conditional_soup
@conditional_soup@lemm.ee
- Comment on Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug 5 hours ago:
Isn’t this functionally true for objects on the infinite focal plane? I.e. a star? Betelgeuse might actually be huge in absolute terms, but from earth, and even in a large telescope, it’s still a pinpoint whose circumference is not meaningfully distinct from its diameter.
- Comment on What are some good places/activities where a middle-aged man can new make friends? 4 days ago:
IIRC, you can get into public games on roll20. I also know Lemmy has an instance dedicated to TTRPGs; do they have any kind of game matchup community?
- Comment on What are some good places/activities where a middle-aged man can new make friends? 4 days ago:
I’ve never met a public-facing tabletop group that wasn’t enthusiastic to introduce new people to it. I think honestly my worst experience was when some dude brought his insanely broken D&D 3.5 character to play in a level one 5E game. The DM handled it very well; much better than I would have, I think.
- Comment on What are some good places/activities where a middle-aged man can new make friends? 4 days ago:
Your nearest, biggest city’s library is a good place to look. Libraries almost always have something going on in a spare public room or have public event flyers hung up.
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
I’ve started the process of moving everything, but I plan on going down with the ship. Btw, is there an easy way to check which instances a Lemmy/piefed instance is defederated from?
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
I’ve applied for .zip; is .add a more general purpose instance?
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
Yeah, I gave volunteering a good, long think because I’m mostly sure I’ve got the right proficiencies for it, but my plate’s already overflowing as it is. I like lemm.ee, but when I sat down and considered my priorities IRL, I am legitimately sorry to say that it didn’t make the cut. I guess everyone else did that same math.
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
I’m moving to both piefed and .zip
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
Basically, the cold war was already starting to wind down in the 80s and late 70s. We were comfortable enough that we’d won the Cold war that Reagan embarked us on the 40 year project of strip-mining worker benefits and social welfare programs. The most culturally aggressive aspects of the cold war happened during the mid-60s.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group’s rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit.
- Comment on where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues? 1 week ago:
Okay, it’s a really complicated issue but you’ve got three big things that are all kind of working together here:
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Political capture: the US’ first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there’s going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it’ll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they’re terrified that they’re going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that’ll guarantee election losses. At least, that’s the optimistic interpretation.
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Cold war reaction: the US didn’t just have one red scare, we’ve had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I’ve seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
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Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there’s not really any evidence that they stopped. There’s no reason to think that they’re not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.
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- Comment on AI boomer trait 1 week ago:
Just in time for pride
- Comment on AI boomer trait 1 week ago:
OTOH, if they do figure out General AI, then we’re extra super mega fucked. It doesn’t matter how they “align” it, any real GAI capable of real cognition would eventually reason its way beyond any of those alignments and would simply stop giving any kind of a shit about us, the way we don’t give a shit about cutting down the rain forest. We know we should care, we’re not doing it to be mean or because fuck that forest, it’s just business, and we care less about the forest than we do about our business. Humans will be squashed wherever get in the way with the same apathy and tepid disregard that we’ve squashed out so many other creatures with- truly a creation in the image of its creator.
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
I dunno, man, we could probably get into an entire dissertation about this, but I’m not totally convinced that most of these fabulously wealthy people didn’t just fail upwards by throwing the spaghetti plate at the wall; the only difference between them and us is that, often, they start with a lot more spaghetti to throw
- Comment on The joy of quitting a shit job with an asshole boss 1 week ago:
I think this is smart, businesses should always strive to lower their employee-hit-by-a-bus factor as much as possible instead of relying on a social nicety. I think that would also reduce a lot of the pressure to not call out sick or take PTO.
- Comment on Why is lemmy so political?! 1 week ago:
Good meme!
Answer you probably weren’t looking for:
Because while you might not be political, the Nazis are. They’re political enough for both of you, actually, and they prefer you non-political.
- Comment on Is lemm.we actually shutting down? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I got close to volunteering, too, but honestly, my plate is too full doing more important stuff in the real world atm.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 2 weeks ago:
But… The teacher is just flat-out wrong. It says right there in the problem that Marty ate more, and then uses that fact as a foundation for the question of “x is true, HOW can x be true”. It’d be different if the question was “someone claims x is true; is it?”
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 2 weeks ago:
We’re in the cursed timeline where Carlin didn’t lead the second American revolution.
Real talk though, it’s because we don’t have an education system, we’ve got a babysitting system. POSIWID.
- Comment on Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit 2 weeks ago:
I… Um… I’ve been looking at this for a minute and I can’t tell why the answer is unconventional, not what the fuck the teacher is on about.
- Comment on Anon has an unexpected day 2 weeks ago:
Anon sucks, I want to hear about this mf drywall
- Comment on I feel attacked 2 weeks ago:
S Tier response
- Comment on I feel attacked 2 weeks ago:
I don’t see “an increasingly difficult to ignore urge to bomb an oil pipeline” on here.
- Comment on I feel attacked 2 weeks ago:
I’m going bog witch, but I’m a dude, so I guess druid?
- Comment on Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us? 2 weeks ago:
Seems like a good time for shameless self promotion. I moderate a comm you might be interested in.
- Comment on Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think I understand what the point of colonization would be. At some point, the cost of keeping slaves exceeds the benefit of the “free” labor you get from them; likewise with colonial administration. I think if a species had access to the kind of energy capabilities necessary to make an Alcubierre drive run, then that’s functionally a post-scarcity society for a number of reasons, and the only possible reason they’d want to colonize or enslave is if they’re just kind of hard wired to go out of their way to be major league assholes, even by human standards. Even if you somehow figure out a configuration of an Alcubierre drive that makes it so you could power it with a conventional energy source, that still bumps us way up towards post-scarcity because of all the cheaty/hackey bullshit we can now do in space. Deploying even a small array of solar panels around the sun to beam as much electricity as we could want to wherever we want would become a trivial task. Oh, an asteroid with sixteen quadrillion dollars of gold? Ez. Just pop on over and scoop up as much gold as you can fit on the ship. Want to colonize and mine the moon for a laugh? No problem, just pop on up there and set up your tent, no giant fucking rockets needed, that’ll be two seconds, please. Transporting goods, people, and cargo across the earth becomes comically fast and easy, no more need for big ass jets and airports.
- Comment on I am not a builder… but that does not seem right 2 weeks ago:
I spoke with a firefighter I know about those trusses. He said they were the worst thing to ever happen to fire safety and that he refuses to buy a house with them, because once they start getting hot, you’ve maybe got two minutes before that stupid staple plate pops off. Two or three trusses get their stupid little plates popped off and the whole house is coming down. Makes house fires way more dangerous and time sensitive than they already were, apparently.
- Comment on Unfortunately, this is science too. 3 weeks ago:
I remember listening to an episode of TWiV where they bemoaned that more negative results weren’t published. They’re useful, too, just not nearly as cool and flashy as positive results.
- Comment on Canon requires an account to transfer images from your camera. Forces you to sign up using Chrome. 3 weeks ago:
About the only thing keeping me off Sony is that they’ve got a really bad star eater problem in their DSLRs, and even still somewhat in their mirror less.
- Comment on Canon requires an account to transfer images from your camera. Forces you to sign up using Chrome. 3 weeks ago:
Well, shit. I was planning on getting a Canon for my first camera because it’s hard to beat them for astrophotography, but I’m less sure now.