AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When did people start saying "have a good rest of your day"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometime after sunrise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many people would a generation ship need to have for inbreeding to not be an issue?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the community name is semantically ambiguous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block chain to stop AI scams.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If spiderman shoots webs from his wrists would not the tension of shooting and swingiing up a skyscraper pretty much break his wrist? Also why SpiderMAN shouuldn''t it be SpiderTEEN?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If any element of the Marvel universe respected the laws of physics, it would break the rest of the franchise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How popular/important do you have to be for your death by homicide to be labeled as an "assassination"? What if the homicide is for a private matter that's separate from their importance?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  if the death is actually only a means to an end and not the end itself

  I would restrict the intended end to institutional change—it’s not an assassination if you kill someone for their parking space, but it is if you kill them for their school board vote.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a good name for a baby born with horns protruding from its head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know if it’s what you had in mind, but MediaWiki (the software WP runs on) has “interwiki” features that let MW instances easily reference each other’s articles; and other MW plugins (like Wikibase and Sematic MediaWiki) have features that let MW instances share their underlying data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re arguing for a particular public policy, then generally no. If you’re arguing for social change driven by private behavior, then perhaps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Felicity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I "sabotage" my own online content to throw a wrench in AI training machines?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically, the thing that most effectively poisons AI content is other AI content. (Basically, it amplifies the little idiosyncrasies that are indistinguishable from human content at low levels but become obvious when iterated.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just saw a YouTube documentary that reminded me of this comment—it describes how Galileo made his lenses by hand from window glass using an artillery ball as a grinder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are eugenics bad seen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For one thing, the idea that there are “bad” genes stems from the outdated idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between genes and physical traits—but the reality is that most genes govern hundreds or thousands of traits, and most traits depend on similar numbers of genes. So bad traits usually result from the wrong combination of genes that are not bad in themselves—take sickle-cell anemia, which results from the wrong combination of genes that by themselves offer malaria resistance. (Most cases are far more convoluted than that.) If you remove the genes that cause the “bad” traits, you’re also removing the good traits they cause in other contexts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are eugenics bad seen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Without even looking at the human issues, the underlying idea that you can improve a species by removing its biological diversity in favor of the “best” variant is catastrophically wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can make a rough magnifying lens by trial and error using glass and a hand grinder—not the same as prescription lenses, but for many it would be better than nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If suffering is good because it gives life meaning, wouldn't it follow that hurting people is good?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The original (and still valid) meaning of “to suffer” is “to tolerate”.

  Is it possible that whoever told you that “suffering is good” had that definition in mind?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone say "What ho!" anymore?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Was it ever a common exclamation, or was it specific to Bertie and Wooster?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Soup of Theseus⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like homeopathic soup.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had 1 dollar and 24 hours what would you do?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Give the dollar to someone who looks hungry, then go to the park and read a book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the ping between your eyes and brain increase when you're tired?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In the literal sense of the time it takes neuronal spikes to travel from your retina to your visual cortex, I doubt it.

  The more likely cause, I think, is the amount of resources your brain is devoting to the real-time modeling of your environment that those visual signals feed into, and that has to be processed before you become conscious of any changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the equivalent of rose coloured glasses for always seeing something in a negative perspective?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A jaundiced view?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who discovered/"invented" fire?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dont say Prometheus

  Ok—it was Προμηθεύς.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:

  A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
  B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
  C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.

  Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).

  If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption with no evidence.