exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Talk like an 👽 2 days ago:
Maybe other intelligent life forms don’t make the same assumptions that we do that lead to the statement that there are two “apples,” and maybe mathematics isn’t universal.
That just shows that “Apple” isn’t necessarily universal, and doesn’t actually disprove the universality of the concept of “two.”
There are a ton of different physical ways to represent the Fibonacci sequence, for example, and I would imagine the first contact looks for ways to find the mutually understood medium by both sides: raised symbols, pulses of radiation, pulses of vibrations, physical pebbles arranged in a line, physical pebbles manipulated over a timeline, etc.
Once we establish a common medium, we’d explore mutual understanding of prime numbers, approximations of pi/e/phi, and things like that.
- Comment on Space Honey 2 days ago:
You can swallow things while dangling upside down. The esophagus is strong enough to work against gravity.
But liquids are a little bit more difficult, because they tend to flow in unexpected places in the mouth/sinuses/nose before trying to swallow.
- Comment on Wacky 3 days ago:
Jim, would you like a sex metaphor or a nature metaphor?
- Comment on UwU🥺👉👈 4 days ago:
this would not work
You assume the goal is to actually try to date or fuck. It’s not. The goal is to intimidate and degrade, to make someone else uncomfortable. So viewed through that lens, it works.
- Comment on Fun game 6 days ago:
The cardinality of this infinite board is the same as a board with infinite number of rows, though, so same same.
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
Yup, gardeners are encouraged to cut off the tops of basil so that it doesn’t flower (and then it doesn’t turn woody).
- Comment on Classic fucking Linda 1 week ago:
And then you eat two desserts out of counter-spite. Win win.
- Comment on Basic geography 2 weeks ago:
Lemme tell you about Gambia’s relationship with Senegal
- Comment on College core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself 2 weeks ago:
Once I understood this, school really started to click. Too bad it wasn’t until I had baked in a shitty undergrad GPA.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Who said anything about scamming? At most, it’s an accusation of trolling for the lulz. Which is actually quite common on the internet.
- Comment on Someone tell the world to slowdown so I can catch up to the events of the previous 12 hours properly 2 weeks ago:
Extrapolating from the plot of the Fugitive, I think it’s safe to say he’s murdered 4 people!
- Comment on Im pan so anyone can apply 2 weeks ago:
Flicking beans is back on the menu I guess
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I definitely know at least one woman IRL that would post like that.
Aight let’s do a quick lesson in Bayes Theorem, here in a shitpost community.
Imagine there is a disease that exists in 1% of the population. Medical science develops a test with 90% accuracy (both in false positives and false negatives) on whether a person has the disease. Your doctor orders the test, and it comes up positive and saying that you have the disease. What is the probability that you actually have it?
Well if you test an entire population of 1000, 10 of whom have the disease, it will correctly positively identify 9 out of 10 who have the disease, and incorrectly give false positive results to 99 out of the 990 who don’t have it. So among the 108 people who get positive results, you only about 8.3% chance of having the disease.
My Bayesian priors for an anonymous prolific poster of thirstposts in a shitposting community on a heavily tech-centric social media platform is that they’re about 90% likely to be 30+ year old men. Claiming to be an 18 year old woman might move the needle a little bit, but not as much as you might think.
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 weeks ago:
Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.
Personally I’m more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it’s still cool to see that people can do it.
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 weeks ago:
I can do that. I’ll keep track of everyone’s food, you know, in exchange for food.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 2 weeks ago:
With enough training you can learn to distinguish buttholes that have been recently rinsed with the Toto Washlet.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 2 weeks ago:
I’ll defer to your personal experience, but when I walk into a place like that (usually as a guest of someone who is actually staying there) I’m always like “ok I don’t belong here.”
I make good money but also don’t think I’d physically be able to swing some of the spending required at places like that. Like, I just wouldn’t have the funds in my bank account.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 2 weeks ago:
Most of the stuff in this thread
We probably need to talk about what one’s definition of “rich” is. I suspect the commenters in this thread are all over the place.
When I was growing up, my idea of rich was private schools and McMansions and overseas vacations and new BMWs for 16th birthdays, basically the kind of lifestyle accessible to only the top 5%.
But now, 20+ years later, I’ve been around 0.1%ers, desensitized to upper middle class stuff that the things I used to believe were signifiers of wealth barely register for me anymore. I’ve also been around descendants of former 0.1%ers who carry some cultural baggage from their families despite having “only” ordinary upper middle class income.
