Nepenthe

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Then they logically wouldn't have cared about the adblock in the first place...? Although I'm intending to go back to doing the same and it's not about whether I make them sad or not. It's a quality of life thing.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Could you explain what Gemini is? I already know without looking that all my search attempts are going to be horoscope stuff, and I don't have the info to really narrow it down to anything.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I don't understand how people do this, to be honest. Do you know how spicy food works? The receptor it triggers in your mouth is TRPV1, which does handle heat regulation and sensitivity, but it's also a pain receptor. Like, selectively removing it to treat the pain caused by bone cancer kind of receptor.

The kind of heat that sets it off is heat above 109F/43C, in addition to things like scorpion venom. Presumably it comes through as heat. Everyone tells me it feels hot. I don't get "heat." I get what is clearly agony in one of the most innervated areas of the body, and science backed me up on this.

Y'all are addicted to licking the curling iron and I'm the weird one

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

That's the weird thing that got me just a couple minutes after posting this, and I just sat there for a while, staring into the middle distance.

I am a sadomasochist that needs my salsa to be mostly yogurt.

You can build a tolerance, I know. You're literally burning your pain receptors out temporarily. But the kind of determination I appear to need to get there. How am I the world's worst bitch

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I'm genuinely sitting here wondering if I can flip my brain to see it that way, and that might even work in theory. But if this is my best way out...I don't wanna be turned on by hot sauce 😭

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Having not heard the song since I was maybe four, I was annoyed that they gave me the intended lyrics before I played it. I agree that most readers will be primed to hear it correctly despite sounding only new-age trippy on its own.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Yeah, I'm chalking it up to a blinding idealistic need to help, that those quoted seem so excited by this. On its face, yeah, this stands to do an untold amount of good for those who for one reason or another are unable to communicate. In addition to the toys they're talking about, like composing music (and I suppose other forms of art) from imagination rather than instruments/tools.

I find research into the ability to mechanically read and monitor thoughts to be a little horrifying. It's too much of a boon to think somebody wouldn't use it, and it's the last thing nobody could access.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I'm happy to see "fuck you, I got mine" is alive and well internationally, but why that was your first response to a plague vaccine being inaccessible to the masses should be up for question.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

There’s probably a reason why people keep mentioning them, no?

Shouldn't you be mentioning them to the Germans and the Swedes, since the former uses the same drywall Americans do and the latter builds with wood? We get bitched at but never them, so it's not actually about the materials.

You guys have never seen a window screen before and politely assume there's no real-world reason they're needed here. The answer is bugs. LOTS of bugs. Diseased bugs. Putrid bugs that breed like hell. Bugs who spray you with little drops of acid. Those don't exist where you live, so you have neat windows.

I agree that we're supposed to be in this shit together. It's fucking maddening that every time a disaster happens in Europe, it feels like the majority of us empathize with you guys, but the second half an opportunity arises here, Europeans point and laugh. Often about things they don't fully get or that were their fault to begin with.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I've never seen one block only one community out of an entire instance, but it's not surprising that they could. I'm assuming like an instance block, all lemmy.world accounts would be officially unable to so much as see new content from there, so no, it physically can't repopulate.

However, the admins will have to play whack-a-mole for a good while every time another one crops up and I'm getting the sense that unlike my fool's errand of blocking every sports community, they stand to be sued out of existence if they fail.

Maybe a bit rich coming from someone who doesn't have to pick up and move, but it's well-known to be an overloaded server anyway and after the initial Beehaw shock, the concept is really whatever to me as long as the fact that it's blocked is widely known. Probably new users will always have that shock, but mostly what it accomplishes is to encourage people to spread out and keep alts if they have too much FOMO.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Sonic Spinball

Oh god, I'm so fucking sorry. Do you have like a donation page for your therapy bills or something.

It's not a bad game, it's just that it's full of insta-death, has no pause or save features, and there is no Continue screen should you fail. If we stopped because we were being called to dinner, it meant having to play....the whole....game....again....all the way from the start. Proudly, we did eventually beat it, but mother of fuck

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.

If they start forcing ads, I'll just do what I used to do when I didn't have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn't like me "stealing," they can fucking pay me.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Ctrl+F'ing my way through the transcript of a 38min crafting video to see when they're ever actually going to do the thing they made the video about, if they ever get around to it at all.

Somehow, more than once, the answer was no.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

If my grocery store required me to either buy an unwanted, overpriced store-specific subscription or stand there listening to multiple minutes worth of sales pitches for shit that I also don't want and could never afford, and this kicked in every time I took an item from the shelf, regardless of whether I decided I was even interested in said item, then yes, shockingly, I am going to do anything except what they're demanding. At that point, especially if they don't like me doing it.

