fubo

@fubo@lemmy.world

No relation to the sports channel.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

fubo, (edited )

Okay, so, let’s say it’s the descendants of the rats from Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

(Warning, this is probably fanfic. It is not intended as commentary on any particular human political situation, including colonialism, capitalism, communism, North Korea, Israel/Palestine, Native Americans, slavery, civil rights, libertarianism, or Trump. Really, I promise.)

They start out as parasites on our civilization; but they desire independence. Their philosophers believe (unbeknownst to us) that “to live without stealing” would be a desirable accomplishment for their people. They have ideas of both community and property; they have individuality and compassion. They argue with one another over their relationship to humans.

If we knew what was going on with them, we might have the chance to do something ethically competent towards them. But if a situation like this arises, we might not even notice it before exterminating it. Humanity has so much power over our world today that we might not even notice.

One initial problem is that we’ve been in the habit of fighting rats for millennia. They eat and shit in our food; they dig holes in our walls; we set cats and dogs and traps and poison on them. That’s how it’s been for a long time.

Another problem is that they know our language, but we don’t know theirs. Their ancestors were taught human language as a scientific experiment; after they escaped, they taught their children to read our language, so they could use our gadgets and protect themselves from our traps – and learn math and science and philosophy from our books.

But the human scientists never learned how to speak Rat. When the uplifted rats escaped, from the scientists’ point of view, the experiment was a serious failure – even contaminating wild rat populations with the modified and trained NIMH rats. The research team tried to contain the failure, then disbanded and went different ways; the idea “there are now rats in the wild capable of human-level civilization” didn’t even make the scientific journals, much less the media or policy circles.

In order to come up with an ethically competent response to this situation, we have to first recognize that it’s even happening. The rats dragging our electrical lights and books into their nest are doing so not just for nesting but because they want to read; the descendants of city rats are building complex colonies in our national parks because they want to become less dependent on humans.

But who notices new rat behavior first? People with rat-infested houses. Organic farmers who don’t use rat poison, whose cats are suddenly getting killed in farm equipment way more often than they used to. Exterminators. Health inspectors.

We’re more likely to notice the rats that don’t follow Nicodemus (who argued that rats must become independent of humans) than the ones who do. We’d first notice the clever and malicious ones; the ones who mutilate cats, evade traps, invade kitchens, and piss on our books and computers as if they were saying “we really fucking hate you.”

Or you’re a park ranger. The folks in town tell you the rats are being weird. Some wire and tools and books go missing … and months later some tripping campers come off the trail and tell you they saw a rat city in the deep woods.

After the fourth set of tripping campers talking about how the crazy city rats went and built their own city in the middle of a national park, you go up there to see it.

What do you think?

fubo, (edited )

Sometimes I pay for games. Sometimes I pirate games. Sometimes I buy actual freakin’ movie tickets and sit in a freakin’ comfy but chilly movie theater (wear a sweater!) and watch a goddamn mainstream Hollywood comic-book movie. Sometimes I download TV shows off BitTorrent.

I’m pissed at YouTube messing with my adblockers, because when I want to hear cheesy stereotypical pop-rock tunes from my youth, I go to YouTube first because YouTube had a mix of official music videos, remixes, unlicensed amateur covers, nerdy science fiik versions, and instrumental covers by twins playing harps. (And that male-feminist heavy-metal cover of “Surface Pressure” from Encanto.)

But sometimes I sing songs to myself, songs that maybe nobody else remembers – because the person who taught them to me is dead, and I never heard anyone else sing them, and I haven’t taught them to anyone yet.

(And the mixtape got stolen with my Walkman. Still pissed about that.)

fubo,

Top. It may be relevant that used Macs for years, and never used Windows.

What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?

I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...

fubo,

I’m not at the moment, but if I were dating, it would be within a poly-friendly social context. I’m not in this space by accident; it’s actually what makes sense to me.

FOSS alternative to... Sending Spotify links?

This is probably a dumb question but what is a better way to send a link to a song to friends without using Spotify? I don’t use Spotify anymore so I don’t like going back to that website just to copy a song link so people could hear it. I know I could send something like a YouTube link but I’m trying to degoogle so I...

fubo, (edited )

I know I’m middle aged but … MP3s? A few megabytes isn’t that much these days.

fubo,

Yeah. He was part anarcho-primitivist, but also part proto-alt-right.

fubo,

Create a new community. Host your own instance.

fubo,

Whatever lays your brick, yo.

fubo,

In some Caribbean Englishes, the pronunciations of the words “can” and “can’t”, which are opposites, differ only in vowel length: kyan, kyaan.

fubo,

This is very popular in newspaper headlines. It’s sometimes called a “noun pile”.

