official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
If you remove the recency requirement then:
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Original Bioshock is misunderstood by most people IMO. What was the point of Ryan's final speech? If he knew the code phrase, why he decided not to use it?
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SOMA had some very visceral non-political based and reality-pilled moments which I don't want to spoil.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.
Do they really?
One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?
Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.
So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You might want to read this paper on Reverse Dominance Hierarchy: https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
I got to it from https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/ which you might want to read first, as an aperitif of sorts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Have you seen the orchestral version of "Dragonborn Comes" btw? Your comment reminded me of it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hnXD6FRZtn0
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything.
The exponential nature of the normal distribution means that relatively small differences in the average ability translate to 100x and more differences in representation when we are talking about one-in-a-million and rarer levels.
There's this unspoken assumption that yeah maybe transwomen on HRT still have like 15% higher lung capacity, but there's like 1 of them for every 300 women athletes, nobody would notice them without looking on purpose. Then you have Lia Thomas and those cyclists and "All three medalists [in 2016 Olympics 800m track] have been found to have the 46,XY karyotype" (despite intersex women being even rarer than transsexuals) and try to convince yourself that this is a series of freak coincidences that definitely don't signify a trend.
No. Math says that if HRT and stuff limit inherent advantages of transwomen to like 15% on average, and there's less than 1% of transwomen athletes, then top 100 women athletes among 8 billion people will be entirely trans.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
If I were trying to invent a leftism capable of handling a workerless future I think I'd go along the lines of some of the recent questions as to how copyright interacts with the output of LLMs. Namely that these things are sampling out entire culture and to some degree we all have some claim to the output, even if it's only through the influence we exert on someone who exerts influence on someone who exerts influence on someone who directly produces lots of the training data.
Longposters shall inherit the earth, yay!
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
https://xkcd.com/512/ but for arguing on the internet.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
and for some reason I looked into their drawers and closets and saw one type of underwear of the same color,
Also black socks fit any clothing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Reddit nuked the API used by pushshift.io which they all used. So I guess no.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
I asked Bing's Sydney. Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund: An example of a modern take on the noir genre, The Crow Girl is a violent story with an unreliable narrator. Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories, and the crimes she finds herself investigating, involving mutilated, mummified children, explode into a horrifying and exhilarating mystery that spans decades and continents
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A bestselling and acclaimed novel that introduces Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator who teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve a decades-old disappearance of a wealthy heiress. The novel explores themes of corruption, violence, misogyny, and revenge in a dark and gripping way.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith: A charming and humorous series that follows Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of Botswana’s first and only female-run detective agency. Precious uses her intuition and common sense to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters, while also dealing with her own personal issues.
Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Indigestion is a common side effect of alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol helps with that.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:
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It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.
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The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.
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The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.
Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked. I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.
And my problem is not even that he's a Holocaust denier, I could tell you some things that I believe about that that would make you uncomfortable probably, it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid. Which, by the way, pretending to be stupid to confuse the discussion, is supposed to be the highest degree of anathema to you mods, but you let it slide when it comes from a literal holocaust denier because you assume that everyone who attacks him attacks him because of the object of his claims and not because of the stupidity/pretend stupidity of his arguments.
@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
GPT failed me on this, so I'm asking you folks: Find a sci-fi short story about a politician who was denied rejuvenation treatment and started a campaign against it in revenge, only to discover that being elderly he forgot to check mail and missed a letter offering permanent immortality as a space colonist. That plot twist came after he talked to a friend who explained that the only reason the treatment didn't grant permanent immortality was because of the lack of living space, once the space colonization issues were solved everyone would be allowed to become immortal.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
To be fair complaining about lawn aesthetics is just as bad as adoring lawn aesthetics. Same goes for reading all that shallowness and unwarranted feeling of superiority into people you never met, vs being that shallow etc. A house like in the picture is perfectly suited for reading Dostoyevsky in, and that's the important part, no?
I also don't think that there's a problem that warrants a solution, much less a centralized solution. If someone figures out how to use resources more efficiently without compromising much more important aspects of life with their "part and parcel of hustle and bustle", let them try it somewhere! If it works, people will come and other places will emulate it! If on the other hand you operate under an assumption that people are deluded about what is best for them and must be forced into correct living conditions with an iron hand, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's you who are wrong.
