cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many hand dryers not dry hands? Am I doing something wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree with the suggestion that there’s no technique. It’s not just trying to blow the water off your hands, it’s also trying to evaporate it, and both of these things are improved by mechanical action, and can be affected by environmental conditions, so even the super high power dryers sometimes need your help with that. Just like using soap is significantly improved by mechanical action, you have to put the effort in to rub your hands all over each other and get good coverage when you’re doing it because the blowing air is not going to do enough on its own.

  Water has a tendency to bead up under surface tension which reduces its surface area to the minimum it can and protects it from evaporation. High surface area is what allows increased heat transfer and evaporation, so you want to maximize it to get dry. Rubbing your hands together continuously and thoroughly pushes the water around, breaks up the beads and the surface tension. Don’t neglect the areas on the back of your hands, sides of your hands, between your fingers, those are all additional surface area that is wet and are places where water can bead up, and that will protect it from evaporation.

  Another issue is the human perception of how “dry” feels. Temperature and moisture are inextricably linked in almost every sense but particularly in our sensation of “wet”. Evaporation on wet skin causes a very real cooling effect, which creates the lasting sensation of moisture even when there isn’t any left. Hot air dryers can help combat this but it’s actually quite difficult to avoid completely and it’s possible to get hands dried in cool air that won’t feel dry at all (until they eventually warm up later). On the other hand rubbing your hands together creates friction which does in fact heat your hands, but also creates a sense of dryness even if there is a little moisture remaining. It’s a complicated balance and the point is that our perception of whether our hands are dry isn’t totally reliable to begin with. It’s much different than using a cloth or towel which wicks most of the moisture away without immediately evaporating it and doesn’t create the same cooling effect on your skin.

  Not rubbing your hands at all will take a silly amount of time for your hands to feel dry even under hot airflow, because it is just a slow process and because of the issues mentioned previously. But also keep in mind if you’re just rubbing the palms of your hands and flats of your fingers together that’s only like maybe 25% of your hands total surface area and you’re not even allowing the airflow to get in there, the combination of the two the evaporation of water will be similarly underwhelming. You have to really put some pressure down to flatten out all those little wrinkles of skin and you have to get a good rotation going with some wrap-around and between the fingers to get all the skin on your hands involved while also still exposing all the surfaces to the airflow at some point. As you forcefully spread the water into a thin film with high surface area more of it can evaporate quickly into the airflow before it can bead back up, as long as you keep doing this continuously you’ll keep exposing new spots of skin with super thin films of water left on them and it will evaporate much faster and after 10-30 seconds should give you almost completely dry feeling hands (that are probably actually dry). Give it a try. See how it works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you’re of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have you all not notice there are NO communist countries?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Benevolent dictators can happen by accident, but never by design. A system designed to govern fairly will inevitably be abused by people who have no intention of fairness. You can place as many obstacles in their path as you wish, you can’t stop them forever and eventually they will get around them all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There is nothing serious on Quora, it is a troll zoo. There are only trolls and idiots feeding the trolls.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was the fall of Rome this stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.

  Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't there that many forks of VS Code that isn't AI-related?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What would you want a VSCode fork to do that can’t be easily done with extensions? (which Codium can run)

  It’s more about not reinventing the wheel. A fork needs to have a reason to exist, because it takes significant effort to maintain and develop, and there is significant opportunity cost when that level of development activity is committed to that purpose. If there’s no reason to have a fork, then it’s more efficient to keep all the development energy and momentum focused in one place. And for Codium, that place is the extension repository.

  If Microsoft starts actively making the core software worse, restricting or stopping updates to the open source code, tying telemetry into features in ways difficult to remove, or otherwise sabotaging the functionality or features of the non-Microsoft parts of the code, there may eventually be a need for more, harder forks taking things in potentially different directions to get around Microsoft’s interference. But since that hasn’t happened, the non-Microsoft build process remains quite trivial and VSCode remains a perfectly cromulent editor when building it without the Microsoft crap, there’s really no need for any other forks. Codium does everything it would be reasonably expected to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does the GOP think “ANTIFA” is bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah people get nasty about it without any concern whether it makes them look like exactly the kind of dogmatic zealots they think they are fighting against. I am not religious in any way, but I always found it funny how certain vocal athiests will insist only fools would choose to believe in something they cannot see, and claim they know there is no god or anything beyond the natural world they see, because nobody can possibly prove otherwise, while also being unable or unwilling to stand their ground in any philosophical conversations about the nature of our senses and perceptions, or of reality or consciousness itself.