Times chief editor: Thirteen-word headline noun pile author firing race controversy rebuttal!

(That is: “The chief editor of the Times has responded in the matter of the firing of headline writer Joe Jones. Jones alleged that his firing from the Times was due to racial bias. However, the chief editor claims in response, that Jones was fired for writing a headline composed of nothing but thirteen nouns.”)

Beer pong is a party game played on a table. If you put the table in the pool, you can play water beer pong. Attach some floats so it doesn’t sink, and it is a water beer pong table. If you then strap a skimpy swimsuit to that table, the swimsuit is a water beer pong table thong.

fubo, (edited )

Hieroglyphs were used for different things! They weren’t always used to denote sounds, but sometimes whole words or parts of words. Some of the ways they were interpreted could seem like puns or puzzles today.

To make a very loose analogy, with emoji as hieroglyphs:

  • 🦆 — can stand for a duck, the actual waterbird
  • 🦆u — here, the sound duck is modified by another sign. This is the word duke.
  • 🦆o — similarly, this is dock.
  • 📐🦆 — by combining the signs for triangle and duck, we spell out the pronunciation of the word truck.
  • (🦒🦆🦒🦉📰) — the name Jack Jones, spelled as giraffe duck giraffe owl news.

This is an analogy; the point is that the same sign could be used for different things, especially at different times in history.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Writin…

fubo,

It is certainly possible to adjust some measurable elements of personality. For example, use of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) has been shown to alter measurable personality factors.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220878/
www.google.com/search?q=psilocybin+and+personalit…

fubo,

It’s not tuition, but rather openings for students and residents. If you want more people to receive more health care, you need more doctor hours. Which means more doctors. Which means there need to be more spots in medical schools and residencies. These are currently scarce.

fubo,
  1. Train a lot more doctors.
fubo,

Nope.

A mildly interesting Michael Moorcock/MCU connection or coincidence

I’m currently (re)reading Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain. Short synopsis - an educated, cynical, apostate and unapologetically brutal mercenary in the Middle Ages is recruited by Lucifer to recover the Holy Grail, nominally so that Lucifer can wheedle his way back into God’s good graces....

fubo,

Curiously enough, Marvel Groot is first, having appeared in 1960, while the Moorcock novel is from 1981.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groot
en.wikipedia.org/…/The_War_Hound_and_the_World's_…

fubo,

“American cheese” usually means a processed sliced cheese made from melted cheese curds. It’s most often found in cheeseburgers, especially fast-food-style cheeseburgers.

Related cheeses include Midwestern brick cheese which is used in Detroit-style pizza, which is a whole lot tastier than any fast-food cheeseburger.

fubo,

Folks can learn stuff.

fubo,

A more typical breakdown would be beer/wine/spirits, possibly with a separation between spirits alone vs. cocktails.

Which learning path makes the most amount of sense?

I just found out about The Odin Project, a self-paced online course to learn full stack web development. There are two paths: one is Ruby on Rails and the other is full JavaScript and nodejs. I am leaning more towards Ruby but I wanted to get some more opinions from folks in the field.

fubo,

Are you brand new to programming? If so, it doesn’t really matter what your first language is, so long as you don’t stop with one.

fubo,

Catbox seems to work pretty well, but do note that they are blocked by government censorship in some countries (see their FAQ).

fubo,

This would be a tripcode authorization system.

fubo,

Water is not very compressible; even at the bottom of the ocean a kilogram of plain water still takes up 0.982 liters of volume (compared to 1 liter at the surface).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Compressibility

However, actual ocean water is saline (salty), and the salinity of the ocean varies widely. Dissolved salt makes ocean water more dense than pure water; and the more salt there is, the denser it is. That's why it's easier to float in the ocean than in a freshwater lake.

Typically, the water at the bottom of the ocean is slightly less salty than the water at the surface. This is because evaporation happens at the surface.

fubo,

Well, there's not just one Them.

The Them who wrote your American history textbook and glossed over the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, aren't the same Them who write TV sitcoms that propagate stereotypes of bumbling clueless men entitled to dump all the emotional labor on their hyper-competent women partners.

The Them who fund intrusive social media, aren't the same Them who dial down the yellow-light time on your traffic lights to catch more people with red-light cameras.

And the closer you look, the less it looks like a Them at all.

The individual TV writers were really trying to be good TV writers, in the social & economic context of TV studios.

The history textbook people were mostly actual professors. They want you to have a good history textbook. But the Texas Board of Education is giving them a hard time.

Heck, the social-media programmers mostly just wanna launch cool stuff.

The yellow-light people, though? They have no goddamn excuse.

fubo,

Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.

As it turns out, it's not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you're interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!

More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they've built! They usually don't have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you're enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #