exasperation
@exasperation@lemm.ee
- Comment on “Daddy why that man walk in Italics?…” 1 week ago:
italics
Is this a slur for Italian people?
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.
- Comment on Anon gives up dating apps 3 weeks ago:
The true key is…counterintuitive as this sounds, not looking.
I agree with your overall comment but would also expand on this point. It’s ok to be looking (and open about that fact) but you’re right that looking for a romantic/sexual relationship is a lot easier when it’s combined with looking for other things at the same time, like the other things you’re talking about: people to share conversations with, to share hobbies with, to do things with, to learn from, to accomplish things with. Because after all, even if you do find someone to be a romantic partner, you’ll want all those other things as part of it, too.
Most people who share your interests or want to do things with you won’t be potential partners. I’m a straight cis guy with a lot of stereotypical straight guy interests, which means that the majority of people I meet through my hobbies are other straight guys, and none of us want to date each other. Even most of the women aren’t in the dating pool (age, relationship status, other factors).
Being social creates opportunities to meet partners. For people who are able to do that, being social is the easiest way to create the environment where potential partners want to talk to you and want to explore compatibility with you.
- Comment on Half as Hot 3 weeks ago:
Which room though?
- Comment on Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four 4 weeks ago:
recipes are basically an engineering text
I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.
Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:
He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.
- Comment on Halloween Botany 4 weeks ago:
You’re thinking of indigo.
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Violet
That’s 6.
- Comment on Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit? 4 weeks ago:
Depends on the topic. From what I can tell, Lemmy skews young and technical and towards certain personalities and interests, so there are going to be topics that go to those strengths, but also topics where the discussions get mired down in either discussing the basics or get stuck in a pretty unsophisticated understanding of the topic.
It’s obvious with the hyper local discussions (where should I eat in this city when I visit), because there just aren’t enough knowledgeable people to form a quorum for quality discussion. But it’s also true in many of the hobby/interest discussions, simply because there aren’t enough people to where good discussion encourages more high quality discussion in a feedback loop.
- Comment on Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit? 4 weeks ago:
Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:
- Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
- Funny memes or other humor
It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:
- Politics, at least on specific sub topics
- Science and specific scientific disciplines
It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:
- Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
- ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
- Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.
And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:
- Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
- Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
- Local things in specific cities
- Finance and economics stuff
- Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
- Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
- Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.
- Comment on Hmmmm 4 weeks ago:
The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn’t explicit.
“No vehicles in the park” is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there’s an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.
Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley’s obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a “tangible object” in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a “tangible object” within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.
So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there’s no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.
- Comment on Hmmmm 4 weeks ago:
But imagine describing an area in meter•feet instead of square feet or square meters. That could really piss everyone off.
- Comment on Hmmmm 4 weeks ago:
You don’t need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.
For lawyers, it’s the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they’ll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.
So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.
Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people’s libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That’s what legal drafting is like.
- Comment on Horrors We've Unleashed 4 weeks ago:
Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.
One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.
For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.
But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?
And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.
So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.
- Comment on Horrors We've Unleashed 4 weeks ago:
Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude
Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?
- Comment on Subway 4 weeks ago:
I would think that an ad for something would paint that thing in a favorable light, not make it look gross and weird and unappealing.
- Comment on Explains a lot... 4 weeks ago:
Same but also because I haven’t felt the desire to get taco bell without having been drinking first.
- Comment on He's just lucky I guess 5 weeks ago:
No sorry this is gastro-entomology.
- Comment on Halloween Botany 5 weeks ago:
What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I’m having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you’re saying.
- Comment on Ok boomer 5 weeks ago:
So we’re having a conversation about the Wal-Mart style self checkouts, which you’ve not only never experienced, but apparently can’t even imagine.
To borrow from an earlier comment of yours, we’re in an “alternate reality,” so your conversation should be grounded in that understanding.
- Comment on Ok boomer 5 weeks ago:
Your entire comment seems premised on the mistaken assumption that every self checkout system is implemented in the exact same way.
I use self checkout at certain stores, and avoid it at others.
And the store that this whole post is about, Wal-Mart, is definitely one of the stores I’ll avoid self checkout at. Their system sucks.
- Comment on Ok boomer 5 weeks ago:
Also over here cashiers don’t bag your items for you, so you have to do that anyway
I’m a lot faster at bagging when I’m not also scanning. The human cashier divided the labor to two people, which makes it faster.
- Comment on Ok boomer 5 weeks ago:
In the name of theft prevention and legal compliance, they do not give self checkout customers the same powers as actual cashier employees:
- Self checkout customers cannot verify their own age for age-restricted items.
- Self checkout customers cannot scan something and report the number of duplicates (e.g., scan a can and punch in that you’re buying 8 of them).
- In most stores, self checkout customers are policed by the system to make sure that each item is placed onto a scale that weighs everything, and stops the process if weights don’t match up.
- The ergonomics and flow of self checkout doesn’t allow for a conveyor belt style rapid scanning, because a self checkout station is a tighter space and tends to require bagging as you scan, instead of scanning and bagging separately and independently.
- The frequency of produce code entries means that customers tend to be much slower to enter foods that don’t have bar codes.
As a result, self checkout tends to be slower for customers who have more than 20 items. That might be offset if there’s a longer line for regular cashier, but if there’s no line the employee cashier is much faster.
- Comment on the flies 5 weeks ago:
How do they know the paint didn’t do it?
There were 3 groups of black cows: an unpainted control group, a black stripe group painted with black stripes (not very visible because the cows were already black), and a black and white painted group. The control group had similar results to the black stripe group, which suggests that the black paint alone didn’t do anything.
So further research could be to compare to an all black painted group and an all white painted group, with no unpainted fur, as well. If it’s the pattern, then one would expect the totally painted cattle of either paint color would see similar results as unpainted.
- Comment on Anon recommends a cast iron pan 1 month ago:
Different types of oils form different polymerized surfaces, too. Related to the greentext, some people came up with the idea of flaxseed as the best oil for seasoning cast iron based on some theorycrafting about chemistry at a high school level, and it turned out that flaxseed oil seasoning chips and flakes really, really easily.
So there are a bunch of people out there doing it wrong and complaining that it’s too fussy.
- Comment on Name generator 1 month ago:
There’s a literal character already named Shu Mai.
- Comment on Marvel VFX giant reveals damage done by Hollywood strikes 1 month ago:
Not in this case. I don’t know whether this particular VFX studio treats its workers fairly, but I’ve heard that the whole VFX world is generally terrible to its workers.
That all is beside the point here, though. The VFX studio doesn’t employ writers or actors, whose strikes shut down production of films. So it doesn’t matter if the VFX studio treated its staff like kings. They were still going to lose a ton of work during the strikes, so there’s no avoiding these issues.