"Try not to make your customers' experience repeatedly miserable or you will lose them" has fallen out of the playbook for no particular reason.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Now all your other comments make sense.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I find the writing for each more or less appreciable, but I do think they need to slow their damn roll, definitely. Not only do all but two of them want me, somehow I ended up reaching this point at the exact same time with all of them and we might as well have solved the whole thing by massive camp orgy and called it a day.

I'm quite sure some of this can be gated behind specific plot points so the progression makes sense. I'm over here completely ignoring the plot for the side quests in Act 1.

Asterion says he "knows a place," which is predictable because Asterion would bang a tree if it weren't for the cock splinters. But he also very specifically said that same day that he's never been to the underdark before, and he literally can't know a place. We just passed an NPC that told us not to make the slightest perceptible noise or we'd attract ravenous monsters and we're going to be murdered.

Maybe we should wait to offend god until after we get outside, perhaps?

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Xenophobia isn't really my bag. It comes off bordering vicious puritanism and I'm left wondering whether it's the result of being ignored, or just the reason. I sat and did my work too, but goddamn.

I think the whole thing is fine, just...progressing way too fast to be believable, and hard to be "friends" without being cruel.

If we're talking about the nudist option, I've been continually asking myself why that exists when we already know why. It's eyebrow raising but if I wish it were the worst thing happening to me today. I can grumble and move on.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

She hadn't even told me about the religious stuff yet when the option came up. Although if you read her mind as a woman to find out whether she's serious, not only is the answer a dead yes, she's deeply confused and embarrassed to be realizing she's bisexual.

No interest in doing a male file in order to find out whether Gale, Wyll, etc. would react with the same awkwardness, but I felt that. Normally, the devs just address it by making everyone openly Bi from the get-go, and I appreciated the smallest shred of realism.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

If it helps, it only ever seems to be the tankies, which are progressively becoming the minority. I'm sure more dicks will show up in future waves, maybe, but...I'm kinda seeing the point of just the lowest possible entry hurdles.

Actually, hold on, tumblr was talking about ActivityPub a few months ago, so if they ever actually do that and do it functionally, that will change the culture pretty substantially. Much more weeb/sociopolitical. I'm happily fucking out of the politics here by choice.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I suppose the difference is the LLM knows how to build a weapon.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

A low enough priority that the further I get in my efforts, the more it sinks in with me that I'm mostly wasting my time. It's a hobby more than a skill.

My attempts to learn my family's native language have hit a roadblock: now that I have a handle on the grammar, there is no one for me to speak to. It's frankly pretty upsetting and I'm very discouraged about it.

You're required to know at least a workable amount of English in order to live and work here, so no matter where they were born, there is absolutely no one in what feels like this entire NW hemisphere that I do not already share a language with. And only one time have I ever known before they said. All other times, they've just happened to mention they're from there after I say something about learning it.

Most immigrants I've met are perfectly incognito, and they speak more than well enough for us to understand each other casually. The point of language is to communicate. Goal achieved.

Trying to find a language partner in this situation is proving not only impossible, it's nigh-pointless to even do unless you're bored. It's the same online — nearly everyone already shares a language with me, you'd never guess most of the time, and even country-specific subs sometimes post things in english.

There's literally no one for me to practice on and zero need to practice unless I feel like going halfway around the globe pretty often in order to make the effort worthwhile. At which point they will still speak to me in english unless I'm lost in the super rural areas, and I will simply cry.

I've come to accept that going overseas even once in my life is never going to happen. Europeans seem to vastly overestimate Americans ability to afford to do that. Even if we could, we still have an entire hemisphere to get through first. Which costs significantly less, is almost just as fun, and doesn't take multiple years of work for a skill you'll only ever use once.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

My grandparents were turkish and swedish, respectively, but neither took it upon themselves to teach either language to their children. My mother didn't even know her mom knew swedish til she was almost an adult, and the disconnected handful of turkish words was a result of trying to sneak ice cream past the kids. We were all 100% americanized and I feel horribly out of place even though I'm technically only second generation.

I do have relatives overseas, but I understand half of them are dead now. Since I was a kid when my own mom was ostracized, I barely even know any names and as I've said, I've never actually visited or interacted with them in any way. They may not even know I exist, tbh.

I could theoretically message my one remaining second cousin, I admit. You're correct. I have the sense this would be very awkward and I'd honestly rather speak to a stranger than explain who the fuck I am and why they should care.

Bonus points if they turn out to be super racist hypernationalists like my granpa so I get to be rejected by the one remaining relative that hasn't gotten around to it yet. Which isn't a thing that's physically preventing me, the prospect just popped into my head and makes me really sad and it would add to my therapy bills

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

The court concludes plaintiffs’ evidence forecasting excessive heat for the upcoming weeks and detailing the risks of heat-related deaths and illnesses is sufficient to show that irreparable harm will result in the absence of injunctive relief,” Nunley wrote in his order.

Last year, he ordered similar temporary restraining orders against the city to halt encampment sweeps during scorching temperatures that lasted nearly two months.

The complaint includes details from a sweep in mid July, when authorities removed about 30 people from a tree-lined street in the city’s midtown. The temperature that day was 91F, and the sweep came just before a multi-day stretch of triple-digit temperatures, according to the AP.

The city did not offer any housing to the people kicked out of their temporary shelters, the Sacramento Bee reported.

So it's a temporary ban on forcing anyone to move under the possibility the victim will die of heat stroke if they do. But after the ban is lifted, they'll still be shuffled around with nowhere to actually go.

They'll just keep struggling to live out of cars and tents (if they have those) in dangerous weather conditions because, from personal experience, the grand majority of people seem to think building shelters is the thing that attracts homeless people and thus, if your city doesn't have shelters, nobody will be homeless.

@OrphanCrushingMachine

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Not even in compact view on kbin. For us, thumbnails aren't automatically included in compact and I happen to hate both those things.

Lemmy is big enough that unless I did, there would be no getting away from seeing the same massive identical image over and over forever on all non-image posts, and any original photos would instantly become oases. Everyone would be forced to use those exact settings just to make it half-bearable. Fuck that.

Having just checked how this post looks on the logged-out lemmy site, this suggestion makes a hell of a lot more sense than it did, because this does not look to me like OP thinks it does, I assure you. I was all set to make fun of them and everything.

Really, it's just a want to make the sub icon more visible. Whole thing seems kinda niche, but you could make it happen on a user level. Just not by forcing every post to be an image post, please god

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

What was the worst movie you've watched?

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

"Russians gone wild." Russians? Why Russians, specifically? They're not even a clear ethnicity like the others. Is it the below freezing nipples?

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Well yeah, I'd imagine there's not a whole lot of diversity talk from ethnostates

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Putting the collide in large hadron collider

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I would have been torn between leftist philosopher and scumbag, but I really want someone to refer to me as Bloodmouth. That's metal as fuck.

Anyway, it takes five seconds to google what happens to a dairy cow if you stop milking them. The answer may surprise you /s

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Well, they grow into happy cows because I don't like how veal tastes.

Less reddit answer, I will concede that milk production comes from repeated breeding and is intentionally exacerbated by removal of the calf. And also that we could just....not do that. However, I would like to correct this and say that dairy cow is a breed.

Beef cows are bred to be stocky for the meat. Wagyu beef, made famous and expensive for its texture and marbling, covers only four breeds of cow, all specifically japanese. You're not getting wagyu from a dairy cow in Kansas.

Regular breeding cows produce around 1.3 gallons (5 liters) of milk and gradually dry out over the course of a year as their calf grows and stops drinking. Dairy cows have the same time constraints, but produce eight gallons (30 liters).

They've been altered intentionally to far overproduce as a breed and while tapering off would be possible, they would need to be monitored every time they're lactating so they don't live in significant pain or die somehow.

It would be disingenuous, I think, to pretend every cow is the same cow and we can just stop and everything will instantly be fine. I suspect if they had no dietary use, they'd require so much care they'd be a niche thing and quite literally all of that would be dumped on the ground or something.

Perhaps we could give it to the homeless or to starving bear cubs if we cared about those things. But giving it any purpose would encourage further monetization.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Doesn't make them good or necessary just because they're common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.

Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that's the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Moving one over here was fairly hard for this reason. I admittedly should be keeping it up still, but where realizing I had nine whole subscribers made me really happy (there are tens of us!), realizing nobody was ever going to make a move of any sort even to comment and that I was going to continue carrying this entire community by myself has made me very discouraged.

I know most people are content to lurk while they look for something that's interesting enough to post/interact with. I do that too. But come on, guys. Don't do me like this. Nobody goes online to sit and talk to themselves.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another "human" hits me with "As an AI...." or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.

It's not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can't be regained and eventually it's going to hit zero and I will leave.

I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot "activity" of reddit....I'd just move to tildes.

The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I've found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.

If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls....maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They're already doing it. 🤷‍♂️

If I'm lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I'd also be fine lurking while "other users" (the bots) give me things to look at, and they'll never go dormant.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Ukranians threaten to castrate russian POWs. Russians castrate Ukranian POWs. Now both sides are even and they can turn right around and invade their own country again, instead of thinking they own someone else's.

