theneverfox
@theneverfox@pawb.social
- Comment on Don’t Look Up director says ‘half a billion people’ have now seen film despite critics 1 day ago:
I don’t think that’s true. At least in the US, we’ve gotten so used to compromise and small wins that we celebrate things like the growth of renewables, but most people rarely ever talk about how emissions have only risen higher. They don’t want to hear how we crossed a major tipping point this year, or that our models are starting to look overly optimistic… They want to go about their lives and not worry about it too much
There’s no compromising with climate change, we’re still driving off the cliff. It’s okay to celebrate turning the wheel a bit, but sometimes we do need a reminder to look up and see the big picture
- Comment on Anon picks up some food for his family 2 days ago:
Half power, double time
- Comment on For French origin words like "meter" American English inverted the last letters of "metre" to better match the pronunciation. Why isn't it also the case for other similar situations like "possible"? 5 days ago:
Poss-i-ble. That’s how you say it in French
- Comment on Stop Trying To Schedule A Call With Me 6 days ago:
Because you’re one of their leads, and you too could cold call people from a list if you pay now!
- Comment on Enemies 1 week ago:
Unwashed eggs?!? Gross
Just kidding, I’m actually extremely jealous, those eggs taste so much better (and are probably way safer at this point)
- Comment on So many options, such excitement 1 week ago:
I’ve thought about it, but ultimately I asked myself… What would change?
I need to move, and I’m planning to. For the meantime, the water makes me feel sick, even the bottled stuff is only slightly better. The people I care about ignore my warnings…I don’t think any more detailed tests would change that
And I have tested the water myself, I’m sure I could get a more detailed result, but would it change anything that matters? Even if it is in my head, my body knows the water to be bad…I didn’t have this issue before, and I can drink tap water elsewhere.
I am curious, but getting the water tested is energy better spent elsewhere
- Comment on Anon buys a TV without researching 1 week ago:
There’s a lot of variations, most of them are kinda crappy and they might last a few months or for years, you never really know. This one looks very similar to the one that has lasted the longest for me
- Comment on So many options, such excitement 1 week ago:
I have one to add… The water supply
So I’m getting headaches, I’ve never had headaches except for caffeine headaches, which are (conveniently) only at night. I’m getting headaches after drinking caffeine, during the day, even after detoxing from caffeine. I’ve got filters, the area isn’t known for having bad water, but this started after I moved.
It took me a while to see the connection, but eventually I decided fuck it, let’s try distilled water. No more headaches, less nausea. What the fuck is in the water…
- Comment on Checking in 1 week ago:
- Comment on Anon buys a TV without researching 1 week ago:
You can get little combined keyboard/track pads for $20-30. They’re the same size as a remote, usually rechargeable, and kind of a pain to type on… But perfect for typing in the name of what you’re searching for
- Comment on Which one are you? 1 week ago:
Double time, half power. Everything just tastes better, it’s heated more evenly and less dried out/mushy
The amazing thing is I can’t get people to try it… Every time I mention it people look at me like I’m crazy to suggest they wait an extra 3 minutes for their food
- Comment on 2025 trailer be wild 2 weeks ago:
12am Happy new year! 1am Friend an hour back: Now it’s new years Me: well, I’ve been in 2025 an hour and it seems uneventful, probably a good sign
I’m sorry for jinxing it, everyone
- Comment on That's a good one 3 weeks ago:
Pagliaci goes to the doctor and says, “help doc I’m so sad.” The doctor replies, “your appointment today was for blood work, due to health system policies you’ll have to schedule a separate appointment”
As Pagliaci stood to leave, the doctor called out, “hey, have you ever seen someone eat a clock?” Pagliaci had not. The doctor whispered conspiratorially, “it’s crazy, check it out on YouTube. Make sure to like and subscribe, it really helps with the algorithm”
- Comment on Two in one stupidish question- Debate about United Healthcare CEO and best place to have it 3 weeks ago:
Fair, but I think our understandings of mob rule differ
To me, mob rule isn’t just mobs with pitchforks, it’s when people get so upset by injustice, they turn to violence. Humans are naturally very averse to killing, even in war, with their lives on the line, most people struggle to kill (hence the psychological techniques like dehumanization and tearing people down until they can follow orders without thinking much)
Imagine a feudal lord who works his people to death. To me, a knife in the back or poison in the wine is mob rule, assuming it’s organic and/or the people tacitly support it by closing ranks around the assassin
It’s anarchy, which is not the absence of rules, but the absence of explicit laws. Is the natural human state - we don’t need laws from the state or from sky daddy to get along.
