AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on At least Quark had some integrity. 34 minutes ago:
I have to keep reminding myself of this. I’m in my late 20s and I still slip up when referring to myself sometimes.
- Comment on Unstable 6 days ago:
Benzene is OP and I love that for it
- Comment on He's just eccentric 1 week ago:
There are quite a few misconceptions in this comment. For example, “Well I guess everyone’s a little on the spectrum.” is a comment that frustrates many autistic people because it misunderstands what the “spectrum” in ASD means, and is usually said in a way that diminishes the lived reality of autistic people. I realise that you weren’t making that statement, merely pointing to the existence of people who make this argument. Nonetheless, I want to emphasise that this sentiment is not representative of autism.
I do think that with the increasing awareness of autism in the popular consciousness, there is a risk that our understanding of autism may be hampered by stereotypes. I have seen diagnosed autistic people feeling like their struggles were invalid because they didn’t nearly fit into the popular conception of what an autistic person looks like. I believe that autism is probably still a useful category, in terms of helping people find the support they need to live fulfilling lives, but that we need to be mindful of how category labels can cause harm if misunderstood or misapplied.
- Comment on Quarter of Gen Zs consider quitting work as young Brits cite mental health as key reason to go unemployed 2 weeks ago:
I had a friend who spent a long while out of work in their 20’s because they had a mental breakdown and quit a well paying job. They later told me that it was less a choice to quit, and more the knowledge that if they continued there, they’d end up killing themselves. They knew that being unemployed would likely be just as torturous for their mental health, but it would at least be different.
This is all to say that I reckon that for many, choosing to be unemployed is probably an irrational choice, but when you’re not doing well mental health wise, you’re not necessarily going to be able to make rational choices.
I think you’re right that everything being fucked at the moment is probably a key driving force here, and it’s why I worry that even throwing a heckton of money at mental health services wouldn’t be enough. It’s also why Reform are doing so well in the polls — people are desperate for something other than the same old stuff that we have seen from both the Tories and Labour, and Reform are the only ones offering something different. It’s a shame that the “something different” that Reform is offering is nothing but a scapegoat painted to look like a real alternative
- Comment on Quarter of Gen Zs consider quitting work as young Brits cite mental health as key reason to go unemployed 2 weeks ago:
“think about making some of the standard drugs in this country to improve supply.”
A friend was telling me earlier about the various logistical tricks that Lidl and Aldi use to reduce prices. For example, because they primarily stock own-brand products, this reduces the number of different variants/brands per product they have to source, which means they buy larger amounts from fewer suppliers. This means they can negotiate with the supplier to get them to package the product so that packaging has super prominent barcodes for easy scanning, and the boxes can go straight from a pallet onto the shelf, reducing labour. In short, by doing stuff in bulk, they have more negotiating power.
i think your point about stabilising drug supply is an example of the kind of thing the NHS could do to leverage its enormous purchasing power. I know that one of my medications is quite expensive for the NHS, but also quite widely prescribed, for example.
- Comment on WWYD 2 weeks ago:
I agree, it’s one of my favourite internet things.
You may already be aware of this, but on the off chance that you’re not, here’s a cool thing: neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
- Comment on got any others? 3 weeks ago:
France have made this law, I think. More countries should follow their example
- Comment on The billionaires and politicians did it 3 weeks ago:
I’m unskilled at economics, so I may well be missing something, but this explanation doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s because I’m not sure how well Marxian economics applies to the current conditions; As part of a university scholarship, I had to do an internship somewhere exceedingly corporate, and I was aghast at how there were entire divisions whose functions seemed to produce nothing of real value, just more metrics and dashboards and spreadsheets. I imagine people more learned than I have applied Marxian economics to problems like that, but trying to reconcile that situation with any notion of “value” makes my head hurt.
To be clear, I’m a big fan of Marx, even if I haven’t the patience for parsing economics definitions.
- Comment on Prepare For Discord To Get Way Worse [Kotaku] 3 weeks ago:
“Discord just last week shut down a server that was my main local friend group, and we had to scramble to reconstitute it.”
Damn, that sucks. How big was the server? Do you know why it was shut down?
- Comment on no ragrets 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, respect to the dude
- Comment on Good afternoon I choose thoughts you've never had before. 4 weeks ago:
I think it certainly helps with flavour if nothing else, but I don’t think the extra degree or so in temperature would make much difference.