  I am of the opinion that such absolute certainty in something fundamentally unknowable represents a form of faith and belief no more valid or less valid than any religious belief. I’ll also assert there’s absolutely nothing wrong with holding such a belief, it’s even a belief I personally share, but you if you are being intellectually honest you need to admit it is a belief, based on no particular conclusive facts. It’s a belief in a thing that is beyond the reach of any kind of evidence that might be found in our present context, not an automatic default position everyone must assume unless proven otherwise. It’s as much of an assumption as anything else. I fail to see why anyone wouldn’t consider agnosticism is not a more “natural” default position than athiesm.

  If on the other hand they want athiesm to be a religion itself, where potentially unwilling people are told what (not) to believe by people of authority who have written impressive and stern books about it which must not be questioned whether they provide any actually reliable evidence that it is so, instead of just letting people see the (lack of) potential evidence and then make up their own minds to believe whatever they want to believe, then I would be pleased to welcome the Church of Evangelical Athiesm to the already rich and extensive tapestry of various religious organizations convincing themselves they’re trying to do good in the world.

  Beliefs are a choice. You can pick and choose. Most reasonable people, including “athiests” and “Christians” do that already, and I think this is the point that many militant athiests refuse to understand. They immediately assume the worst of every “Christian” based on a predetermined idea of what they believe without ever asking. That’s yet another form of belief.

  You can still believe in a “Christian God” when you understand that the organization of the Church is a system created by humans and the Bible is a book written and interpreted and translated by humans. The whole point of belief is that you still get to believe what you want, and you don’t have to believe what you don’t want. It’s not a monolith, even if the Church tells you it is. It’s personal, and other people don’t get to decide whether a person gets to call themselves a Christian or not. Other Christians might decide you’re not. They might disagree. But there’s nothing in particular that makes them any more right about that, than they are about stoning gays.

  I recommend athiests and Christians alike judge people by their beliefs, actions and attitudes, and how much those align with your own, not by whether they call themselves athiests or Christian or not. Sorry, I know it’s so much more convenient to just judge people by a label. Simple, easy, clean. But you have to look deeper than that, life not a simple thing, and if you think it is, you’re probably oversimplifying it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Long is Too Long for a Reply?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with “necroposting” in a forum is that it bumps the topic to the top as if its new again, some people think its actually new, and it usually starts the whole discussion over again, stealing attention from topics that are actually new and relevant. That’s why people hate it.

  It doesn’t work like that on the threadiverse. The only person who gets notified is the person whose post you are replying to. It does not get “brought back to the top”. It only exists if someone searches for it, and that doesn’t trigger the same “viral” flood of comments as it does from being bumped to the top of a forum.

  Some people don’t understand the distinction, and have evolved their habits in forums that frown on such things, so they continue to frown on it here without thinking about why they hate it so much. They will still hate it if you do it to their posts, and that’s perfectly valid for them to feel that way, even I feel that way sometimes, but you don’t have to abide by their rules. In summary, fuck the haters, necro everything, at worst you’re simply leaving your wisdom for some future searcher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do boycotts work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are a useful promotional tool for the cause. Sometimes they don’t work at all. How do you know which will be which? You don’t.

  Every person who supports a boycott very slightly improves its effectiveness, either directly or to create more awareness of the cause.

  Avoid black-or-white thinking. it does not have to “win” to be part of a change, it only has to have the chance for change or contribute to change, and we won’t know how much of a contribution it made, if any at all, until and unless the change eventually happens. It may be the butterfly flapping its wings that causes a hurricane, or it may be a butterfly flapping its wings that does absolutely nothing at all. Either way, let the butterfly flap its wings first, and then we’ll see what happens. It is neither guaranteed to succeed, nor guaranteed to fail. That’s the kind of black-or-white thinking you need to avoid. We don’t live in a world of certainty, the world is a complex place full of uncertainty. We try because there’s a chance, not because it’s guaranteed, and the chance to make a change is the worthwhile part you should be pursuing. Seeking absolute certainty from future events is a form of self-sabotage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I balance my checkbook every day. I manage my bank acount . Why does the goverment have so much problems with this? I get large payouts and such but it always seem they are in the neg??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re trying to use logic to understand it but you also have to understand that the only actual logic about is the logic we’ve intentionally applied to it, by choice. Money only has the meaning we give it.