Laws create clear lines (theoretically), which say “if you’re on this side you’re safe”
Mob rule means “if you piss people off so bad they turn on you, you suffer the consequences”. You don’t get clear lines to exploit, you don’t get to hide behind bureaucracy…you’re just responsible for your actions in a very organic way
- Comment on Are there people without handedness? 3 weeks ago:
I like to say I’m ambidextrous, because I write equally badly with each hand. I can write like 3x faster with my dominant hand though, it just all looks terrible… My typing is good though, weirdly, so is my calligraphy
I remember my friend helping me find my dominant foot though, it was similar… He threw down a board and told me to jump on. I’m actually a switch with my feet though, the “right” way changes moment to moment but I can switch without relearning from scratch
- Comment on Are there people without handedness? 3 weeks ago:
Ironically, Jewish history contains several occurrences where the default of right handedness was used to great effect
- Comment on Are there people without handedness? 3 weeks ago:
Happened in the US too. I had teachers who were forced to use their right hand… With “mixed” results. And by mixed, I mean they switched to their dominant hand the moment it was acceptable, if not sooner
- Comment on The Republican Flying Doctor Service. It's funded by taxes. 4 weeks ago:
Don’t forget the handwritten manifesto I was able to read in full the day I heard the news
- Comment on Two in one stupidish question- Debate about United Healthcare CEO and best place to have it 4 weeks ago:
The way I see it, this was just another shooting. Except, instead of targeting innocents or literal children, it was someone who actually played some part in making them so desperate
And in the first 48 hours, the adjuster did more to shake the health insurance racket than decades of the public demanding change.
They say we need the rule of law, otherwise we just have mob rule… But maybe it’s worth wondering if mob rule isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be
- Comment on Anon hates smartphones 4 weeks ago:
The problem is the chipsets, which include the radio. They have their own proprietary code, including some built in firmware. Along with things like roaming, negotiating frequencies, requesting MMS downloads and other niggly details, you have stuff like handling sim cards, emergency services modes, and public alerts. All of which I’ve heard are lightly documented and a pain to work with… It’s a lot of compatibility layers built up over the years
You can get a Linux phone today, the consensus just seems to be it’s not ready as a primary phone
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but go to a city and you’re just another import. Go to another country, and you’re just “the foreigner”. Through almost all of human history, you could just kinda leave your past behind if you just ran away
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
Consciousness is the AI assistant in meat mecha suit.
It seems like we make decisions, but we don’t. Think of a decision you’ve made - you think over it, you sleep on it, you imagine outcomes and might decide intellectually - but you don’t lock it in. That just happens - sometimes it even flips at the last second, and you don’t know why you did it - for better or worse
Our brain does a lot of preprocessing - vision, hearing, balance, walking, language…
Our conscious minds preprocess time. It turns our senses and our experiences into stories, abstract predictions, laterally pattern matching, and ultimately - analysis and recommendations
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
But that’s kind of my point - we do have evidence. As much as we have for humans, at least
Koko the gorilla is what made me start to question all of this back in grade school. This gorilla learns sign language, and is shown picture books with cats. She asks for a cat for Christmas, despite never having actually seen one. They give her a toy one and she gets angry.
Months later, they bring in kittens. She picks the tailless tabby and names it “all ball”. It was her pet all its life, she would take care of it and even told the keepers it had ear mites
On a foggy December morning, one of the assistants told me that Ball had been hit by a car. He had died instantly. I was shocked and unprepared. I didn’t realize how attached I had grown to Ball, and I had no idea how the news would affect Koko. The kitten meant so much to her. He was Koko’sbaby. I went to Koko at once. I told her that Ball had been hit by a car; she would not see him again. Koko did not respond. I thought she didn’t understand, so I left the trailer.
Ten minutes later, I heard Koko cry. It washer distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried, too.