I read this thread and wonder where each commenter sits in how they evaluate richness.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 3 weeks ago:
Kinda depends on the price of the place, right? A $500/night hotel might have a few upper middle class folks on a splurge (a honeymoon, some kind of points-based play on their credit card, etc.). A $2000/night place filters out the merely rich and leaves only the ultra rich. And a $10,000/night place isn’t even accessible as a bucket list item for even the 1% but not 0.1% types.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 3 weeks ago:
I assume in your city, $4/month/sq ft isn’t considered “crazy expensive,” though. In a place like San Francisco or New York, a $2000/month apartment that is 500 square feet wouldn’t register as anything notable.
If it’s not considered “crazy expensive,” people wouldn’t assume you’re crazy rich just by living there.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think this answer truly internalizes how some of the ultra rich live. Yes, many are living a normal looking life, going to their jobs and doing a lot of the same activities that the upper middle class do. They generally eat at the same restaurants, have the same hobbies, and enjoy the same television shows that the rest of the middle class does. Often they go to the same live events (sports, concerts, plays, stand up comedy) that middle class people do, and often don’t bother with luxury boxes or things like that. They’re members at the same gyms, and might plot out the same run trails as normal people.
It’s just that they tend to fly private instead of commercial, stay at very nice luxury hotels unique to that particular location rather than the chains you’ve heard of. They have multiple homes. They’re members of clubs that require a lot more money to keep up in. They have lots of paid staff, both seen and unseen, smoothing over their day to day lives, washing dishes and laundry, maintaining houses and cars and landscaping, making reservations and doing paperwork on their behalf, etc.
The form of stealth wealth isn’t that they’re all among us doing normal things, with no obvious indicators of wealth. It’s that they often aren’t even around us to begin with. So the sheer amount of time that they’re around non-rich people, and actively interacting with non-rich people, may be a tiny portion of their time. Even if they do a lot of the same stuff we do, and go to a lot of the same places we do. They do it in ways that don’t necessarily interact with us directly.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 3 weeks ago:
There are all sorts of filters:
- Expensive clubs. Members only associations like country clubs can skew towards the ultra rich. Yacht clubs and polo clubs are kinda an extreme version of this, but there are all sorts of organizations where the membership can be assumed to be rich.
- Expensive hobbies. Wine tasting, skiing, golfing, boating, horse stuff, biking, and traveling/vacations can range from the slightly expensive to prices that only the ultra rich can afford.
- Related to both of the above, expensive places. If you’re skiing in an expensive resort town, and hanging out in the lobby of a $2000/night hotel, you’ll probably only see employees of these places or other very rich people. Some have even layers beyond that, like an exclusive members only club in an expensive area, or a separate lounge for only people lodging in the most expensive rooms in the hotel. Or if you’re at a private jet airport, and weather causes delays and cancellations, standing around in the terminal might allow you to mingle with other private jet people. Or if you live in a crazy expensive neighborhood or building, your neighbors are pretty much guaranteed to be rich.
- Third party verification. Networking, introduction by mutual friends/acquaintances, even social media or dating apps where you have to prove your status/wealth.
It’s not all or nothing, either. Some places have a disproportionately high number of rich people but aren’t necessarily exclusive to the rich (private schools, certain types of clubs, certain types of activities/hobbies, public parks/restaurants/libraries/museums in rich areas). So a lot of rich people do mingle with the middle class, but often will feel comfortable letting their guard down more or less in particular places or in particular groups.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 3 weeks ago:
There are about 2700 billionaires in the world. There are probably about 10,000 centimillionaires in the U.S. alone.
Especially if you include family members, it’s not just a few dozen.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 3 weeks ago:
After Michael Crichton’s Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 3 weeks ago:
Where does Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai fit into this?
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 3 weeks ago:
Lion King is as much Hamlet as Frozen is The Snow Queen, which is to say, it really isn’t.
Lion King is loosely inspired by, but doesn’t actually follow the same story structure or present the same conflicts/tension or explore the same themes as Hamlet.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 3 weeks ago:
Would that fit OP’s question of “actually pretty good” though?
- Comment on Dumb glasses 3 weeks ago:
It’s not about wavelength, but about intensity.
At night, in darker conditions, cameras dial up their light sensitivity so that they can see faint light (the human eye does the same thing through the iris). So in that mode, they’re sensitive to the brightness that can be produced by human-made light emitters.
But during the day, they’re already set for sunlight levels of brightness so that blinding them in that setting will require more light than is feasible to produce using normal light emitting technology. Infrared or visible light.
Think about trying to blind someone with your car headlights in the middle of a bright sunny day. It just doesn’t work.
- Comment on A sudden epiphany. 3 weeks ago:
My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).
So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.
I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.
I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.
- Comment on Lemmyshitpost lately 4 weeks ago:
