Ephera
@Ephera@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Evolution isn't linear. 19 hours ago:
Don’t forget the part where actual evolution requires a lot of sex and dying…
- Comment on shoebills 2 days ago:
Up until the 15th century, we still had birds this big: Image
That’s around 3.6 meters.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 2 days ago:
Rhubarb is actually really sour. As in, if you eat too much of it, your teeth will start feeling as if they’re covered in fur, because it genuinely fucks with your enamel. (Rhubarb contains oxalic acid, which is also used in some tooth whitening products).
But it’s basically never eaten without adding a boatload of sugar to it. So, you can kind of imagine it like those sour sweets, but stronger, and of course, it’s a plant, so the taste is somewhat richer (although still not very rich for a plant).
As for eating it raw, well, then you can’t really add sugar to it, so basically not palatable. I mean, you can do it, but unless you really like sour, it’s just not good.
And it’s only really similar to celery in terms of its texture and crunch. The taste is completely different.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 4 days ago:
Recently, we were in the canteen at work and a colleague, who moved here a few years ago, told that she never had rhubarb before.
Then she asked me, probably just for vocab reasons: Rhubarb is a vegetable?
Uhh…
I had never thought about it. I mean, what the heck is this:
ImageCould be a salad, a leafy green. It’s kind of similar to celery, but is celery even a vegetable? Well, and of course, rhubarb is often used like a fruit, so uh…
Well, I looked it up, and scientifically, it does count as a vegetable, but colloquially, it’s often considered a fruit.
- Comment on Slacker 4 days ago:
I’m guessing, it’s an assistance dog…
- Comment on What would happen if every atom on earth was to simultaneously double in size? 1 week ago:
What they mean is that the size of an atom isn’t really defined. It’s got protons and neutrons in the middle, with electrons swirling around. Other atoms are kept at a distance, because the electrons repulse each other with their electric fields.
If you double the size of the protons, neutrons and electrons, that alone would not double the strength of the electric field, so other atoms would generally stay at the same distance as before…
- Comment on weed 1 week ago:
My mum refers to dandelions as weeds and they’re native here in Europe. They are still rather invasive, as in if you’re trying to grow a vegetable garden or something, they’ll be all over that in no time, thanks to their floating seeds and hardiness.
But yeah, personally, I don’t really get why our vegetable garden needs to be a 100% dandelion-free zone. Heck, you can even use them in salads and whatnot.
- Comment on Is it true that addicts never stop being addicts, they just replace their addiction? 1 week ago:
There’s generally a reason why people turn to excessive drug use in the first place, which is usually unhappiness paired with a feeling of worthlessness, of not being needed.
When you’re then addicted, it can be difficult to build up self-worth, because you may not be able to function in society at all, but also because of the stigma on drug addiction. And once you go on withdrawal, unhappiness will settle in.
This makes it so difficult to get away from an addiction in the first place, and can also mean that people quickly fall for a different addiction.
But of course, it’s not a law of nature that addicts will always be addicts. With sufficient support to eliminate those root causes, and to keep them accountable, it is possible to get away from an addiction.
- Comment on Will they never learn? - US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’ | WIRED 1 week ago:
And here I was thinking maybe the Democratic Party would like to not prolong the 9/11 emergency laws, since the Undemocratic Party might abuse those, if Trump gets elected. But of course not…
- Comment on GTA 6 publishers Take-Two cancel games and lay off hundreds to "rationalize their pipeline" 1 week ago:
“Rationalizing your pipeline” sounds like a rude thing…
- Comment on They really want people to RTO 1 week ago:
Because comfy.
I don’t even disagree with your points. I do notice that my back muscles will quickly undevelop, if I work from bed all day.
But on Monday, I had a stressful day in the office, so I had no qualms spending yesterday working mostly from my bed.
Similarly, someone who does more sports than me could easily counteract the effects. - Comment on MineClone2, inspired by Minecraft, gets renamed to VoxeLibre 1 week ago:
Well, it’s a community project. Tons of community members want Minecraft without the Microsoft, so those community members built that. It’s not that someone consciously decided to create a really blatant copy.
Besides, the name change was specifically motivated by players expecting an exact copy and complaining or filing bug reports when the devs took some liberties in their design.
- Comment on space 1 week ago:
I have heard that notion before, but don’t know how the maths is supposed to work.
I can tell you, though, that light would be going faster than light, if it could.
Here’s a simple equation you probably know:
F = m * a
(F is force, m is mass, a is acceleration)Well, if you rearrange it, you get this:
a = F / mWe currently believe photons to have no mass.
Insert that into the equation and you get a division by zero, but our closest approximation means acceleration is infinite, as soon as any non-zero force is applied.Infinite acceleration results in immediate infinite velocity. It makes no sense for light to only accelerate until 300,000 km/s and then take its foot off the gas pedal.
