Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Custodians⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s great. Farmers need to use pesticides and monocultures to stay competitive, since other farmers are using them. Also, pesticides and monocultures kill the ecosystems that provide things like natural pest control, pollination and humus. So, you probably don’t get an increased yield from pesticides and monocultures when they’re employed in wide areas, while you do still get the destruction of ecosystems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Entirely too many questions about Mastodon. So sorry.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It is similar to Bluesky, yes. They both got a lot of inspiration from Twitter (before Musk turned it to shit/X).

  And I would say that the discussions are more shallow than on Lemmy. Even though Mastodon has a higher character limit than Twitter and many Mastodon instances effectively remove the character limit, it’s still fundamentally a platform for shortform interactions. Infodumping is rarely seen, because you need to create a silly number of chained messages.

  On the flipside, though, you get to know people. I do appreciate the time I spent on Mastodon, because of that. It’s a very different perspective as not everything is about discussing cold hard facts, but rather also people’s hobbies and struggles and whatnot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the idea of “life” and “intelligent life” is all relative?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I find ants and bees and such interesting in this regard. They work together more seamlessly than humans do and arguably have a higher form of sociality.

  Especially in Western cultures, we humans like to think of the individual and compare ourselves to the individual of other species. But that is a logical fallacy.
  Are you smarter than an ant? Sure. But are you smarter than a human-sized ant hive? That’s a far trickier question to answer…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck off Babish⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My favorite is when you get told to cook something in water and there’s always just this implicit “with salt” in there.

  Except when it isn’t. For example, you should only add salt to lentils after cooking, otherwise their hull turns hard.

  Well, and they also don’t tell you how much salt to use. Yesterday, I cooked millet and just added as much salt as I would add to noodles.
  But then I had to leave them in the pot to soak for half an hour, because they wouldn’t soften (is that also from the salt?). Which meant they had soaked up all the salt water and the millet was far too salty in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon is delayed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I could imagine that they didn’t want to do something called “Destiny 3”, because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you’re gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you can't make it yourself, store bought is fine⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think, that’s not a coral, but rather a tree next to a stream…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Radio transmissions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but that doesn’t actually happen in reality, that things just stop changing. Occasionally, you get rather isolated ecosystems where the changes go back and forth in a mostly self-contained manner and then adaptation might plateau for a bit, but at some point, a lightning or an earthquake or something will strike and then it’s back to adaptation.
  Well, and those species which were the most adapted to this isolated ecosystem are also likely to die out then, rendering this temporary endpoint not exactly “ideal” either.

  But it’s also not one singular endpoint either. Diversity is itself a strength, which helps species survive. This is particularly important where there is change, because external influences will affect different members of this species more or less strongly.
  But even without change, splitting the work is beneficial. This can be as mundane as not everyone carrying around the equipment for bringing out the babies. But in particular with societal structures, it can also mean that the big muscle folks might do the muscly tasks and the big brain folks do the brainy tasks and those with claws for hands open up all the tin cans.
  Evolution will not push past that to arrive at some hypothetical “ideal endpoint”, because that society with work splitting is fitter for survival than a monoculture would be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Radio transmissions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I hate that so much. Often times, it’s clearly just easier/cheaper to put makeup on a human actor, or at least for the aliens to be able to use the same equipment. But it’s so boring. If I want to see a humanoid with different skin color, I’ll visit my neighbor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Radio transmissions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Ideal endpoint of evolution” is itself a funny joke to those who participate in knowing things…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨W H Y⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  LÖFFELSTIEL

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaves have evolved at least twice 🤔⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I happen to separately only eat foods that don’t cast a shadow do the vegan thing and my genes don’t like the taste of onion either, so uhh… 😅

  But still good info. I haven’t yet tried cooking whole-grain buckwheat myself, so knowing a combination that works, I can figure out substitutes or other combinations which are likely to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaves have evolved at least twice 🤔⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I recently figured out that wheat/gluten FUBARs my health, so even just the concept of cereal grains has recently exploded in complexity in my head.

  Before, I was eating:

  • wheat (incl. durum, spelt, rye, and rarely barley, emmer)
  • oats
  • rice

  Now I newly eat:

  • buckwheat
  • millet
  • quinoa (in like three different colors)
  • amaranth
  • whole-grain rice is apparently pretty cool
  • maize/corn (in the form of polenta and tortilla)
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think, it’s possible to find alternative materials which behave similar to plastic in certain use-cases.