  It makes more sense when you realize it’s all fiction. It’s just a game we play our whole lives because so many of us are very competitive and the ones who aren’t still have to compete against the ones who are, and at the highest levels of national policy they’re not even playing the same game anyway. They’re using it to metagame against other countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.

  It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Relooted - Game made by South Africans has been bombarded by right-wingers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.

  That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.

  The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what advice can you give me to try and mend a broken friendship so we don't interrupt each other or yell at each other while trying to solve our issues?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Analyzing your own feelings through the lens of stoicism may help. I’m not saying you have to live by the philosophy but it may help you decide which of your feelings actually make any logical sense, and that may help inform whether it’s worth destroying a friendship over them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do people call it “woke”?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No that’s quite accurate, they are against antifa. For example, Fox News hates antifa. They regularly call them a terrorist organization, use them as a pejorative or a bogeyman to dismiss protests or opinions. One could reasonably conclude they are very anti-antifa, making them anti-anti-fascist. This is indeed a double negative, which can be confusing and even misleading. If you seek to clarify the situation by removing the “anti-anti-” double negative, what does that make them?

  … that’s correct, “fascist”.

  Does that clarify things at all? Yes, I think it does. Interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the origin of the whole "X destroys and humilates Y" genre of debate videos?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …using this one simple trick!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does the Chinese government even work⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the end of the day all governments are desperately afraid of making people angry (at them), from the healthiest democracy to the most totalitarian dictatorship, because the people are always the overwhelming majority, creating all the goods and services, creating the surplus that the rich and powerful exploit and enjoy, and therefore ultimately holding all the real power no matter how much legal, policing and enforcement structure is built around them. Some governments are just extremely creative at making people forget that or preventing them from learning it in the first place, while finding ways to manage their expectations to either convince them to be happy enough, or to make sure they’re always going to be angry at somebody else (or each other), or some combination of the two. They usually turn to the latter when they fail at the former. When they fail at both, it tends to become a revolution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I regret attempting to answer your question in good faith. I should’ve known you’d be an asshole about it. All your other comments on this thread are asshole replies too. Fuck off, loser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is insulting people for their state (Florida) ok, but not gender or race?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an overgeneralization. It is not always okay to insult someone for their state. In fact, I would argue that it is only rarely “ok” and that requires certain rather specific conditions to be the case.

  People often do it without it being fully okay, because not everybody agrees exactly what these conditions are, and that creates an unwinnable situation where you’re guaranteed to offend somebody, and some people decide that is acceptable. Is this is a “majority rules” situation where if the majority are not offended it is okay? Not really, but many people (perhaps even the majority) treat it that way.

  I would offer to describe some examples of the sort of conditions that apply, but doing so is fraught and dangerous, not just because nobody agrees universally, but also because anything I could possibly say about someone’s state, someone else will invariably chime in and try to apply the same logic to gender or race. They will use it as an excuse to justify racism and sexism as if they are simply being reasonable. It is a trap and I will not fall into it.

  Instead I will offer you some questions that you can use for yourself to decide what conditions you might think should apply. And then you can feel free to apply them or not. I’m not your dad. None of these are absolute anyway, they are always on a sliding scale, there are always situational elements and not every situation is going to be the same.

  • Does a person choose to live in a state? Were they born there, and did they have a choice about that? If they do live there, would they choose something different given the opportunity? Is it plausible that they might get such an opportunity eventually?
  • Does a person sometimes insult their own state? Is it okay when they do it? Is it a joke when they do or are they serious? Familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes we just need to vent about our own situation, and that doesn’t mean it’s automatically okay for others to do the same or double-down, or sometimes you are welcome to play along. How do you know the difference?
  • Could the target of the insults be interpreted to be directed at the state’s government, law enforcement, education or other specific state-level systems rather than an individual or the state’s population as a whole? These sort of things probably qualify more as free speech rather than hate speech.
• ⁨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:

  It’s not hypocritical if you are providing affordable housing for someone.