Three days later, Koko and I had a conversation about Ball. “Do you want to talk about your kitty?” Iasked. “Cry,” Koko signed.“ Can you tell me more about it?” I asked. “Blind,” she signed. “We don’t see him anymore, do we? What happened to your kitty?” I asked. “Sleep cat,” Koko signed. A few weeks later, Koko saw a picture of a gray tabby who looked very much like Ball. She pointed to the picture and signed, “Cry, sad, frown.”
Koko described herself as “fine gorilla person”, she painted and joked and understood mortality.
Why is Koko special? Because she was interested in communicating, and so was her keeper. That was decades ago… Back when we rarely accepted animals were even sentient, let alone sapient
I’ve watched a video where a dog described it’s dreams, and one where a cat lied and negotiated for a treat before being convinced over the course of minutes to willingly take it’s medicine to make the “hurt go bye”.
My childhood dog was well behaved, so we’d let him in or out when he scratched on the door. We stopped paying attention… We only caught him exploring the suburbs when a neighbor called us. One day we were driving and saw him miles from home, so we followed… He kept to the sidewalks, avoided people, and looked before crossing the street. So we let him have his secret life, and he never got into any trouble… We wouldn’t have known otherwise, because he timed his adventures well
My mom’s dog used to watch dog shows, and smiled wide when I put a medal around her neck jokingly… Not when I put my keys around her neck, just the medal - I did ABACAB testing, just the medal got that reaction.
You can explain away all these things, or you can entertain the idea. Maybe Koko was the exception or my mom’s dog just thought the medal was pretty, or maybe she dreamed of winning a dog show.
We can’t even philosophically nail down sapience, and yet we don’t have a second Koko… Because we barely try to meet them where they are, and dismiss every success as an anomaly
The evidence is everywhere, we just seem to ignore it
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
How can we truly know this though - we don’t even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means “why are we the most special”. It’s been a constant game of moving goalposts
Here’s a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read
Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That’s the same as your example with eating slower
There’s also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one
There’s even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat
We hold ourselves back, because we’re always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter… But ultimately, they have different priorities
Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other “human” trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere
Whose to say dogs don’t wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
It’s crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved
Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren’t allowed to play with, and say “she’s thinking about it”. We avoid words like “walk” because they’ve understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won’t react the same to “should we take her for a walk” and “is he able to walk”. My mom’s dog knew all of our names, and the difference between “soon”, “tomorrow”, and “the day after tomorrow” - she would watch the door all day on the right day
And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as “she’s just a dog”. For them it’s just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we’re extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn’t planning or considering, it’s instincts fighting against training
But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we’re extra special
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
Heh. It was unintentional, next time it won’t be
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 4 weeks ago:
I never understood this weird hangup, it’s like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you’ll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing… You’re the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?
Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?
Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not… It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
- Comment on Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway. 5 weeks ago:
I think it absolutely laid down the base for the modern progressive movement - mistakenly believing protests do anything on their own
Occupy was huge, it was global and persisted for a long time, but it didn’t have any teeth - people just stopped paying attention and eventually police cleared people out
No one (rich) was losing money, no one (rich) felt threatened or inconvenienced in any way. They made their feelings known… But most people had no idea why or what they wanted, and politicians don’t actually care what you want. They didn’t even organize enough to be a voting block or clearly communicate their message
- Comment on how badly could a pelican fuck me up in a fight? 5 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t worry to much about pelicans. Fun fact - pelicans try to eat people sometimes. They basically try to eat every animal, because they have no sense of scale for their food they can swallow. And they don’t risk much by trying - most large animals have the same incredulous reaction we do
They are not very bright birds nor very quick ones. They are also not very agile. And as a bird, they have hollow bones and you could kill them with a solid fist to the chest… I once saw the aftermath of two shin high dogs tearing one apart. On a small balcony. There was blood everywhere… The dogs were covered in it, completely uninjured and very pleased with themselves
I wouldn’t worry, even if they have the sharp bits that could injure you, they lack the instincts to use them properly
- Comment on Mitochondria 1 month ago:
It also separates raw protons from hydrogen atoms and somehow turns it into spinny-motion, which it then turns into chemical energy with incredible efficiency. It’s a wild piece of biological machinery
