Schadrach
@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on $80 for Borderlands 4 too costly? Randy Pitchford says, "If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen" 6 days ago:
To quote LazyTown: Yar har, fiddle de dee…
- Comment on “This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.” 1 week ago:
Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren’t generally very black for most of history.
- Comment on Anon indulges 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, but despite being diabetic I can’t live without apple butter. To be fair that’s why I get the “no granulated sugar added” stuff from Amish country. Depending on the brand, no more than four ingredients (apples, apple cider, lemon juice, spices), though my preferred brand only has three (no lemon juice). Way better quality than most other kinds too - you get more of the tartness of the apples because the only sweetener is more apple and they use less of the apple cider to sweeten than they otherwise might because you can only take it so far before it messes with the texture or flavor too much (which isn’t as much a problem for most other sweeteners) and it costs more.
Amish Wedding, Jake & Amos and Yoder’s all have good ones. The jar I finished off with my breakfast this morning was 5g carb/tablespoon, which is pretty low for apple butter.
Same idea for jams and jellies - particularly fond of Mrs. Miller’s no granulated sugar added jams, which get sweetened with fruit juice (which in turn has price/flavor/texture limits on how much you can use and still have a good product). Whereas actual sugar free jams by the major brands tend to be godawful with entirely the wrong texture and flavor - Smucker’s sugar free jams are an insult to the fruit they were at some point walked past during their production.
Related is that things that use unusual or expensive sugar sources (think agave nectar or honey as the primary or only sweetener as opposed to cane sugar, HFCS or something like that) tend to use less for price reasons and so tend to be slightly less horrific on the added sugar front.
- Comment on Anon indulges 2 weeks ago:
So yeah … that’s the story of how my supposedly healthy friend gave himself diabetes by drinking a metric fuckton of OJ.
Worth noting that drinking all that OJ also essentially means his blood sugar could not be properly measured by some of the testing methods used, because high levels of vitamin C interfere. I wear a CGM and it warns me every time I put on a new sensor not to consume more than 500mg of vitamin C per day if I want it to work, which is much less than a gallon of OJ. Same applies to most common glucometers. Unless they checked his blood sugar using a lab test that didn’t involve a redox reaction, it’s good odds that his blood sugar was not actually whatever it tested as. They likely had to make him swear off the OJ for a day or so and then rerun it to get a real number.
For reference, type I, was at 421 when diagnosed back in the 90s, blood sugar has never been higher than that though I did have one serious hypoglycemic incident where it managed to get low enough that it wasn’t measurable, after they started a glucose IV I came to when it got up to about 35. Closest I’ve ever been to dying.
I have about 2 hours of lost time from that incident, during which I drove a total of about 20 miles between at least two trips. No coherent memory of that period, just a few flashes - I remember the steering wheel in my hands and the pressure of the pedal against my foot, I remember the Sheriff’s Department logo sideways, I remember someone in medium blue, like a work uniform or maybe scrubs or something similar said something to me and I said something back (I don’t remember what either of us said) and then it was two hours after my last coherent memories and I’m in the back of an ambulance with a glucose IV in one arm, an EMT on that side pricking my finger to check my blood sugar and it coming up 35, and EMT on the other side squeezing a tube of glucose paste into my mouth that tasted like a tin can in all the worst ways. The EMT noticed me looking at him and started asking general awareness questions, seemed a bit worried that my answer to where I was was “in the back of a parked ambulance, but I’m not sure where the ambulance is.” Car was totaled, thankfully no one was hurt. I think whatever part of me was still capable of decision making was trying to get help, since I wrecked very close to a hospital ER that would require me to drive out of my usual way to get to.
- Comment on Anon blames millennials 2 weeks ago:
I may be wrong, but I was thinking the Machinarium with 8 gear rooms was the solution to something, and was being vague about it. So Workshop, Security, Utility Closet, Laboratory, Pump Room, Boiler Room, Hall of Mirrors to duplicate one of the above then Machinarium.
As for the drafting studio, that might be a solution. I’ve had bad luck getting it to pull too, only having seen it twice. Been holding off on picking an outer room in recent runs so that if I see the drafting studio again I can burn rerolls to force a shrine to get maximum use out of it.
- Comment on The ones and zeros and tens 2 weeks ago:
This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.
I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.
- Comment on Prices are out of control 2 weeks ago:
I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.
