Hegar
@Hegar@fedia.io
- Comment on better? 4 days ago:
When people don't like the present, they almost always assume the past was better. When people are broadly happy with the way things are, they argue the past was worse.
Our take on the past almost always says more about our take on the present rather than anything true about the past.
- Comment on It's just not something I could ever get behind 4 days ago:
Wait so you would rather have shallot bread than garlic bread?
Shallot > onion is just common sense, but let's not go dragging garlic into a fight it has no part in.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 4 days ago:
My understanding is they only generated some textures, which everyone noticed and complained about, so they had to patch in human-created textures to replace them.
They also lost a goty award because they lied about having never used ai.
I don't think either of those situations would encourage hidden use of ai.
- Comment on Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace, Nine, Benign, Homecoming, One, Boxcar 1 week ago:
Yep! It's called primary endosymbosis and it's one of the coolest things around! (I think.) The endpoint of a process where two parts of symbiotic relationship morph into an organ in an organism.
The first case of primary endosymbosis resulted in the mitochondria and thus all multicellar life. That's pretty cool.
Another time created the chloroplast and thus all plantlife. Again, yay for primary endosymbiosis!
A few years ago scientists discovered that it happened really recently, resulting in an organism with a "nitroplast" for in house nitrogen fixing. So in the far distant future there could be an entirely novel branch of life, potentially as different from what we know as redwoods are from cats.
- Comment on Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace, Nine, Benign, Homecoming, One, Boxcar 1 week ago:
Mitochondria are so much more than that!
They have the ability to kill the cell as well as provide power, they can communicate and transfer resources to other mitochondria, and they might be one of the reasons that organisms need sleep.
I heard a science communicator suggest that in some senses, we might just exist to serve the needs of our mitochondria.
- Comment on The problems Mothers have to deal with 1 week ago:
She's depicted here with dark hair, she's just wearing a yellow headdress.
- Comment on The problems Mothers have to deal with 1 week ago:
There's a great story in i think the pseudepigrapha, where child jesus is playing with his friends and gets upset and turns one of his friends into a pillar of salt and mary comes and yells at him to turn the kid back.
- Comment on Publisher reveals and immediately cancels new Postal game after fans accuse it of using AI generation 2 weeks ago:
Multiple genres of games are about doing mass killings for fun.
You know that bit when you get bored playing some open world game, go around killing everyone, then reload? Postal is That: The Game. Just without the reloading.
Or that was how i thought about postal 1&2.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 2 weeks ago:
North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don't think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.
Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 2 weeks ago:
You gotta say "nor-nor-east" instead, that's a blast.
- Comment on coleoptera master race 3 weeks ago:
This was just a top notch meme. Informative and a very clever arrested developement reference.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I'm inclined to agree.
But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.
There's a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
There are lots of ways to organize people that aren't heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.
Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.
It all comes with drawbacks of it's own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
There's a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Or that's how i see the problem.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.
As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we'll always have capital-b Badnesses.
We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.
- Comment on TBH it's a really good deal. 1 month ago:
What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, "i would pay for that to have not happened. But i'd only pay $4"?
- Comment on TBH it's a really good deal. 1 month ago:
What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, "i would pay $4 for that to have not happened"?
- Comment on The House Of The Guy Calling You A Libtard 1 month ago:
That house looks sweet! Cool tree right there, plenty of nature, even a ramp. My appartment is less ada compliant than that.
Also this post is some middle class bullshit.
- Comment on Scurvy ain't nothing to fuck with 1 month ago:
Always was.
- Comment on Scurvy ain't nothing to fuck with 1 month ago:
Wu Tang means "sugar free" in chinese so there are a lot of products labelled as wu tang.
- Comment on A hypothesis 1 month ago:
Any correlation would likely be related to socio-economic status ie class. Macs were always more expensive, that's going to skew wealthier, which has way more impact on developement and learning than which OS you used as a kid.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
The catholic church would absolutely use sainthood to whitewash the legacy of a rapist, but i'm sure that position has plenty of promising internal candidates.
- Comment on What are the most popular conspiracy theories? 1 month ago:
My favourite atm is that kirk's wife had him killed.
- Comment on What are the most popular conspiracy theories? 1 month ago:
In reality, an open elite controls world governments and economies.
- Comment on Wrecked 'em 💀 1 month ago:
the pink square is the giveaway
Good to know! The last time i read viz was decades ago.
- Comment on Wrecked 'em 💀 1 month ago:
This has to be from Viz, right? It reads like a Viz line.
- Comment on New image-generating AIs are being used for fake expense reports 1 month ago:
Yes fapiao culture!
The bar i used to drink at in SW china would write fake receipts for business travellers. The one time i was there for it a dutch guy came in, bought an expensive bottle of maotai for everyone to share, then the owners wrote him a receipt for twice that much. The patrons got drunk, the bar got paid and the guy got to steal from his company.
Just your classic win/win/win.
- Comment on Biased source 1 month ago:
Dino Grandino? No, that's too obvious. Hmm. I know!
- Comment on Introverts of our era spend their time on their computers, but what did introverts do before? Like when literacy rates were lower (pre-1950s)? Or before the printing press? 2 months ago:
Humans are social mammals. In many important respects, it makes no sense to even think of us as individuals.
I suspect that in the past people with higher levels of social anxiety probably just spoke a little less than average, and noticably less on the much less frequent times they met strangers.
But i think it's its probably very inaccurate to imagine anyone who we'd recognize as an "introvert" in the much more collectivist cultures that dominate history.
- Comment on Woman 2 months ago:
Yes, fart with pride! Always compliment public farts.