This is why it’s instead believed that there is a speed limit to causality itself.
The speed of light (as well as of gravitational waves and other massless things) just happens to be the same value, because they’re going as fast as is possible.Here’s a video about the speed of causality: pbs.org/…/pbs-space-time-speed-light-not-about-li…
- Comment on space 2 weeks ago:
I mean, personally, I actually don’t believe that the Big Bang created everything out of
thin airvacuum, because much like travelling backwards in time, that would break causality.It makes much more sense for everything to just have always existed and the Big Bang is merely a very visible event + expansion afterwards.
I’m open to the notion that expansion and contraction happen in some sort of cycle, because well, many things do.But for it to be cyclical to the point where it repeats precisely the same? Why?
Can’t we just let the universe flobber on its merry way without assigning some higher meaning to everything it does? - Comment on snek id 2 weeks ago:
I believe, TikTok does this. Basically, the Algorithm will bury your post, if it detects a bad word, so people are censoring to trick the Algorithm.
I fully expect a return to leet speak or “double-plus ungood”-like language.
- Comment on space 2 weeks ago:
Well, since this was posted in Science Memes, I’ll be so pedantic that science does not support the idea of travelling back in time.
It does support travelling forwards in time, at various speeds, but you’ll constantly be aware of where you are (even if one method involves travelling really fast and therefore may still leave you in empty space).
- Comment on tag yourself (I'm basic) 2 weeks ago:
I’m pH <3.
- Comment on How is the hydrogen made? 2 weeks ago:
Oh great, and I was wondering why some of our policians were pushing hydrogen cars as an alternative to electric cars, despite even the car industry telling them to shut the fuck up.
- Comment on meow_irl 2 weeks ago:
Unfortunate, that one cannot actually type in French, the same way you can type in 𝔊𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔫.
- Comment on wat 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I guess, lots of maths being done without units is the culprit here.
2 / 0.5 = 4
just makes it sound like you’ve magically applied some transformation to2
, which has cloned it.
2 cakes / 0.5 cakes = 4 half-cakes
rather makes it clear why it’s suddenly double the amount, without cloning involved. - Comment on wat 2 weeks ago:
Always bothered me that this feels unintuitive in maths, even though this is precisely what maths tries to model with division.
But yeah, being able to divide by fractions of 1 and negative numbers and whatnot, that really does not make it feel like you’re cutting cake.
- Comment on Sorry lemmy but I have to ask? 2 weeks ago:
Grayjay is not open-source, though, by the way. It’s source-available, i.e. you’re allowed to look at the source code, but you’re not allowed to do anything with it.
- Comment on it works! only 99.99$! 2 weeks ago:
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it’s written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they’d present you with all that spam content, you wouldn’t find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it’s written by a human, they’re going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.There’s also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: theregister.com/…/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse…
- Comment on U.S. government blasts Microsoft for lax security measures in report on Chinese hacks 3 weeks ago:
Unfortunately, many, many users exist, for which trust is a function of “Have I heard of this company before?”…
- Comment on U.S. government blasts Microsoft for lax security measures in report on Chinese hacks 3 weeks ago:
That culture has been in Microsoft’s DNA since forever. A one-off reform will not fix this.
- Comment on Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability. 3 weeks ago:
A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being ‘meaningful’ in ways I don’t see it today anymore.
Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there’s a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I’m slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.
Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn’t even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There’s like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you’ll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.
I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad…
- Comment on Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it 3 weeks ago:
I just remembered that Redfall also flopped last year, and that was supposed to be one of their two big titles, along with Starfield, which got overshadowed, to say the least.
Wikipedia tells me the CoD release in 2023 was “the lowest-rated mainline Call of Duty installment on Metacritic”, although it seemed to have still printed them money with essentially no work invested, so I guess that’s good?
Diablo IV, I think, did reasonably well in its niche. I remember it being a bit overshadowed by Zelda.
Not sure, if I’m forgetting any other major Microsoft/Bethesda/Arcane/Obsidian/Activision/Blizzard/King games, but yeah, that doesn’t look too great…
- Comment on It's not enough to touch grass 4 weeks ago:
aesthetically pleasing
???
- Comment on Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs explain why it was a much bigger overhaul than you'd think 4 weeks ago:
After reading that headline, for just a moment, I thought this was going to be Bethesda-style gaslighting of players…
- Comment on Android users who have a keen eye for design and detail, how is the whole stutter/lag situation? Esp. after a few years of use? 5 weeks ago:
Hmm, you probably mean lists shouldn’t be creating new objects (/allocating new memory) while just scrolling.
Which, yeah, I remember a colleague knowledgeable about Android saying that aRecyclerView
specifically re-uses allocated list elements.And from the little bit of Android dev I saw, it also looked like all the APIs are designed to stop you from doing(/allocating) much while the user is merely scrolling. Then, I’m not sure what’s causing the lag…