The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.
My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.
- Comment on You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE 3 weeks ago:
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
- Comment on You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE 3 weeks ago:
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.
- Comment on You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE 3 weeks ago:
If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.
This is literally how I got introduced to several bands I never would have heard otherwise. Missing one track off one album, downloading…this definitely isn’t the right track, but who is this? And now I need to download another 8 albums by that band…
- Comment on Anon blames millennials 3 weeks ago:
Again, I think I understand what I need to do for one puzzle, but if I’m right I need to draft 8 specific rooms all in the same run (I’m hoping I’m wrong and can come up with some other answer). That’s…easier said than done barring a lot of luck. It’s very much that I’m pretty sure I know what the puzzle is and what the solution is but the game is unwilling to let me draft what I need to solve it.
I’m pretty sure one of my missing rooms from the directory is some kind of elevated clock room (“High up among all the clocks”, the only “high up” room I’ve really got is the Attic and the only room with a lot of clocks is the Den so it feels like I need a new room), but I’m a few dozen days in and haven’t seen one.
If you’re post room 46 you probably know what puzzle I’m talking about, and I’ve got 5/8 of the keys and the puzzle behind one door solved. The third one I’m missing is almost certainly in one of the lockboxes in the Vault, but that’s a matter of time and luck to get vault, the right deposit box key and enough steps to get from one to the other in the same day. It’s another case where it’s not an interesting puzzle or mystery, it’s waiting on RNG to allow me to do the thing. Getting those keys, figuring out the puzzles behind the doors, and finding the rest of the red envelopes are my current big goals.
And boy do I wish that I’d got the coat check the only run to date where I got all the parts for the power hammer. Currently got the emerald bracelet in mine, which is nice but…
- Comment on Anon blames millennials 3 weeks ago:
Only thing I don’t really like about it is the drafting mechanic. I hit a lot of “ooh! I think I know how to solve that puzzle!” or “Ooh, I think I vaguely remember something in that one room that I didn’t screenshot at the time but I’m pretty sure was a clue for the puzzle I just discovered!” only to never see the relevant room(s) in a bunch of runs. Hell, I’m pretty sure based on a clue that there’s some kind of clock room (if it’s just the den, I have no idea how to figure it out so I’m assuming there’s another clock room) I haven’t seen yet at all dozens of days in, another related puzzle that requires I draft a whole bunch of related rooms that I never get enough of (unless I’m on a wrong line of thought about that) and a third related to the other two where AFAIK I’m waiting on a random item drop and the room to use it in to appear in the same run.
Even something like being able to curate the deck more than the conservatory allows would be tremendous.
- Comment on Winning 4 weeks ago:
I understand at a nuanced and historically informed level what’s happening at a political and geopolitical level here, and all of my bleakest predictions keep coming true
Let’s test this: Make some specific predictions for various points over, say, the next 5 years (start near future and work your way out). Put them somewhere where they can remain generally fixed but available (say on a pastebin or lemmy post or something). Then come back to look at them after those times have past and see how accurate you are. This would let you see your actual rate of accuracy as opposed to just the ones that stand out because they ended up true), which would ideally lessen your panic or alternatively if you really are getting it right in a consistent fashion we can start calling you gravitas_deficiency the Bleak Prognosticator.
For example just glancing at your profile one you seem to be doubling down on a lot recently is that there will be either no US presidential election in 2028 or no peaceful transfer of power in January 2029. That is easily verifiable in four years time. How do you imagine this will happen? Is it enough to satisfy this if the election happens and the GOP wins with a non-Trump candidate? Do you think opposition to the GOP will simply be made illegal? Do you think they will push an amendment to let Trump run again? Do you think Trump will just run again regardless and argue that the Constitution doesn’t apply to him because seemingly no other law does?
- Comment on I had no idea y cunt was this powerful 1 month ago:
and I became a vegetarian.
That’s just the estrogenization keeping itself active through phytoestrogens.
- Comment on logs are for quitters 1 month ago:
Usually space craft have relatively light power needs so why bother with a whole-ass nuclear reactor when an RTG is smaller, lighter, and has no moving parts? They’re a pretty common choice for space probes, for example.
- Comment on We are so cooked 1 month ago:
I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.