On the latter note, in my experience there's an inverse relationship between the quantity and quality of interactions with neighbors and population density, in terms of inviting neighbors to your birthday party or a random bbq, vs not knowing who even lives in the apartment next door. Like, you might think that people living in separate houses naturally become a sort of haughty recluses shunning human contact, while people forced into a sort of human hive naturally form vibrant local communities--nope, for some reason it's the exact opposite in my experience.
I don't know why, maybe it's because a separate house on its plot of land is much more self-sufficient in certain senses, you don't just sleep there, you hang out there in the evenings and on weekends, your kids play there and around there, stuff like that, so naturally you interact with the neighbors all the time. While if you live in a pod and have to go to do all other activities in other designated areas, you just don't get many opportunities to interact with your pod-neighbors.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Why do mosquito bites itch?
Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Scrapes and cuts, especially scabs, itch too.
It's not comparable at all. A cut doesn't begin to itch until after several days, and don't itch at anywhere the intensity proportional to the affected area. Needle pricks don't itch at all and they are tens or hundreds of times larger by area than mosquito bites. So no, it's evidently a reaction to the anesthetic stuff they inject.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
O, tick bites are a great example because they do not itch pretty much at all (and don't swell at first either), while mosquito bites start itching within minutes. So it is possible to anesthetize the bite location without immediately causing an immune response: why don't mosquitos do that, do they simply not care (evolutionarily speaking) or maybe there's some non-obvious benefit to it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Ticks will stay on your body for comparatively a much longer duration than mosquitoes. I don't see how there's any actual benefit from a mosquito having any kind of analgesic property when they'll finish sucking and fly off in seconds. The benefit to a tick is much more obvious.
I understand. To reiterate, my question was: do mosquito bites become itchy because the mosquito doesn't care what happens after it has fed, so whatever it injects is optimized for short term anesthetic and anticoagulant properties, which by default causes itchiness later? Or are mosquito bites especially itchy because there is in fact some benefit in that to mosquitos or humans?
To that I received several responses basically claiming that itchiness is inevitable, because scabs itch when healing, skin itches when pierced, an immune/inflammation reaction is produced in response to introduced bacteria and foreign proteins, and so on. However ticks provide an excellent counterexample: it turns that when it's important to pierce skin without causing neither pain nor follow-up itching for days, Nature finds ways to do so, despite all of the problems above.
So then back to my original question: if it is possible to be entirely non-itchy, are mosquitos itchy simply because they don't care, or are they especially itchy for some reason?
I don't know that I've ever had a mosquitoes bite become itchy as quickly as you describe.
Well, yes, maybe not in a couple of minutes (it can be hard to determine when the bite itself occurred), but in 10-15 minutes for sure, based on the interval between me entering a mosquito infested area and realizing that I've been bitten in a bunch of places.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #1 :marseyreading:. “The Master and Margarita” Chap. 1-7
You're welcome to join, 100 pages per week is actually not a lot given how well it's written, I accidentally got to chapter 5 on Monday night lol. Also apparently people are very surprised that rather than Dostoyevsky it's more like Douglas Adams with some extra dark humor.
The discussion is pretty good too!
You can pirate the supposedly best English translation here: https://libgen.is/fiction/819D3E8A110577E3C53018814ECAAACD, I checked out the first chapter, I guess it's about as good as you could expect a translation to be. Anyways, people seem to really enjoy it!
Marxbro was a troll by the way. At one point we had a discussion about the Labor Theory of Value, I tried my best to steer it away from theorizing and keep to a concrete example of some guys on an island exchanging fishes for pots etc, and eventually he had enough and basically said that no, he didn't want to explain this or that, he was doing it to get a rise out of people like me. Or at least that's how I remember it, it was, what, five years ago? But yeah, my impression was that he let the mask slip.
Of course, in words of a Chinese poet, if you pretend to be insane and tear your clothes and run into the garden, are you actually pretending, which also applies to single-mindedly "trolling" an internet forum for years.
My cats clearly don't understand how doors work.
They don't even understand that I open doors. One has learned that if she stands with paws on the door and looks at me and meows then the door opens sometimes, but I'm really not sure that she understands that it's I who opens the door, she just knows that "the door's open" tends to happen after "meow near the door". She doesn't understand "push on the door" leads to "door opens", I checked.
How would something like that work for humans? I mean, is it possible to imagine beings that are so above us as we are above cats and who affect our lives in meaningful (open doors etc) but incomprehensible ways? Like I have a literal guardian angel, I pray to it (like my cat meows to me), and then somehow things work out better for me, in an incomprehensible way. How could that work? How could an angel "opening a door" for you appear to a human?
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