pixelscript
@pixelscript@lemm.ee
- Comment on Mama mia 1 day ago:
Your username literally ends in 69. You have no high ground to stand on in a debate about obnoxious humor, lmao.
- Comment on Improve your Wi-Fi with this one trick 2 days ago:
I remember my 6th grade science class having a lively 15 minute discussion about whether or not rockets can work in space since there’s no air…. We’re looking at videos of rockets working in space and then debating whether or not they do. 🙄
This feels a tad different than the person in the screenshot. Screenshot person fundamentally misunderstood how rasio waves worked. Meanwhile, 6th grade you absolutely understood how rockets worked, at least to the level of understanding that they need air to work. Because you were right the whole time, those kinds of rockets can’t work in space without air. The slightly absurd solution that you wouldn’t readily know without a deeper understanding of how the rocket is built is that a rocket literally brings its own air with it.
- Comment on Government? 3 days ago:
- Comment on Just do them 5 days ago:
Remember that Trello board you started that you quickly abandoned?
- Comment on PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery 6 days ago:
I also don’t think it cones pre-installed anymore, you have to get it through Microsoft’s meme store that no one uses.
- Comment on What game surprised you with their length? 6 days ago:
I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there’s now some more content to play.
“Oh cool, a postgame,” I thought.
No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.
To a certain kind of person this must’ve felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn’t turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.
- Comment on how badly could a pelican fuck me up in a fight? 1 week ago:
Every dedicated “ask <xyz-style> questions” community I’ve ever participated in has had a nonzero amount of users who seem to only show up to bitch and moan that, shock! people are asking <xyz-style> questions. I don’t get it either.
- Comment on Good morning I choose violence. 1 week ago:
You can even have the same off-grid experience!
- Comment on $1K a month is a good deal 1 week ago:
It’s even worse than that. Paying private insurance pays for other peoples’ healthcare and the paychecks of MBAs and C-suite execs on top.
I genuinely don’t understand how some people can’t seem to grasp the business model here. For anyone to get any net value out of insurance, by definition, there has to be at minimum an equivalent number of people who pay in more than they would than if they didn’t have insurance at all.
This doesn’t change whether it’s a government-funded single-payer system or a private corporation. The only thing that significantly changes when it is made a private corporation is it (theoretically) permits it to be nimbler to adapt to change by slicing out all the red tape a government-run entity would have, at the cost of shifting the focus from maximizing benefit to the public to profit-seeking that may incidentally also benefit the public from time to time as an occasional side effect.
Insurance isn’t a magic subscription that pulls money out of thin air to pay for everyone’s whatever as long as one is a member, it fundamentally comes from other people getting short-sticked. That is the whole point. You throw money into the abyss when you’re doing well, in exchange the abyss won’t swallow you whole when you’re not doing well. That’s the contract. If everyone who joined was entitled to more than they paid in, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme.
I’m sure you know all this, just venting a rant to no one in particular…
- Comment on definitely 2 weeks ago:
It’s not like this superficially either. That’s literally what the word is.
finite - to have a limit, be bounded
The de- part is acting like it does in words like defraud. It’s not a negative, like you might see in detox, where it means to remove something or undo something. Instead, it simply insists something has been done, not unlike the suffix -ify. You’ve been defrauded. In a manner of speaking, you could say you’ve been “fraud-ified”.
You could say something that has been defined has been “finite-ified”. The possibilities of what it could be were limitless, but you restricted them to something specific. You’ve made it finite. You’ve defined it. It is definite.
- Comment on When you die, what do you want to be done with you? 2 weeks ago:
I took up enough precious space on this bitch of an Earth in life, so my only wish is to take up as little of it as possible in death.
No giant overpriced wooden box in a concrete case on a dedicated plot of land, filled with fanciful linens to wrap my lifeless husk specifically treated to rot away as slowly as possible. Not if I get a say. Burn my dead ass to ashes and preferably scatter them to the wind, I don’t care where. Or, as a wise Danny DeVito said, throw me in the trash. Nature will have its way with what’s left. I’m crumbling to entropy anyway, might as well get it over with as efficiently as I can.
I will not ““become”” a tree, or ““return to”” anyplace. I want to be gone. My lease on this world is over. I explicitly want that lease returned, to the fullest extent it matters.
Not like I’d necessarily get a say, though. Funerals and their rituals are for the living. The ultimate conclusion of my wish to command nothing of the world after I’m gone is that I also can’t command what happens to my remains after I’m gone. I can express my wishes, but if no one agrees to honor them, so be it.
If my loved ones want to stuff my corpse in a monkey suit and bury it in an expensive box on a dedicated plot of land for 100 years because that’s how they want to greive my passing, who am I to stop them? I’m dead.
- Comment on I have to be knowledgeable about a particular superstition in order to sign in to access a government form 2 weeks ago:
Someone looking to specifically break this website’s captcha wouldn’t have a hard time.
But web-scraping bots using off-the-shelf captcha solvers will be screened out en masse, because how many of them are equipped to correctly answer this stupidly specific question? That’s the obscurity.
- Comment on i hate hate hate stuart little 2 weeks ago:
To hell with this obviously one-sided blowout match with Remy, I wanna see Stuart in his car race Ralph on his motorcycle.
