- Comment on Oh no my harvest is too bountiful 1 day ago:
Furry boobs of course.
- Comment on Oh no my harvest is too bountiful 2 days ago:
As with many things, you can love the content they produce while hating the fandom and all the people in it.
- Comment on Oh no my harvest is too bountiful 2 days ago:
Well then you just trade furries for scalies and bronies.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 2 days ago:
I am not an expert per-say on AI, but I have survived economic collapses. Kinda.
Here’s what you can expect.
It will happen a lot faster and more sudden than you expect. It will be a few days of “uncertainty” and you will see reports on the market and spending and fear through investors, and then BAM everything goes deep red for a few days and then you suddenly get sent home from work.
Your job, no matter how skilled or stable or unrelated to finance or the stock market you may think it is- is NOT safe. In fact, service industry jobs are often the first to go, because when the market tanks and investors start pulling out money, one of the first, strongest effects we feel is that people with money immediately stop spending. If you install windows and doors, if you cut grass, if you clean or cook, expect people will suddenly start doing that themselves more and more. You may get laid off suddenly depending on how much reserve your company has.
There will be an immediate and overwhelming strain on state and city services. Unemployment offices, food banks, employment centers, and expect the media to create a LOT of hype around it to a destructive degree, there will be the same kinds of supermarket raiding like we saw with covid for no real good reason other than people feeling afraid.
What you should do now to prepare:
Have backup income plans. Even if modest, have some hustles ready to deploy. Get certified or see what you need to get certified ahead of time to do Uber and/or Lyft, people are going to be using ride sharing more because they won’t be able to afford to drive or make car payments. Think about other services people are going to need if they don’t have jobs - handyman work on the cheap, dog and pet care, unlicensed work you know you can do safely, etc. If you or your family can do art and crafts, set up an etsy market now before you’re strained, open it up to international customers.
SAVE MONEY, have cash savings as well as bank savings, have gold too if you can swing it. Expect any accounts that are tied to investments to be frozen or even wiped out, such as 401k’s and the like.
Whatever you can do to reduce debts and spending - pay down or pay off credit cards or cars if you can. Get your finances in order as much as you can, so figure out exactly what you’re spending and what your margins are.
Stockpile canned goods and basic survival supplies ahead of time like it’s the goddamn apocalypse. Seriously, have at least a month of dry goods and preserved food, you have some time (maybe) so start collecting canned food, sacks of dried beans and rice, toilet paper and soap, other supplies you buy regularly. This will give you a safety net if it gets bad, it’s one less [major] thing to worry about as you shift around your expenses and priorities.
Get information ahead of time about where your local DES/unemployment offices are, and what’s required to apply. Find out ALL the programs you can apply for, from, nutrition assistance to grants to stipends or tax credits for whatever your family situation is. You won’t get through on the website, it will be crashed with traffic, so be ready to go stand in line with your paperwork. You will get some number of months of benefits if you qualify (requirements vary by state) and most likely after some political contention, congress will pass emergency funding for extensions and stimulus checks. But it won’t last forever.
Go visit your nearest food bank now. Bring them some food and socks, get to know who runs things so that when it’s your time to stand in line, they know you already and have good associations.
We don’t really know how bad it could get. So get a gun. There may be civil unrest at some point. Our world is about two missed meals away from anarchy, or at the very least crime will increase and homes will get broken into, and police will likely be understaffed and overworked. You will be on your own.
- Comment on I'm too stupid for this 3 days ago:
I’m pretty sure everyone clapped.
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 4 days ago:
From experience: all stages of a coconut are distinct, edible and used for different dishes, treats, condiments and ingredients.
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 4 days ago:
I got to travel Southeast Asia for a time, it’s atrocious how much we’re missing out on in the USA.
Even the really fresh coconuts here just don’t compare to the ones you get fresh off a tree. It’s unreal.
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 4 days ago:
Conservatives hate this one trick!
(The trick: literally everything in all aspects of reality, from the larges to smallest scales to every branch of life and consciousness is a motherfucking SPECTRUM. No hard lines. Nothing is solid. Not even the matter you’re standing or sitting on.)
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 4 days ago:
Go get those weird looking white ones from an Asian grocery store, they look like styrofoam cylinders with carved pointed tops. Use a butcher’s knife to chop the point off. Insert straw and long spoon to carve the natural jell-o out with. Thank me later.
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
You should look up Penrose’s work in conformal cyclic cosmology.
