Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What was going on in England in the 1970s to give Monty Python so much comedy fodder that is still relevant today?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s such an interesting statement.

  Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.

  Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What was going on in England in the 1970s to give Monty Python so much comedy fodder that is still relevant today?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.

  The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).

  All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.

  During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good to see AAFES looking out for my health⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s especially entertaining with a Dutch accent rather than a Flemish one, as that “g” in “wagen” is said in a very unusual way compared to pretty much all other European languages and accents.

  Mind you, it’s strangely pleasant to say it that way for me as a non-native, and having picked up the local version of “God damn it” (which has a similar sounding “g”) as an expletive when I lived there, now - almost 2 decades later - it still just comes out in its own when I’m pissed at something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good to see AAFES looking out for my health⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “We’ve stopped selling paper due to the danger of paper-cuts for people. We will continue selling firearms and ammo.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cats are Healers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The calming down and stress relief all happens once the petting session ends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cats are Healers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Correlation and Causation are just fancy-pantsy words used by experts to lie to us common folk!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Energy 🤤⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Damn magnets just kept slowing the rotation of the blades, so good thing you took them out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Energy 🤤⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The ultimate shitpost is the post which is posted on a shitpost community and turns out to be entirelly wholesome after reading it (ideally getting people to read it twice or thrice to make sure), hence shitting on everybody on that community who expected it to be a shitpost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SHINY⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For every random genetic change that did something that turned out to be useful, there were countless ones that did nothing useful at all or were even counter-productive (to get a sense of how many “tries” there were, consider every time every beetle in the World tries to reproduce times how many eggs they lay times several random genetic changes per egg times millions or billions of years - we’re talking grains of sand in a beach level or even more, and this is just for one kind of creature that doesn’t even reproduce all that frequently).

  Then for all those random genetic changes that did something that turned out useful, there are only going to be some were that make enough of a difference in terms of increasing the survival of a beetle till reproduction and way more that didn’t make a difference.

  You know what happen to all those quadrillions or whatever of tries that went nowhere? We’ll never know about them because the creatures in question are long dead (if their eggs were viable to begin with). We’ll only ever know about the ones which did work.

  (There are actually a lot of cognitive falacies around how we perceive success because we only really get to know about what worked, not about the countless things that didn’t work. A good example is how most people pretty much only hear about Startups that made it big, yet for every Startup that does succeed enough to become widelly known there are tends or even hundreds of thousands that fail and we never heard about, so it might seem that Startups generally successful when the reality is, in average, the very opposite)

  Continuing on the Evolution story, if the previous part of the process worked based on the Maths of “trully insane large numbers”, at this point we add an effect akin to compounding interest: even if a genetic change adds a very small increase in reproduction for an animal - say, a beetle with a given random genetic change that did do something useful and gives it a 1% higher chance of successfully reproduce - as long as that trait gets passed down to the next generation, it means (rought) that all else be the same there will be 101 beetles born with that change for every 100 beetles born without it, for every reproductive cycle. This might seems little but as I said it compounds, so for example after 71 generations that will have grown to 200 for every 100 and it will keep growing.

  This is how even a random genetic change that gives even just a tiny increase in success of living till reproduction and reproduction itself will, given enough time, come to dominate a population.

  And then all those slightly different beetles keep on having the random genetic changes happen (the first part of the process) and those additional changes that did work and gave a tiny bit more success over that ones with just the original change will get the compounding part of the process.

  TL;DR (but you should)

  A beetle with a random genetic change that affected its shell that makes it every so slightly harder to spot for predators in a place that has lots of water droplets on leaves will have more descendants than the rest and some of those will randomly get additional changes that make that effect even more successful at making the beetle harder to detect for predators thus having even more descendants than the rest and amongst those the ones with random changes that make it even better will have more descendants and so on. Given enough time and enough beetles this is how you go from beetles with a “normal” carapace to beetles with a mirror-like carapace.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scalper economy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That “solution” suffers from the problem that requiring hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to get informed about and agree to do something is incredibly more hard than it is for a few tens of people or maybe a couple hundred to as individuals swarm the sales venues and take all the tickets to resell them for more money.

  Or putting things another way, it’s a mountain to climb for large numbers of people to organise and stop scalpers (and that, only for a while), whilst in the current commercial environment scalpers appearing is a natural outcome.

  This kind of thing usually requires changing the structures that make scalping so easy, rather than hoping that somehow (magic?) hundreds of thousands or miliions of people agree to do something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scalper economy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is the taking beyond their need, not if it’s many doing a little bit each or a few doing a lot each.

  A swarm of locusts still leaves you with nothing even if each one only takes a bit (and unlike people buying a handful of houses to profit from merely owning them, the locusts only eat what they need).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Turkey Temptation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The places I know were they do cook stuff using volcanic heat (in Peru and the Azores islands which are part of Portugal) they do it by digging a hole in an area were the ground is hot from volcanic heat and putting a pan cooking in it (they cover it all to keep the heat).

  So it’s more a local technique for cooking for free that then evolved into a couple of traditional dishes.

  Never heard of trying to roast stuff on the output of a geyser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shiny⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The amount of effort to obtain the female-impressing rock by the crow is far less than by the human, thus indicating that the crow is the wisest of the two.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Had one too many succulent Chinese meals…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This world is cruel…⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is really just about it being correlated to a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5 Pro is struggling to improve some games, despite its power advantage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ll paint flames on the side to make it go faster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They must not be tired⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re running around looking for the thiefs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.

  For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).

  Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on.

  Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as often does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.

  The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players are beyond that self driven to just explore just because liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.

  And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.

  The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Withdrawal is going to make people go mad⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I the only one who does this?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggest whilst agreeing with the objectives.

  It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.

  There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it or in disagreement with it but to try and help improve that idea even further.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monster⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and that being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

  Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Premium Ads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they’re premium ads because the advertisers pay extra for access to a pool of self-selected suckers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most powerful brain on Twitter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.

  One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Little kid: “Why is there a bright ball of light in the sky?” Me (thinking): “Oh, shit…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Do LED Bulbs fail? An Autopsy! - The Doubtful Technician⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.

  Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.

  As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the one with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Do LED Bulbs fail? An Autopsy! - The Doubtful Technician⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000 of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there are also some maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness after manufacturing).

  The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate.

  So you might try choosing the ones with CE marks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Since when does a clock need a privacy policy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.

  A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Since when does a clock need a privacy policy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s because it’s not a clock, it’s a private information stealing app disguised as a clock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can't figure out if this is a baby, or a cat⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In all fairness, he never had any in choice in your relationship.