There are plenty of other communities people made, just most didn’t become very active. If the Linux memes are everywhere, it’s because those are the people actually active here
Personally I don’t think I’ve noticed this. Things devolving into political discussions, sure, but that’s par for the course with social media I imagine. I had assumed you meant the prevalence of Linux stuff on the all feed.
The news communities outside of lemmy.ml are probably a better bet than the ones on lemmy.ml, because the lemmy devs themselves seem to hold that kind of view, and they run that instance.
Does it actually have to maintain physical integrity as a single structure? If it’s not got a vacuum chamber due to relying on the ambient vacuum, then each section of magnets need not physically touch, so the individual components need only use some of the energy from their power source to actively steer themselves into formation rather than rely on material strength to hold together.
Now I’m imagining placing a ring of gigantic dyson-sphere powered magnets in an intergalactic void to create the final and ultimate supercollider, the size of a galactic supercluster
Both seeing this question, and seeing how many people apparently have cleaning robots, is making me realize I live in more futuristic times than I thought. I remember people getting exited about Roombas when I was very young, but not having heard much about them for years apart from the occasional video of cats messing with one, I sorta must’ve assumed they weren’t really good enough yet to be common and had never thought to look into them
I mean, no one instance is really going to be that viable a competitor on its own, isn’t the entire point of fedi platforms that what you get is an amalgamation of all (or at least most, after considering defederation) of them?
Speed limits are a not a good analogy to language rules, partly because they are generally intentionally designed rather than a product of an evolutionary pattern, partly because there is a clear and accepted authority that sets and enforces them with actual penalty, and partly because the consequences for not having them are often deadly.
By contrast, there is no clear authority that “owns” a language and can enforce it’s rules. Some government or academic body might in some cases declare that it has that authority, but they don’t really have any ability to set more than guidelines for how people working for them or producing documents on their behalf must write. Unlike speed limits, which simply would stop existing in a meaningful sense if governments stopped existing, languages existed before any such “authorities” did and would continue to exist if those organizations ceased. As such, I’d argue that linguistic rules aren’t really rules at all in the normal sense, there’s no-one with actual accepted authority to create, repeal, impose or enforce them, they’re just guidelines, loose ones at that, that one should follow if one’s intent is to be understood by someone else using the same or sufficiently similar guidelines. If you understand what someone is saying, which in cases like “should of”, people calling it against the rules clearly do, then they have succeeded in that goal, so it cannot really be a failure at being literate.
I reject any notion that this will eventually overcomplicate language to the point of it being too difficult to learn or use, because ultimately, people are not born knowing it, they must all learn, so any language too complex to learn wont be learned and therefore won’t be used, and similarly, any language too complicated and unclear to be used to communicate, can’t be used, and so won’t be. The complexity of language is inherently self-limiting at a level that prevents it from becoming useless.
Or for a TLDR: we don’t have to change the rules to accommodate people breaking them, because there aren’t really any rules at all.
It’s known that sneezing is a reflex to prevent dust or nose hairs or whatever from getting down into the lungs, but why do people and animals sometimes get hiccups? What function does that serve, and what causes them?...
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that I very consistently (as in, nearly 100% of the time) get hiccups while shaving, almost always whenever I get to the parts under my chin or the sides of my neck, with the severity getting worse the longer it takes me to do those areas. I’m kinda curious why that might happen, especially if hiccups have to do with food (I obviously don’t eat anything while shaving). Every time I’ve asked someone about this when the topic of hiccups comes up somewhere, they’ve told me this doesn’t happen to them and have never heard of it being a thing, so maybe I’m just weird that way? Kinda frustrating tbh as I’ve yet to find a way to prevent it.
I’ve vaguely heard of them but not really looked into what makes them different from any other conventional razor. I might consider trying one I suppose.
I’ve always used electric shavers, as I greatly prefer not having to deal with constantly buying replacement blades for the more traditional kind. I’ve had my suspicions that maybe the vibration has something to do with it, but I’ve no idea how it would do so.