  Despite the kneejerk hate towards landlords lately, which is largely justified due to the extreme levels of rent-seeking behavior evident in today’s completely unaffordable rental market, affordable rental housing is actually a legitimate market and there needs to be availability to meet that demand. Renting on its own is not a crime. Some people even prefer it. It can provide significantly more flexibility and less responsibility, stress and hassle, at a lower monthly cost than home ownership IF (and ONLY IF) you have a good landlord, either because they choose to be or because the laws require them to be, which is not so much the case with most of the laws.

  So for me those are the dividing lines. If you are not:

  • A slumlord providing “affordable” rental housing by leaving your tenants in unsafe, unsanitary, and unmaintained properties.
  • Demanding luxury-priced rents for an extremely modest property with no features that can be considered a luxury and no intention of maintaining anything to luxurious standards.

  Then maybe it’s not hypocritical. And I don’t mean just taking the highest price you can find on rentfaster and posting your property for that price because “that’s what the market price is” I mean actually thinking about whether that price you’re asking is actually affordable for real human beings living in your area.

  Basically, if you treat your tenants like actual human beings with the understanding they may be struggling to get by, trying to raise a family, working as much as they can even when work is not reliable, and dealing with all life throws at them, and you don’t treat these things as immediately evictable offenses like a battleaxe over their head just waiting to drop, then yes, you absolutely can argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone – because you are helping provide it.

  If, after contributing to legitimate maintenance expenses and reserves, you are making a tiny profit, barely breaking even or even losing money renting, good. If you are treating it as a cash cow that funds your entire life, fuck you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google will not be forced to sell Chrome, despite its near-monopoly, as its dominance is not 'sufficiently attributable to its illegal conduct'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well you see after being the shot the man decided to stop breathing, therefore his death is not sufficiently attributable to your single bullet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rogue.site is a new worker-owned, reader-funded gaming site⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yahtzee and his coworkers and team recently escaped from The Escapist (pun intended) to form a new independent group called Second Wind, too. I’m enjoying the direction that gaming media is going. Corporate media can mercilessly suck all value out of the industry until it withers and dies, and the names and legacies of these places will die with it, but they can’t destroy the talent if the community are still behind them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting old sucks, it’s only preferable because the alternative sucks worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Centipede Simulator Steam Page is now live⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks I hate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four wheels good, two wheels bad: why are there no exciting cycling games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Paperboy, duh. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing wrong with asking the question and I’m sorry if my response sounded dismissive or hostile, I actually think you asked a great question and your heart is definitely in the right place. I think we should do a lot more discussion and education around brain diseases and brain aging, if we spent as much time trying to understand how natural intelligence works as we do how artificial intelligence works these days, maybe we’d have a lot less chaos in the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is “senile” not simple enough for you? The problem is, it’s maligned because its too loosely applied and becomes used as an insult. So it’s really a no-win scenario. Make it too simple and it becomes clinically useless and people will throw it around like an insult, make it too complex and it becomes only useful in clinical settings and average people can’t remember it. Is there a middle ground? I’m not sure. Alzheimer’s and dementia/demented are kind of in the middle, but they both get used inappropriately and are clinically useless, so they end up being a worst of both worlds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did Ukraine provoke Russia by building a dam?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He is misinformed or deliberately revising history to fit his narrative. Ukraine’s damming of the canal was done after the annexing of Crimea, and in direct response to it. The other relevant dam, the Kakhovka Dam was built by the Soviets in the 1950s. It was destroyed (after a few failed attempts) by Russian demolition charges, though they continue to deny it.

  There were arguments from Ukraine about the continued Russian occupation of their Sevastopol naval base in Crimea, which Ukraine wanted to end. That was the real provocation that Russia could not tolerate, but that is not so sympathetic of a story as saying the “Ukrainians cut off the water to the poor independence-minded Crimeans” /s

  Of course, if someone is going to wholesale believe one side or the other I doubt there is any way of convincing them otherwise, but the facts simply do not fit the Russian narrative. If, indeed Ukraine “damming the canal” was such a great provocation that they had to start a war over it, why then did Russia subsequently destroy Kakhovka dam during said war which dried up the canal anyway? Of course they claim they did not, because it is a war crime, but it’s pretty absurd to pretend that Ukraine had the means to do it given the dam and surrounding area was very thoroughly under Russian control at all times.