Libra
@Libra@lemmy.ml
- Comment on There's a noticable influx of trans kids in my job. Are there any topics I should avoid or considerations I should take into account when training them? 2 days ago:
Respect them for who they are, and listen to them if they tell you you’re fucking it up, just like you would with anyone else. It’s almost as if trans people are just people. ;)
- Comment on Why do people care so much that their friend or family member’s partner is attractive and not just loving? 3 days ago:
Because some people are just shallow.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 days ago:
Guy’s over here talking about a story involving tech and magic and you’re talking about how sci-fi works? I think you’re confused about how genres work.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 days ago:
We’re talking about technology in the context of a story here, so whether or not it’s high tech to the reader is besides the point. Which, as I was trying to elucidate, is that what matters is how the characters treat technology relative to magic, not the audience.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 days ago:
Like hunks of metal, but that’s not how I treat smartphones or fusion reactors or whatever. Technology is change, and there is no evidence in Star Wars that technology ever changes. They treat supercomputers with world-altering computational power compared to what we have like old console TVs from the 70s that you have to slap occasionally to make work again. Doesn’t seem like high-tech to me.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 days ago:
They don’t treat it like high tech, they treat it like their granddad’s old beater of a car that somehow never dies or fails to get you where you’re going, but somehow never does a particularly good job either. They treat technology like we treat trees: a brute fact of life with some occasional redeeming qualities.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 6 days ago:
We don’t treat iphones and AI like we treat cars. Star Wars has literal instantaneous communication anywhere in the galaxy and literal thinking, feeling machines, and they’re like ‘lawl my 9 year old built a stupid robot that speaks 4,000 languages with some plans he downloaded from them thar interwebs!’ Technology, like everything else, is a spectrum - except in Star Wars. There’s no sense that anyone in the SW universe is going ‘Meh we’ve had starships for 10,000 years, but these new laser swords, man those are some hot shit!’ or whatever. There aren’t tech enthusiasts in Star Wars; you get a little bit of the gear-head enthusiasm for ships, but no one is raving about the new must-have gadget or that cool new meta-material they read about. They treat technology in Star Wars like we treat trees: just a brute fact of life with the occasional redeeming quality. Technology is change, and even if it wouldn’t change significantly over the course of the various shows and movies, there’s no evidence that it has ever changed.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 1 week ago:
Star Wars doesn’t really do ‘super advanced technology’. Like they’ve got space ships and hyperdrive and laser swords and shit, but they don’t treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat cars and swords.
- Comment on Why is it okay for shit to go down the drain but not food? 1 week ago:
Aside from what others have pointed out about solubility, sink drains, as I understand it, have a narrower pipe than toilet drains do, though once it gets out of the house it all goes through the same pipe either way, but I think that’s a larger pipe than what’s in the house.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
These fuckin’ questions, no doubt.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Conservatives don’t have an ideology beyond ‘I am a good person’, not as a value judgement, but as an assertion of objective truth.
- I am a good person so the things that I want are definitionally good and the things I don’t want are definitionally bad.
- If I didn’t want something yesterday but do today it was bad then but it’s not now because I want it.
- If I wanted something yesterday and don’t want it today it was good then because I wanted it and bad now because I don’t.
- I am a good person so the good things that happen to me are deserved and the bad are injustices.
- If you don’t agree with me you are a bad person and the bad things that happen to you are deserved and the good are injustices.
- Winning is all that matters because it puts the good people who want the right things (because I am good and I want them too) in power instead of the bad people who want the wrong things (because I don’t want them.)
- Comment on How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 1 week ago:
sqrt(-1).
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Sounds like she’s not really an indoor cat, so not a fair comparison?
- Comment on Why is it so hard to buy the same toothbrush twice? 1 week ago:
Because a new product or new packaging sells better than the same old product in the same old packaging. The simplest answer is generally true, and when looking for an explanation for why a company does something it’s always safe to bet on ‘because money’.
- Comment on Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s? 1 week ago:
No, for two reasons:
- The racism of the 1800s was built on that of the 1700s and the 1600s. Slavery as an institution was almost 250 years old when the civil war happened, so that kind worldview doesn’t get built overnight and it doesn’t evaporate overnight.
- The south resisted industrialization because slave labor was cheaper, already represented a significant investment, and didn’t require scrapping and investing a bunch more money to build factories and such. Plus the south doesn’t benefit from things like the Great Lakes as a transport network so industrialization was never going to take off there anyway until the transport barrier could be overcome with trains and later trucks. But even with those things, the South is considerably less industrialized than the Midwest. Looking at this map you can see that even today the ‘industrial regions’ in the South are still almost all along major rivers and near good natural harbors.
