AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of actors never get into drugs, and lots of other people do anyway. We’re just more aware of the actors because they’re living under a spotlight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long until we can start shorting years to 2 numbers again?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess it’ll be when the majority of the working population is Gen Z or younger.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what was the worst enemy of feudalism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It was a ritual of social inversion (a fool was crowned king, personal status was ignored and identities concealed, religious and social rules were relaxed, etc.)

  There are differing views, but one theory is that it served as a reminder to both lords and commoners that the social order could be overthrown if the lords became too oppressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what was the worst enemy of feudalism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Carnival.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does each country have a book/library of the laws of the land that a commoner can consult to check if they're about to do something illegal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From the article on Public.Resource.Org:

  Malamud called for increased awareness that Westlaw was a commercial broker of the United States Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and Federal Appendix. While Westlaw had been adding value to the content by indexing it with their proprietary West American Digest System and accompanying summaries, the purchase of their products was the only way to access much of the public domain material they hosted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  New Year’s is celebrated by everyone

  More so than Christmas, perhaps—but you still have people with different calendars (Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, etc.).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word or (concise) phrase to describe the paradox of sharing something (like a website) that you don't like, but because you're sharing it you're tacitly helping it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Feeding the trolls?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does everyone put celery in soup stock?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Water Chestnuts are a fantastic substitute if you like the crunch.

  My opinion of celery vs water chestnuts is apparently the exact reverse of yours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are all dinosaur fossils 'replicas'?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:

  North
  i North
  -North
  i^3^ North.

  And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance… or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come there is not a pope without grey hair? I mean a much younger pope like 30s 40s. Really can't be that hard. You got an ocean of cardinals and priests who pretty much tell say?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of the people electing the pope have hopes of becoming pope one day themselves, so they elect someone they expect to outlive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assuming humanity last another few hundred years; How many human languages do you think are gonna be left in 100 years? In 200 years?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Once we get good, universal real-time translation, we might start to see a new proliferation of local languages. And of small groups inventing their own cryptolects for privacy, trying to evolve them faster than AI can keep up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for when someone is not capable of, or doesn't try to understand verbal communication in a language, they are fluent in similar to functionally illiterate but for speech?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Aphasia or aphrasia?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is it called "overseas" even if a dispora population move to a place connected by land?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Before trains, sea travel was the standard way to travel long distances even if a land route was available. Sea voyages came to represent any destination that was far enough away that communities wouldn’t be in continuous contact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is re-visiting a place of trauma a good idea? Have anyone done it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have any direct experience with that—but I’d say if you’re going to do it, do it with some friends and try to create some positive new experiences to overwrite the traumatic ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What exactly is the reasoning behind Satan ruling Hell?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah—Milton’s Paradise Lost seems closer to the modern conception.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be correct to say that enshittification is the physical manifestation of the economic ai bubble bursting?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s reversing cause and effect: the AI bubble is the result of the preexisting corporate practice of enshitification getting a new toy to play with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When kids come trick-or-treating, what happens if I choose trick?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Immediate civilizational collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would one run faster without arms?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Additional weight makes it harder to accelerate, but once you’re up to a steady speed it doesn’t make so much difference.

  On the other hand, using your arms as counterweights makes it possible to transfer more force from your foot to the ground with each step.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When did people start saying "have a good rest of your day"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometime after sunrise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many people would a generation ship need to have for inbreeding to not be an issue?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are actually two issues:

  • The most obvious effect of inbreeding is the increase in homozygosity for deleterious mutations, causing more birth defects.

  • A subtler effect is the loss of genetic diversity reducing a population’s ability to continue to evolve in response to future selection pressures. This would be especially important when migrating to a new environment with new selection pressures the species has never encountered before.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the demands of the No Kings protests? What's the plan if they win?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not wrong—the protests in their current form aren’t going to achieve anything by themselves.

  But adding some specific set of demands will accomplish even less: it will alienate supporters who don’t agree with all the demands, and it will allow Trump to claim to address the issues by cherry-picking and distorting the demands beyond recognition (see the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago).

  If we reach a critical point where mass protests can achieve some real, concrete good, it will be due to contingent circumstances that neither side was able to predict. But the contribution the current protests can make to that moment is to give everyone the confidence that the numbers are on their side, once a productive channel is found.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the demands of the No Kings protests? What's the plan if they win?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If a bus driver is trying to drive off a cliff, the passengers can band together to stop it even if they haven’t all agreed on a preferred destination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have you all not notice there are NO communist countries?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Since a theoretical communist society would be stateless, the idea of a fully communist country is an oxymoron. Instead you have countries claiming to be transitional states that are laying the groundwork for true communism at some point in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was the fall of Rome this stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:

  • The end of the Republic
  • The Crisis of the Third Century
  • The fall of the western empire
  • The capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade
  • The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire

  The most commonly thought of event is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When We Sleep Our Mind Creates A World In Dream Then Can't We Believe The Power Of The God? Human Birth Is To Attain The Supreme⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the community name is semantically ambiguous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block chain to stop AI scams.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’d have better luck doing it the other way around: fingerprint known non-AI content, and treat everything else as potential AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s saying 38 is the maximum lifespan predicted by their model—but it also says their model has an R^2 of 0.76, meaning their model only accounts for about 76% of the actual measured variation. And then they mention other factors that could account for the remaining 24% of the variation, including post-reproductive-age lifespan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless I missed something, the word “telomeres” doesn’t occur in the article or its source paper—rather, it discusses the rate of DNA methylation.

  IMO, the key passage in the paper is this:

  However, any genetic regulation for a species may potentially be a secondary factor as there may be other environmental selective pressures. This may be the case with species which have lifespans post reproductive age and therefore, there may be non-genetic factors that may be more predictive of their maximum lifespan.

  I suspect that the methylation rate is actually tracking the end of the reproductive stage of the lifecycle, rather than the length of the lifecycle as a whole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does information want to be free⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Storing information while simultaneously keeping it private requires a ongoing resource commitment; and there’s always a non-zero chance that it gets corrupted or leaked anyway. So in the long run, all information either becomes public or gets lost.