I think something to consider is the sheer timescale that evolving civilization implies, evolution takes a very long time, and as far as we know nothing else on earth quite is as smart as humans. That means that another species on earth developing civilization implies one of three things:
That we will have been interacting in some form with their ancestors as they evolve intelligence for a very long time, and so their civilization will have evolved with and probably around ours, rather than completely separately, meaning that they probably won’t be a separate civilization so much as we’d have a shared one, or at least a loosely connected one. (Like if over the next several thousand years, some octopus was to slowly get smarter and eventually evolve to civilization, they’d do so in an ocean littered with human artifacts and shaped by human activity, and they might even need some of this stuff in some way, like maybe they develop metalworking by shaping bits of metal in shipwrecks and garbage rather than extracting it from rocks for example.)
That they already were intelligent in a way similar to humans, with language and other such things needed to develop civilization, without us knowing, but simply had not invented it yet (like humans were until around 10000 years or so ago, most of our history as a species). In this case, I don’t think just leaving them to their own devices without contact is a great idea, because they’ll probably have an extremely bad view of humans (we don’t tend to treat wild animals all that well, and especially the more intelligent ones, which we have often hunted for food or to remove competition, and they’re probably going to have a whole lot of stories and oral history about us as a result.) Since they haven’t been able to really do much in retaliation (to the point we didn’t even recognize them trying), they’ll probably think of us less as just rivals and more like unstoppable monsters to be avoided at all costs. This kind of view is basically setting us up for conflict with them later on, and will take a lot of work to address given how ingrained it probably is with their culture, so both communication and helping them out with early civilization problems that we’ve already solved is probably a good idea for peaceful relations later.
Finally, the third possibly is that they are able to suddenly become intelligent and develop civilization because we made them that way, ie, they’re either AIs of some sort, or an intelligent species we engineered, or an existing species like dolphins or such who’s intelligence we have artificially enhanced (in science fiction this is often called uplifting). In this case, their civilization is intrinsically linked with ours from the start, and if they happen to need some of our technology to exist (ie, like machines need manufacturing equipment to make more of themselves, or maybe an artificially enhanced creature needs some kind of drug to get the intelligence enhancing effect or something) then making their own civilization without help from ours in at least giving them that tech isn’t even possible. It’s possible they might still want to go out and found their own government or something, but such a thing is less like a wholely separate civilization and more like just a new country, at least at first, and so probably should be treated as such.
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
deleted_by_moderator
bro pls (mander.xyz)
What's a sci-fi or fantasy book or series that you want to see adapted as a movie/television series?
I didn’t read this series when I was a kid, but I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber....
no window (feddit.de)
What is the name of your cleaning robot?
What name have you chosen for your robot and why?...
choose... (feddit.de)
Should of built a better foundation (lemmy.world)
Do hiccups serve any actual useful biological function?
It’s known that sneezing is a reflex to prevent dust or nose hairs or whatever from getting down into the lungs, but why do people and animals sometimes get hiccups? What function does that serve, and what causes them?...
Was it not ripe enough or something? (startrek.website)
If another species on Earth began to develop civilization, how would you like to see them approached?
Would you prefer a hands-off, leave them to their own devices kind of approach, a keep at arms reach gently advise, or something else altogether?
"Earth-like" (startrek.website)
Have you tried sunning you perineum? (aussie.zone)
MIGHTY MIGHTY HETEROMORPHIN TIME (mander.xyz)
listen, little timmy needs to learn sometime (mander.xyz)
www.nasa.gov/…/why-sun-wont-become-black-hole/
Rocket, 1914 (slrpnk.net)
I have a logic joke, and it is inductively defined as follows: (mander.xyz)
Two ship-mascot cats being held while their ships are repaired, WW1, 1918 (lemmy.world)
Are you 0K? (mander.xyz)