Though saying that, I’m now wondering to what extent rice cooking would be affected by high altitudes — I had a friend who lived somewhere high altitude in South America for a while, and she said that the low atmospheric pressure meant cooking certain foods was difficult because the water boiled at a lower temperature (I wish I could remember more specifics)
- Comment on Good afternoon I choose thoughts you've never had before. 4 weeks ago:
That seems wrong to me. Adding salt doesn’t increase the boiling temperature much
- Comment on I don't have to worry about saying the wrong thing when I'm alone in the basement. 4 weeks ago:
I hope that some day, you’re able to be a part of a community where it feels safe to be maximally weird
- Comment on I have an entire cabinet currently storing empty jars... 4 weeks ago:
I am both of the people in this image.
- Comment on A long video of one person's opinion about "algorithmic complacency" 5 weeks ago:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Way back, I found it hard to discover new people to follow on Mastodon, and I found myself wishing for a little bit of algorithmic feed, as a treat. I found it a shame that people were increasingly becoming anti-algorithm, full stop, because I think that algorithmic recommendation engines could be so powerful if they were leveraged for good (which, for many people, isn’t the endless scrolling or maximal engagement that the current system optimises for).
I need to get round to setting up an RSS reader. I’ve heard that a few of those have an option to give some level of algorithmic recommendations, whilst still prioritising the stuff you’ve already opted into seeing.
- Comment on A long video of one person's opinion about "algorithmic complacency" 5 weeks ago:
“38 minutes is too long? What a world we have when folks cannot pay attention longer than a tiktok vid.”
Short attention spans is an overly simplistic explanation. Of those who may find a 38 minute video to be too long, I think only a small fraction of those have that preference due to becoming accustomed to Tik-Tok and other short form content. I’m going to give a few examples of alternative explanations, and perhaps that will help you to cringe less.
I have a friend who has the unfortunate combination of being hard of hearing, and dyslexia, so lip reading is more useful than subtitles. They can cope with videos where it’s mainly a person talking to a camera (so TC would actually be better for them than most video essays), but a lot of long-form videos have fancier editing or visual effects than that. Even when it is a relatively accessible video style, it takes more mental effort to be parsing spoken information.
I know someone else who is dreadful at processing auditory info, likely related to them being neurodivergent. Definitely no problem with attention span though, because they’ll digest huge essays and books with zeal. They’re young, so the majority of their peers are big fans of the short form videos like TikTok. We sometimes laugh at how sometimes they sound like more of a grumpy old person (with their “kids these days” rants) than I do (and I do my fair share of ranting too)
I know someone who can only effectively focus on auditory input when they’re able to focus on something else visually, such as going for a run, or doing crochet. They prefer podcasts and audiobooks to videos, because it’s easy to get lost if a video is expecting viewers to be at least half watching things.
I hope my comment doesn’t come across like I’m telling you off or anything. A large part of why I wrote this is because I know that there are quite a lot of people who just can’t jibe with long videos (for a variety of reasons), which makes me appreciate how OP was clear in their title. it’s a little gesture of being considerate of other people’s needs always brightens my day, especially on places like Lemmy, where it bolsters the wider sense of community
To cap off my comment, I’m going to end it on a positive by actually materially replying to the meat of your comment and adding to that discussion rather than just lecturing you: I have been a long time fan of TechnologyConnections because he’s so enthusiastic that it’s like he’s casting a spell; when I first stumbled across one of his videos, I laughed at the absurdity of a 40 minute video on some boring and niche topic I didn’t care about, but I ended up sticking around to watch the whole thing, and I came away from it with stronger opinions on appliances than I ever expected to have. I do love weird nerds who are so excited about their hobbies that they make learning about it fun. His vocal delivery makes it easy to follow along semi-passively without tuning him out.
- Comment on I don't have my shit together 5 weeks ago:
If you’re reading this, I want you to know that I’m proud of you. I know that I don’t know you, but I don’t need to know you personally to know that things are a lot right now, and have been for rather a while. If this comment makes you feel sad because simply existing is taking so much out of you that you feel like your life isn’t much of an achievement, then I’m especially proud of you, because that’s where I’m at, and it’s hard.
Being very familiar with the cycle depicted in the OP is why I’m writing this comment: I know how hard it is to be kind to yourself when the world is bent on wringing you dry. Indeed, it’s only through recognising our shared plight that I’m able to be kind to myself. Solidarity.