  But yeah, I can’t see a one-for-one replacement happening. It’s part of the appeal of plastic, that it does not degrade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There's been a massacre!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, perhaps the most fitting example here is non-vegetarian diets: Feed plants to livestock. Livestock uses up some energy for its own existence. Then feed livestock to humans.

  There is a slight difference in that livestock can ingest leaves, which we cannot, but in industrialized farms, they typically get fed produce anyways, to make them grow more quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SUNS OUT GUNS OUT⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh, that’s a wild statement considering he later went on to formulate his ontological “proof”, which attempts to prove God’s existence without relying on axioms (and in my not-so-humble opinion fails to do so, because it assumes “good” and “evil” to exist).

  Sure enough, this statement here is about math and not a general statement, but you’d think he would’ve gotten a clue, that trying to prove anything without axioms is not a smart idea…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SOCKS SOCKS SOCKS⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They could’ve also socked the tail…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Besides money/capitalism, why are tech companies trying to push AI text generators over search engines?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think, it’s mainly just companies trying to get their foot into the market. If Microsoft can establish LLMs as alternative to search, then it’s Google that loses market share. And once they control a share of the market, then they figure out how to capitalize on that.

  At the very least, they can use it to control what information is available to the public and how it’s framed. But they can also integrate things like the LLM generating an affiliate link when asked about a product, or just generally weaving ad placements into the generated answers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that’s significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NO TO AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s always kind of bothered me about the whole generative AI thingamabob. Why are we generating things and storing them, when the ability to generate more of it is right there?

  I mean, I know in lots of cases the output is extremely flaky, so it’s not as easy to just generate the same thing again, but yeah, it still feels kind of backwards…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poisonous Frogs with Ants in their Pants⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Would’ve been funny, if a fish was somehow snacking ants on the regular. 🙃

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poisonous Frogs with Ants in their Pants⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it’s gonna depend on the specific ant species. Some ants don’t sting at all. Some ants only have formic acid. Some ants’ venom tickles. Some ant venom can kill you.

  But to quote Wikipedia for one of the latter, the Jack Jumper ant:

  The retractable sting is located in their abdomen, attached to a single venom gland connected by the venom sac, which is where the venom is accumulated. Exocrine glands are known in jack jumpers, which produce the venom compounds later used to inject into their victims.

  It then goes on to list all kinds of those compounds: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_jumper_ant#Venom

  I don’t have much deeper knowledge than that, but at that point, it might as well be a mixture of some compounds that they ingest and some that they produce from simpler compounds. At the very least, they would need to ingest appropriate atoms/molecules in some form, like for example nitrogen, which is contained in relatively many of those compounds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Jason Schreier is not a no-name. I would expect the guy to figure it out, if he thought about it for a moment. But yeah, the whole article seems a bit rushed…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, and just because you know they’re lying, doesn’t mean you know what the truth is, much less so how to prove it to someone else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't Oblivion and Morrowind turn the character model when you run in different directions?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You always attack into the direction that the camera is facing, so if the character was facing away, that would look quite weird.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it says it’s a verb, so it’d have to be the last one…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it’s best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨floats away in disgust⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For me, it’s a matter of this joke being old. If someone had sat down and drawn it as a comic anyways, that would make it cool and the thought of it can be humorous in its own way. But since they didn’t, it’s ultimately just an old joke. It not having been made through manual labor does change my enjoyment of it.

  (And much like the others, I don’t care that it looks well-drawn. I just care that someone decided, fuck it, I’m a silly goose, I’ll spend some time crafting something for no good reason.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To perhaps lean more into why complex carbs are useful:

  Your body can’t really not digest something you’ve eaten. Once it’s in your stomach, it will be broken down and gets put into your blood. With the simple carbs, you get a lot of blood sugar very quickly and your body then has to deal with that. It does so by producing insulin, which tells the rest of your body to take sugar out of the blood. It’s put into either a limited, temporary storage (glycogen) or, once that’s full, into more permanent storage (body fat).
  Eating lots of sugar can also lead to your body producing too much insulin, which will cause too much sugar to be taken out of the blood, so you often have a high and then a crash/low after ingesting sugary foods.

  Ideally, you want blood sugar to always stay at a reasonable level, where it can supply your brain and muscles, but where your body does not have to start storing lots of it. And that’s where complex carbs are neat, because they don’t get broken down all at once, when they’re in your stomach/intestines, meaning their sugar enters your blood at a more sustainable rate. By eating them instead of sugar, you’re less likely to put on fat and less likely to have a crash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every. Single. Game. Ever.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also kind of breaks immersion when there’s tons of different enemies, but they never fight between themselves. Only when the player character shows up, they’re like, imma ruin this woman’s life.