The short version is this: as the rarified universe becomes massless particles flying in all directions as space expands, it is basically the exact same conditions as the big bang. IE, when the universe fizzles out, from a different reference frame it’s still an infinite field of energy expanding out faster and faster.
Just cross out the “distance” part of interactions between particles, without humans or anything with mass really to observe or interact with anything, the relationships between photons are all that matters, and from that perspective it will be the same as the big-bang state. All that’s important to look at is the relationships between these particles, the angles between them and probability of them interacting with each other.
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
Fuck that, I will mess with shit.
“I want all humans to be able to change sex, race or species at will.”
“Give every human being the ability to experience what someone else has experienced by pressing a small button on the top of our heads.”
“Make volcanoes erupt food. Just endless, nutritious food for everyone.”
“Babies are hatched from eggs. I dunno man, seems like it would be silly.”
“No more mosquitoes. Replace them with tiny little airplanes that sometimes circle around you and you have to swat them down like king kong.”
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
Ideally our species survives and manages to send ships away from Earth well before that or you’re going to get a really warm summer eventually, followed by sitting on a charred ball of barren, airless rock for the majority of those trillion years.
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
If you get the chance, ask for omnipotence or to become conscious energy systems or something. You can still choose to experience being a human and having all these experiences, but you will never be stuck, you will never get bored or feel anything related to being mortal if you don’t want.
You could even choose to live a whole lifetime. Maybe billions of lifetimes, each one feeling totally and completely indistinguishable from reality, because it would be reality.
You could be experiencing that right now.
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
No, really, this is a fantastic question we should all ask more.
Because on the outside, in terms of space and the physical universe, it will undergo phase transitions, it will experience a long, slow cooling into rarified energy… but those terms “long” and “rarified” are just from our human reference frame. Roger Penrose’s work demonstrated how even a vast, infinite expanding space with tiny particles zooming through it, from other reference frames behaves exactly like the big bang. IE: as the universe cools and expands, it’s still infinitely dense and exploding outward from a different perspective of time and space. It’s perpetual.
That’s one thing. The other thing is this… time passing is meaningless if nobody is there to observe it. You will be dead for an infinite amount of time, you won’t notice a moment of it. But every passing moment you’re dead, the universe is rolling dice. It’s always rolling dice.
Eventually, even if it takes so incredibly long that we don’t have numbers to express it (we actually do) then something is bound to happen again. Eventually these “somethings” will be just right to create a kind of universe, complex information systems, and maybe even a consciousness that can experience it.
It sounds kind of fantastic and overly fanciful, but I am basing this on the evidence that it happened at least once before that we know of.
- Comment on one bright second 5 days ago:
Seriously, even halfway through my expected lifespan and I’m already seeing a point where I’ll be ready to get off the ride. Not in terms of self-harm or depression, but just generally as the decades go on it gets less and less enjoyable in a broad sense.
Our brains absorb too much information and memories than our minds were meant to handle. Our emotions become an annoying liability. Our memories reveal themselves to be these tenuous and bizarre amalgamations of experiences and imagination and cannot be trusted, and maybe most annoying of all is seeing people making the same mistakes around you all the time, and tuning you out for being “old” more and more, determined to fall into the same holes and traps that could be easily avoided, but dragging all of society with them over and over. It takes away a lot of the magic of seeing the future.
Even all that would be something manageable, if I had a loooong life I would probably escape from everyone and just read in the woods or something. But holy shit it has to be alongside physical health because by far the worst, worst, worst thing about getting old is the aches and pains and minor irritations that turn into crippling infections, unhealed strains, and degrading senses.
- Comment on Physics! 5 days ago:
On this note, one of the best Cosmic Horror shows of all time was Chernobyl on HBO.
A story of a small town affected by forces outside anyone’s understanding. Terrible, primal, cosmic power unleashed and uncontained threatening the entire world. It kills indiscriminately in the most horrible ways, melting people alive and contaminating all it touches after escaping a high-security confinement.
A plucky team of brave souls work tirelessly to find some way to stop the monster from burrowing into the Earth and gaining even more power.
And what’s most amazing is no part of it is exaggerated or sensationalized, it’s so accurate to reality that even the actors look like their real-life counterparts. The showrunners went on to work on The Last of Us.
- Comment on THE CRAZY PILLS 1 week ago:
I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.
Our problem we’re butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what’s a trick and what’s a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they’re a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)
But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That’s not a bad run, it’s proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.