- Comment on Percentages 2 weeks ago:
Then odds show up to the party and upend everything we thought we understood.
- Comment on No need to boil the ocean 2 weeks ago:
Be nice to skimmed milk drinking cryptids. They happily subsist on the waste product of butter making and reduce competing demand for the full-fat milk product you enjoy.
- Comment on Scalper economy 3 weeks ago:
At least in the case of fumos these days they’re made-to-order. Buying 10 of them isn’t snatching 10 of them from the carts of other potential buyers, it just means 10 more fumos will be made. If anything it’s strictly increasing the supply and making them more accessible to people who couldn’t make the preorder window.
This was absolutely not the case a few years ago, though.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
This thread alone is showing me how divisive this question is for a lot of reasons. Just the meta-question of “what’s the definition of ‘free speech’ in this context?” on its own makes it a shitshow to answer, let alone the rest of it.
It says in the name. ‘Free’, ‘speech’. If I can say it, you can’t silence it. Anything more restricted is not ‘free’.
If that’s what it means to you, then no, “hate speech”, whatever it may be, is included by definition. There is no ambiguity. But that’s a pretty inflexible answer that doesn’t satisfy.
Well that’s a stupid and useless definition of “free speech”. Obviously some things that can be spoken aren’t ‘free speech’, because they aren’t constructive, they’re not good-faith conversational, they are a form of harm, etc."
Sure. Under that definition, it’s totally possible.
But congratulations, by restricting what ‘free speech’ is in any way whatsoever, you’ve invented an implicit judge who rules what is and is not free speech. (And, likely as well, rules what is and is not “hate speech”.) That only kicks the can down the road to the question of, “Is this a fair judge?” And now we are back in the shitshow where we began, we just painted the walls a new color.
“Free speech” as Americans in particular are so worked up about is a nickname given to one of the amendments of their constitution, which is a clause about disallowing* the government* from punishing anyone for their speech. Any implication of rights relating to speech outside of this context is a gross misunderstanding.
If that’s the definition you’re going with, then yes, obviously it’s possible, because that’s where many of us are at right now and have been at for ages. That makes it a rather nothingburger of an answer because it dodges the implicit question of whether we should uphold “free speech” as a principle outside of this context, whatever that may mean.
The way I see it, the two answers on the extreme ends are cop-outs that don’t actually help anyone, and any answer that exists in the middle just becomes politics. Is it possible to allow “free speech” and simultaneously stop “hate speech”? Yes, with adequate definitions of both. Will any solution that does so be satisfactory to a critical mass of people, randomly selected from all people? Haha no.
- Comment on What are some video game quotes that is stuck in your head? 4 weeks ago:
Spongify!
- Comment on Anon walks home in the city at 2 AM 5 weeks ago:
I can’t think of a time before this I’ve seen the word ‘meanacing’ used as a verb and not an adjective.
- Comment on Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey 1 month ago:
I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.
- Comment on Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see. 1 month ago:
Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.
- Comment on I just need to keep it steady 1 month ago:
There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.
A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.
An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).
The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.
The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.
I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.
- Comment on A real puzzler 1 month ago:
Votes on Lemmy are public, fyi.
You have to host your own Lemmy instance to see them for yourself, but you can check if you were so inclined.
- Comment on Why did it take so damn long for humanity to "learn" how to draw/paint realistic images? 1 month ago:
Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn’t make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.
And to put it bluntly, realism wasn’t the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more “crude” styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.
The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they’d be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn’t survive.
- Comment on Why are peole hating on .world? 2 months ago:
I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.
The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.
This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.
The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.
- Comment on Invincible 💪 2 months ago:
In the microwave of evil?
- Comment on I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US 2 months ago:
The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won’t deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.
But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, “Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?”
Americans are hardly the majority of the world’s English apeakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that’s not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like… read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.
- Comment on I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences 2 months ago:
I’ve seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as “respect distance”.
- Comment on Which are the lesser-known movies that are well worth seeing? 2 months ago:
Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom is a comedy film that will either be the funniest thing ever or an absolute cringefest, depending on your opinion of Jason Steele’s brand of humor. There is no in-between. It’s available to watch for free on YouTube, or whatever alternative frontend you use.
Jason Steele, AKA FilmCow, you may recognize from YouTube series such as Charlie the Unicorn or Llamas with Hats. Yeah. That guy. Imagine 70 minutes of that.
The film is a sequel to a pair of 4 minute long shorts (here and here). The film contains characters from these shorts and references events from them. So watching the film without watching the shorts first leads to some characters showing up out of nowhere with unexplained details. But that’s how every other character in the movie is, so… whatever, lmao.
I still recommend watching the shorts first. If nothing else they can serve as an appetizer for you, to decide whether or not it’s your cup of tea. The film is the same vibe as the shorts, just longer. If you hate the shorts you will despise the film.
It’s unironically my favorite film, so, I hope you get some amusement out of it. But if you bounce right off, I won’t be surprised. If you like it, enjoy quoting every line of it for the next month. If you hate it, sorry for wasting your time.
- Comment on Burning Up 3 months ago:
The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.
Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.
50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.