Of course not. That requires being infected by a trans first - they work under vampire rules which is why we need to keep trans and children away from each other! /s
- Comment on Virgin Physicists 1 month ago:
To an engineer, pi is 3
No, to an engineer pi is 22/7, 355/113 if your tolerances are really tight. 3 is pi to a theologist, because that’s what the Bible uses.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.
Somehow I briefly got her and Pluckrose reversed in my mind, and was still kinda nodding along.
If you don’t know who I mean, Pluckrose and two others produced a bunch of hoax papers (likening themselves to the Sokal affair) of which 4 were published and 3 were accepted but hadn’t been published, 4 were told to revise and resubmit and one was under review at the point they were revealed. 9 were rejected, a bit less than half the total (which included both the papers on autoethnography). The idea was to float papers that were either absurd or kinda horrible like a study supporting reducing homophobia and transphobia in straight cis men by pegging them (was published in Sexuality & Culture) or one that was just a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf as a feminist text (was accepted by Affilia but not yet published when the hoax was revealed).
My personal favorite of the accepted papers was “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” just because of how ballsy it is to spell out what you are doing so obviously in the title. It was accepted by Hypatia but hadn’t been published yet when the hoax was revealed.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 2 months ago:
The blue check went through some twists and turns. Originally it was meant as “your identity is verified”, then it became a status symbol, then it had extra features attached to it. At one point the people approving them were literally taking bribes to expedite or guarantee your blue check (like personal bribes, not a payment to Twitter). And at some point along the way it somehow became a “Twitter approves” thing, because at least one person had their blue check stripped for going too far as a right wing troll (Milo Yianno-whatever). All of that pre-Muak.
Post-Musk, it’s just a subscription you pay for with some extra features and there’s now a different checkmark for corporate or government entities that merely verifies their identity.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 months ago:
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
- Comment on Anon is a reader 2 months ago:
Now, what happens when we combine them together to make… Sonichu!
…you get serially harassed by online weirdos, likely become the single most documented human in all of history because of said weirdos, come out as trans and eventually get charged for incest with your mother?
- Comment on wrong again 2 months ago:
Most puberty blockers go to cis children too btw, and have for decades.
…specifically ones with precocious puberty, because hitting puberty at say 4 can have some lifelong detrimental effects.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 2 months ago:
I mean, except of those with agoraphobia or those who are incapable of leaving their residence due to physical infirmity of some kind.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 2 months ago:
I just want to point out that there were text generators before ChatGPT, and they were ruining the internet for years.
Hey now, King James Programming was pretty funny.
For those unfamiliar, King James Programming is a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, with quotes posted at kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com
4:24 For the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to.
In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out
3:23 And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.
I was first introduced to it when I started reading UNSONG.
- Comment on Meow 2 months ago:
My cat figured out the dog door by watching the dogs. She’s inside 80% of the time but prefers to do her business outside if the weather’s clear and goes out for an hour or so about twice a day besides that.
Of all things, my part basset hound mix is a bird killing machine despite the stubby legs, broken hip and arthritis. I don’t know how she manages to do it, but lots of half eaten bird corpses started showing up in our yard right after we got her, but only in the back yard which she could reach via the dog door. Starting before the cat started using the dog door.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 2 months ago:
And Two, companies generally comply with California laws because, on the whole, California passes mostly positive limitations.
No, companies generally comply with California laws because California is a massive market. Companies don’t, on the whole, operate on what is mostly positive for society according to a specific flavor of progressive.
Companies operate on what is most profitable, and selling to California is usually good for profits, while running a separate production line just for California usually isn’t worth it. So if the regulations aren’t too expensive to meet, they’ll just switch the whole production over to meet California law because that minimizes costs and maximizes sales. The same kind of thing also happens with Texas, for much the same reason - especially with textbooks.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 2 months ago:
I mean as far as metaphors go, it’s really not that bad. It’s visual and immediately understandable, and at least connected to the underlying thing it’s describing (network traffic really does flow down a series of wries/cables that are functionally “tubes” of electrons or photons). Hell, people have been likening an internet connection to a “pipe” since at least the 90s (it was already a thing when I first got internet access in '95).
Sure the guy who said it was a dickbag, but I can think of a dozen worse analogies offhand.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 2 months ago:
Never trust a salesman, and a politician is just a salesman selling that he should be in charge of you.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 2 months ago:
…and as many people voted for Trump in 2024 as voted for Trump in 2020, while Harris didn’t have the turnout Biden did.