- Comment on Cool Dog 5 weeks ago:
Ooh, thanks for this link. I’m not a podcast person, but I have a friend who would love this
- Comment on This rock bottom has a basement 5 weeks ago:
I have a disability that gives me quite a lot of pain, and my 1-10 pain scale doesn’t actually go up to 10; I will never say I’m at a 10/10 pain, because that’s saying it’s the worst it could ever be, which is asking for trouble
- Comment on i'm your god now. 1 month ago:
To be fair, the ones that I often come across in my home are literally called “house spiders” (Eratigena atrica)
- Comment on Americans are weird. 1 month ago:
It’s a particular shade of paint. It’s widespread enough in the UK that multiple brands do their own version of Magnolia. It’s often what’s used when people don’t want to have to decide what colour to paint, or in council housing, and it’s increasingly common in private rentals. Image
- Comment on Costs to thee, but none for me! 2 months ago:
(n.b. I got here after OP deleted their comment, so I don’t have the context of what you were replying to. This is just a reply to you)
I felt a sad wistfulness upon reading your comment, because of how deeply I wish this were possible.
I’m reminded of an exhausting dinner in which a friend and I were trying to explain to his Dad why doctors and the like don’t work for free. It took us a while to figure out what he was actually saying, but in the end, we understood him to be arguing roughly: “It sure would be nice if people could work for free, because things like the NHS and other social safety nets only exist if people feel a duty to society, or their community. It sucks that selfish motivations seem to be guiding people’s decisions instead, and this isn’t their fault, but a product of them having to struggle to fulfill their basic living needs under capitalism. Maybe if we had a comprehensive, universal basic income, we would see more people able to exercise their duty to society”.
This memory sticks out to me because we spent most of that conversation exasperated and confused because it seemed like he was arguing that people should work for free, in the here and now. Your comment brings me back to that memory because I do believe that sufficiently robust social safety nets would lead to far more people doing work because they find it rewarding; I’m imagining a world where they still get paid, but the money is far less of a determining force in people’s decisions. It would be nice to be able to be an idealist like this, but we’re a long way off from that world
- Comment on Costs to thee, but none for me! 2 months ago:
This article blew my mind when I first read it. The unsustainability of the current academic publishing situation made a lot more sense after learning how we got to this point. Strongly recommended this article to anyone who doesn’t know how huge Maxwell’s influence was in this area.
- Comment on Costs to thee, but none for me! 2 months ago:
I know quite a few people who fit into that category, although I imagine they would take issue with how this meme characterises them.
A widespread concern that I see is that paid peer review may make things worse via a perverse incentive. Consider, for example, paper mills, and the conditions that cause them to arise: Publish or Perish; poor pay in academic research; lack of stability of jobs in academic research (tenure Vs adjunct) etc… If we’re concerned about the quality of peer review, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be concerned that paying may exacerbate the problem.
- Comment on Meta Censors #Democrat when searched for 2 months ago:
I wonder if that may be the cause of the block in the original post — i.e. if the fascist accounts were posting lots of “sensitive” content (such as stuff that would, in a different era, been far more likely to be removed if reported), then it might appear like the censorship that OP saw. I vaguely recall an instance of something similar happening, and if so, the “censorship” would be an automated error, and it being visible now would be after the manual intervention.
- Comment on Religion 2 months ago:
I want you to know that I’m screenshotting this comment (and the one you’re replying to) to send to a friend, who will find it very funny.
- Comment on Religion 2 months ago:
I do know an Anglican priest-in-training who refers to God with They/Them pronouns because thinking of God in a monogender way is weird to them. This apparently isn’t particularly controversial within their mini community, although there was a big argument once when someone suggested that capitalised pronouns (such as He/Him or They/Them) technically means God uses neopronouns
- Comment on Religion 2 months ago:
The way that someone explained it to be once is that if we think about the typical monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient God — surely a God would be far more than what humans can comprehend at all, right? So any single characterisation of God is going to seem weirdly limited, because it’ll be grounded in our human perspective. So the idea is sort of like God™ is like a diamond, and each of the Hindu Gods is like a facet of that gem. The problem is that our human perspectives can’t understand the diamond (similar to how visualising 4D shapes like a tesseract is trippy and hard) so we have to try to understand the diamond by looking at each of its facets and trying to imagine an entity that can be all of those things at once.
As someone who is neither Hindu or Christian, it reminds me of the Holy Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
- Comment on Why aren't you 2 months ago:
- Comment on *cough cough* GOLLUM *cough cough* 2 months ago:
The bear deserves better food