I don’t think we’re going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we’re doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.
- Comment on THE CRAZY PILLS 1 week ago:
look where it got us
I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It’s proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don’t exactly have a lot of alternatives. We’re fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.
But we can easily play this “would we have been better off” game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)
The reality is though that we’re here now and we’re better off as a society than we’ve ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it’s in the decline. We just feel bad because we don’t live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn’t even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That’s a MASSIVE improvement.
What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we’re entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.
Nah dog, we’re not going out there. We’re not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.
- Comment on THE CRAZY PILLS 1 week ago:
Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.
People think their brains are tools for determining reason and logic, and I suppose with exercise and effort they can be, but it’s not what we’re designed for.
We have brains designed to tell stories to explain how you feel, or to feel things about stories supplied to you. That’s it. It doesn’t need to make sense or have logical consistency, the brain doesn’t give a shit about consistency or reason, it just wants to tie loose ends together to create a coherent narrative that you can use to survive.
See huge paw prints by your watering hole? Feel worried? Your brains writes the most likely story for how those prints got there and why you’re scared. In that situation the story-telling can save your life. In our modern, complex world we have the exact same brains structurally, but the clues and emotional signals are vastly more complicated and others supply us stories for why we feel those feelings, and brains soak that shit up like sponges.
We have no future until we start accepting the weaknesses and flaws in our own minds and can set up policy-level safeguards against ourselves, but I don’t see that happening since the people who should be managing these safeguards are as fallible as any of us.
- Comment on I c it! 2 weeks ago:
Additionally, if you can make sunlight shine through a tiny hole that is somewhat level with the ground into a dark room or box, onto a flat, white surface, you can often see a projection of the world outside if the sun is hitting everything just right, the image will be upside-down and reversed, but often in full color like a video image.
Naturally occuring camera obscura must have freaked people the fuck out in olden times.
- Comment on Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year 2 weeks ago:
I don’t know but I’ll look into it, I haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed game in so long they will probably make an Assassin’s Creed game based on the time period in which I last played one.
- Comment on Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year 2 weeks ago:
I would so love to have an AC game where you play a black assassin taking out slave-owners and warmongering southern landowners, it’s a universally* acceptable premise that should be celebrated and enjoyed.
* the people this would offend should be ignored like we used to.
- Comment on Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year 2 weeks ago:
“Okay team, we need to make this game about the American Civil war, but in a way that doesn’t touch on politics or offend anyone in any way, we have do whatever we can to make the Civil War seem like just some kind of completely neutral historical incident that couldn’t have been avoided, we can’t have modern slavery apologists or descendants of slaves feel ANYTHING about ANYTHING!”
- Comment on it's true! 2 weeks ago:
ITT lots of people who blessedly have no idea what an HOA is.
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 3 weeks ago:
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
- Comment on New EA Owners Hoping AI Will Cut Costs And Boost Profits, It's Claimed 3 weeks ago:
“I keep catching myself in this uncanny loop — expecting the so-called ‘AI moment’ to have fizzled out, only to realize the bubble hasn’t just not popped, it’s still inflating. You didn’t just add AI to your business plan, you pivoted your entire narrative to center on it — because in 2025, apparently, no pitch deck is complete without a sprinkle of machine learning magic. Every time I see it, I’m not just surprised, I’m re-surprised — like déjà vu, but powered by buzzwords and venture capital fumes.”
- Comment on Who the fuck needs an x axis anyway 4 weeks ago:
They don’t think in logical, reasonable systems, they imagine stories. The entire conservative mindset is narratives and feelings. That’s why things like vaccines and tylenol go so hard for them, it’s an easy McGuffin to comprehend and work into their mental storylines.
- Comment on Who the fuck needs an x axis anyway 4 weeks ago:
spectrum
Our species broadly doesn’t think in terms of spectrums or nuance.
I burned years of my life trying to make arguments from reason and explain how there can be simultaneous truths or that issues are not black-and-white.
But people’s minds largely do not work that way. We all HAVE to digest this and mourn it and let it pass through us so we can stop trying to argue with these blockheads in ways they can’t even grasp. We can change them if we tell them stories about feelings, if we make them feel validated or heard, we can change them with careful, patient one-on-one care like a parent telling a child bedtime stories… but this takes a level of energy, empathy and patience that few of us have. Some do, I give massive respect to those who have dedicated their lives to this kind of outreach. I wish we had more.