So even if robots had been ready for widespread commercial adoption in the 1800s they would still have represented a significant investment to transition from a slave-economy, probably wouldn’t have achieved widespread adoption, and thus probably wouldn’t have displaced many slaves. But even if that wasn’t the case the racism that came alongside slavery was already well-established, and as the Jim Crow era showed, once slaves were no longer the backbone of the economy they were relegated to second-class-citizen status and much, much worse. Another 60 years wouldn’t have made that big a difference (and don’t point to the last 60 years as evidence of what can change in that time, the way racism has changed in the US in that period has largely been a product of technological advancement in TV, internet, etc exposing folks to different people and ideas.)
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Depends on the cat. Strays fight on the regular so they’re probably pretty good at it. On the other hand one of my entirely-indoor-from-birth cat routinely wrestles with a 100lb dog for fun and takes no shit, so I’d give him fair odds. The other is a big lazy puddle who doesn’t stand a chance.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
“Listen, I enjoy hanging out with you, but sometimes people just need some time alone and don’t feel up to hanging out.” is probably a good place to start.
- Comment on Whats the best way to deep dive into learning a language without apps? 2 weeks ago:
Interesting, I didn’t realize it had a name, I thought it was just immersion.
- Comment on What techniques do bad faith users use online to overwhelm other users in online discussion and arguments? 2 weeks ago:
Flooding the zone (which now that I think about it is close enough to gish-galloping for there not to be much of a distinction), whataboutism, and moving the goalposts are all extremely common.
Whataboutism and moving the goalposts are the ones I see most often.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Depends on your definition of ‘difficult’. I can pull a motherboard and replace it, I can hand-edit the Windows registry to do some shit most people aren’t even aware is possible, etc. Are those things difficult? No, because I know how to do them. They are complex and technical and require a fair bit of knowledge and understanding to not screw it up though. Everything is difficult until you learn how to do it, then it’s not. Might be better to ask how hard it is to learn? Cause I can’t drive at all so I’m guessing it’s somewhere between multiplication tables and organic chemistry but that’s probably not helpful. :P
- Comment on Whats the best way to deep dive into learning a language without apps? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been on the internet for a long time and met lots of people from around the world, and one thing I hear a lot is that many of them learned English by watching American TV. Some of those folks speak better English than I do as a native, so maybe there’s something to it? Though they mostly did it as kids and for years and years, so maybe that’s not practical.
- Comment on Is it weird to sometimes wonder wether everything you know is wrong? 2 weeks ago:
It’s pretty normal. There’s a graph that plots confidence as you gain new skills or knowledge, and it sounds like you’re on the down-slope of Mt Stupid and coming into the Valley of Despair.
I have spent my life learning for fun and if I can be said to have learned anything abou tthe process it’s that the more you learn the better you understand just how vastly complex everything is, how many ways you could be wrong, and how insufficient your earlier simple assumptions were. Like yeah, maybe trans people are just mentally ill because there have been a few cases where that seems to be the case. But does that make it okay to deny all of them the agency and dignity of being able to decide who they want to be? Even if we define gender-affirming care as ‘harm’, we seem fine as a society with people harming themselves with stuff like cigarettes, why are we not fine with people ‘harming themselves’ with gender-affirming care?
At the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is: would you rather never be made uncomfortable by this realization that things are more nuanced htan you thought, or would you rather have the most accurate information about the world that you can get? Because you can’t have both.
- Comment on What is the definition of concurrent vs cumulative? 2 weeks ago:
Concurrent: at the same time - if you eat two cookies at the same time you’re eating them concurrently. Cumulative: accumulating/growing over time - If you eat a cookie now and eat a cookie later you’ve cumulatively eaten 2 cookies. Bonus points: wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to google ‘define:<word>’ than to make a post here to get other people to answer for you? You’d get the answer a lot quicker the other way, too.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
A spoofed one.
- Comment on how do i become a Scientologist? 2 weeks ago:
Don’t. Even if it’s not a cult (it totally is) it’s a scam designed to extract money from people. If you just want to give up a significant portion of your money and feel like you belong you’re welcome to buy a shitload of weed and come hang out with my friends and I.
- Comment on what are your thoughts on Bidirectional brain-computer interfaces ? 3 weeks ago:
Oh yes, please sign me all the way up for corporations pumping ads directly into my brain, that’s a great plan. :P
- Comment on Is it weird to juggle in the park? 3 weeks ago:
It’s weird to juggle anywhere, but you shouldn’t let that stop you cause everybody’s weird in some way or another and that’s fine. A park seems like as good a place as any.