Where your own post is concerned, I'm going to have to take an undisclosed amount of time to think about whether I'm going to take seriously a story that seems invariably to hail only from Russian news sources when it says mean things about the country Russia is loudly invading.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

From an apparently uninformed discord user, deets? Granted, I've been annoyed at their insistence on monetizing via unasked-for "perks" I've absolutely never even thought to be interested in. But I've never felt like I was treated ill, and I assume there's something I haven't heard of

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.

Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez's clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.

Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.

Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company's history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.

If it was reddit going down in flames, that's always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you're reading this.

And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don't really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It's only going to get worse, not because they don't already have millions of users who didn't leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

You are thinking of state IDs, which already exist.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I could see it being maybe a problem since the company sells food, depending on how large a mohawk we're talking. Not like it isn't easy enough to set a height limit just so it still fits in a hairnet.

I know damn well I'm not the only one that would actually be put more at ease if the guy selling me a car or whatever had dark teal liberty spikes and a nose ring. It would make them much more human and personable than "smiling snake in a suit," and therefore I would be more likely to have a favorable opinion of them and maybe buy something.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

When it's too cold out to wanna walk all the way up there, I've gone for 3-4 months at a stretch. All I ever get is garbage anyway, so it's only ever mattered twice, and one of those was an expected package.

No one's ever called me a welfare check :(

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

My ass came to the whole comments section hoping to find out who the hell Moana murdered

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Yeah, I was more than a little bit surprised by just how unpleasant victorian roads would seem to feel. I knew it was bumpier, but that's all bumps and nobody cared? They just left it and went home?

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

You think it's motivational and uplifting, but really we're just all going to scavenge in the ruins

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Yeah, mine LOVES stick-like things more than anything else. But they have to be just right.

Chopsticks and skewers. Those fishing line/feather toys, but only the handle part, not really the toy part. I gather and replenish a whole collection of sticks when I go walking, but they have to be skinny little twig branches. Too thick to withstand her attack, and she isn't even interested.

She also loves pens/pencils, but only when I'm using them and only the one I'm using. So I suspect that one's a bonding thing.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

Can I not, though? With the proper software, I can add and alter video frames. This is still a bit limited now, but deepfakes are on the rise. I can already download someone else's art and add in whatever I want.

The only difference is whether or not the original creators/publishers approve of me doing that, not whether I'm able.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

It's ok, guys. This time they're making the whole facility out of SNES controllers.

Props to the journalist for keeping the written version of a straight face while having to include such paragraphs as

If a space station could be designed to withstand the sulfuric acid in the clouds, Söhnlein says, hundreds to thousands of people could someday live in the Venusian atmosphere.

alongside quotes describing the Titan as "a calculated risk" that is "not deserving of a negative connotation" because without previous experience handling brittle carbon fiber vessels whose single window was rated for a third of the intended depth, "certification would only have served to give the vessel the illusion of safety, which could have led to complacency."

Can't wait to hear Söhnlein and friends livestream it as their living pod is slowly eaten away by venusian acid, upon which time they, like their seafaring colleagues, will become extremely portable indeed.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?

“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.“
—Prof Lesley Hughes

When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.

The cause in both these statements is that global warming will NEVER be an immediate threat. Humans are wired for immediacy, and if the threat is not a right now thing, they switch to ignoring and adapting. Our psychology is wired to try to address the tiger and to adapt to what is unfortunately continual environmental collapse.

Those who understand we literally cannot do that and that a great many of us will die are not equipped to handle that information without simply sinking into increasingly immobile despair, because...what the fuck can I do about it?

I already eat little, don't even own a car, my worst offense is having internet but it's necessary for work. My other options are to become homeless again or Amish.

People in many countries are suffering greatly already from natural events that have been kicked up to 20. All I can do is watch. And I do. But more and more as someone who has a large stomach for suffering, even I'm beginning to evaluate what good it's doing me, as a civilian, to watch.

I can't help, or I would have. Whatever's going to happen to me in the future is unavoidable. My choices then are between Despair and Not Despair. This is why the masses won't pay attention. They don't have the bandwidth for the entire planet.

The politicians, however, have no excuse for this, and had we less tendency to shut our eyes and stomp our feet and more biological ability to plan in long term, they would be on pikes in the 00's.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

I mean, they're quite literally not, though. All it takes is luck, firepower, and someone willing take out Taylor Swift.

I'm sure it will have to get one fuck of a lot worse before people in that tax bracket catch it from their own security, but if enough people are self-sacrificing for long enough, they may even have to outlaw guns or something. Which would at least give my wretched corpse a chuckle.

Nepenthe , 10 months ago

It should count. It has water in it, and it's enough in one place to count as being wet rather than just humid or something. Now I'm wondering if stuff like sweat would work.