AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can anyone explain what the midterms means? Eg how it changes the power, how much it restricts Trump etc⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority, any legislation they passed could still be vetoed by Trump. To overturn that they’d need 67 Senate seats plus two thirds of the House.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia hacked..?⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Looking at the revision history, it looks like it was vandalized and then reverted five minutes later (and the vandalizing editor was blocked from making edits).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it "Their name is Trevor," or "Their names are Trevor" if you know 2 Trevors?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Their names are Trevor and Also-Trevor”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why methadone?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So it’s the opioid version of a nicotine patch?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If Dog's or any animal can catch human diseasies or problems, how come we don't give them flu shots or anything?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To get the maximum benefit per vaccination, it’s best to vaccinate the individuals at greatest risk of spreading the disease first. And in most cases, diseases that affect both humans and domestic animals spread far more quickly among humans, thanks to their larger and more heterogeneous social networks. So even if your aim is just to protect the dogs in a given community, you’re probably better off vaccinating x number of humans in the community than the same number of dogs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the net positive of Eugenics out weigh the negative? How so?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not eugenics, it’s gene therapy. Eugenics is when the policy is compelled by the state, for its supposed benefit to society instead of the affected individuals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do reverse thrusters work on an airplane, but a fan on a sailboat doesn't work?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A sail absorbs the wind’s energy (transferring it to the boat), rather than redirecting it backward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your thinking is that an AI wouldn’t have second thoughts and decide to change its first response?

  It makes sense, but at soon as it becomes a recognizable thing, they’ll make AIs edit their posts deliberately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it’s from Middle English “engin”, which at the time meant a device or trick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

  gin up
  2 (gin something up, gin up something) US English generate or increase something, especially by dubious or dishonest means: the trade press has ginned up a controversy | critics say the program is just a way for big drug companies to gin up demand for their psychiatric drugs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If all taxes got turned into bonds, so when they hit the limit the tax would end be way better than an infinity tax?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Bonds are borrowed money—they eventually have to be repaid (with interest) from regular tax revenue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should the next President of the US pardon Trump for all his crap like Ford did Nixon?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if Trump copied Nixon by resigning early so Vance could pardon him, he’d still be facing various state charges. (And he could always be extradited outside the US for war crimes.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would moving/shifting in the 4th (spacial) dimension be fatal?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’d immediately collapse into a wrinkled-up ball.

  The Pauli exclusion principle keeps particles like electrons from occupying the same physical space, which is what makes them take up volume and gives atoms and molecules their size. If they were free to move in an extra spatial dimension, they could pack much closer together, and their volume would collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A couple mates and I run askhistorians.lemmy.world. How can we get more people to post instead of myself all the time?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.

  I think people’s familiarity with the askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But even a non-expert reply can encourage clarifying comments from people with somewhat better knowledge who might not othewise feel qualified enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would happen if I just started replying to everytthing, even accusations, with "maybe..." like in some old Zen Buddhist koan?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It may be OK if your only goal is to avoid conversations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The System does not work.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My suspicion is that institutional dysfunction is a result of other systems evolving to more efficiently exploit it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The System does not work.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The purpose of a system is what it does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some fruit produce human compatible hormones?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All multi-cellular organisms use hormones and other chemicals to send signals between cells. We all inherited the same system, but we adapt the specific purpose of each signal to whatever messages our bodies need to send.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Greenland has over ten times the area of non-glaciated land that Iceland does. So if you’re measuring “green” in terms of absolute area instead of percentages, the name fits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is your experience like for Jury Duty in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve gotten a summons almost every year. Most of the time I just call in a few times and don’t have to report; most of the times I do need to report in, I end up sitting in jury pool room for half a day and then going home. Once I was selected as an alternate juror; I spent a few weeks listening to testimony with the regular jurors, but wasn’t needed for the deliberations or verdict.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What paper feels the best when you drag your fingers across it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eggshell finish.

  It has a nice tactile feel, but without the visual distraction of linens or laids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They despise the Americans they imagine live in blue states. The ones they meet in real life, probably not so much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between ignorance and stupidity?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignorance characterizes knowledge; stupidity characterizes behavior.

  You can be ignorant without being stupid and stupid without being ignorant, but they tend to be correlated because avoiding knowledge is stupid behavior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I may be wrong here. Isn't AI only as smart as the user putting in the information or commands? What's the big deal?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Comparing intelligence implies that they’re creating their output by a comparable process, but that’s probably not true—they’re just finding patterns in other peoples’ output. The “big deal” is that they can create new output on the same patterns.

  Human beings can do this too, though—it’s called “bullshitting”. The only difference with AI is that they’re so good at it they stumble onto the right answers more frequently than human bullshitters do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where do I go for unbiased news in the world without it having an ulterior motive or kissing ass to the establishment of said country?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get news from just about any source, but the trick is this: the only real information is in the discrepancy between what they say and what you would have expected them to say based on their past reporting and other sources.

  Before you read an article from a known source, try to anticipate what the broad strokes will be. If the article matches your expectation, you’ve learned nothing and can ignore it. If they say something unexpected, it’s because they encountered something unexpected and are trying to accommodate it. So figure out what would make them change their story as they have—that’s the actual news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Republican Party used to be very big on smaller government. What caused them to turn into the party of big government over reach? When did it happen?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Small government” only ever meant the removal of corporate regulations—in all other respects they were already above the law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America and it's racism and Israel?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nationalism is the belief that the world should be divided into ethnically-homogeneous nation-states. So it’s perfectly consistent for nationalists in one country to support other nationalist states outside their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is ZFC and why is it important?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The more abstract and general a theory is, the more different things it can be applied to. If you can figure out how to describe any problem in terms of sets, you immediately have all the theorems of ZFC at your disposal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In practice, sure—if nothing else, it means they wanted a tattoo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How accurate can your position be calculated from a photo of the sun you post online?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A correct guess isn’t usually based on a single clue, but on using multiple clues to narrow the possibilities down in different ways. So every potential clue matters and should be considered, instead of assuming it’s irrelevant because there are other clues present as well.