happybadger

happybadger, 11 months ago

Municipal fibre is the only good ISP I’ve ever had. Communities around Colorado are rolling it out. I pay like $70/mo for 1gb/s, consistently get 300-600mb/s download speeds, haven’t had any downtime in a year, and zero piracy warnings using public trackers without a VPN.

happybadger, 11 months ago

Condoms are dangerous and prevent your penis from respirating, trapping bacteria and making you sick. I have an immune system. I will never submit.

happybadger, 11 months ago

I’d immediately go for the minimalist apartment. A floor bed that I can roll up, a table and chairs I can stash, just a big open space with dozens more plants and my gun.

happybadger, 10 months ago

I wonder what a tan^-1^gerine would look like.

happybadger, 11 months ago

Over rice? Why wouldn’t you serve it with egg noodles? Over rice is just like making it a shitty curry.

happybadger, 10 months ago

Oof. Reddit removed me from one of my subreddits for posting. The head mod is now a bot that sells damaged funko pops, the next mod hasn’t been active in three months after quitting the website over it, and even the Judas who did a hostile takeover of the subreddit through the admins hasn’t posted in almost two weeks. Posting frequency for the subreddit is like halved.

happybadger, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

livescience.com/crows-understand-concept-of-zero.…

www.jneurosci.org/content/41/22/4889

ABSTRACT: Different species of animals can discriminate numerosity, the countable number of objects in a set. The representations of countable numerosities have been deciphered down to the level of single neurons. However, despite its importance for human number theory, a special numerical quantity, the empty set (numerosity zero), has remained largely unexplored. We explored the behavioral and neuronal representation of the empty set in carrion crows. Crows were trained to discriminate small numerosities including the empty set. Performance data showed a numerical distance effect for the empty set in one crow, suggesting that the empty set and countable numerosities are represented along the crows’ “mental number line.” Single-cell recordings in the endbrain region nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) showed a considerable proportion of NCL neurons tuned to the preferred numerosity zero. As evidenced by neuronal distance and size effects, NCL neurons integrated the empty set in the neural number line. A subsequent neuronal population analysis using a statistical classifier approach showed that the neuronal numerical representations were predictive of the crows’ success in the task. These behavioral and neuronal data suggests that the conception of the empty set as a cognitive precursor of a zero-like number concept is not an exclusive property of the cerebral cortex of primates. Zero as a quantitative category cannot only be implemented in the layered neocortex of primates, but also in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics. To explore whether precursors of zero-like concepts can be found in vertebrates with a cerebrum that anatomically differs starkly from our primate brain, we investigated this in carrion crows. We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one. Moreover, we show that single neurons in an associative avian cerebral region specifically respond to the empty set and show the same physiological characteristics as for countable quantities. This suggests that zero as a quantitative category can also be implemented in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.

edit: The idea of zero is always one of those things that seemed like it didn’t need big brain mathematicians to develop, like the Pythagorean theorem being a common sense thing you naively get if you’ve ever walked somewhere with a diagonal shortcut. You have a practical need to understand the absence of something numerical if you are a social animal dealing with resource scarcity. If I forage 10 handfuls of berries and need to distribute that to my group of little monkey-ass things, I don’t eat unless I understand that I can give away 9 handfuls but not 10. Even if I knew nothing else about mathematics I’d know 10-10 equals some kind of total absence of berries, with those still existing as a category without a quantity.

happybadger, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I hate when science headlines try to make shit seem all mysterious for clickbait. Those are just the blood temples. We’ve known about them for decades. It’s not like a whole thing.

happybadger, 10 months ago

You will live in the ersatz economy. You will eat the non-white people.

happybadger, 9 months ago

I’ve taken like four or five advanced trigonometry courses and I still can’t really define what trigonometry is. Mathematics is like Andrew Tate’s Hustler University scam. If you take one class, it only exists to prove that you’re a mark and sell you more classes.

happybadger, 10 months ago

From the shitty sky box it’s clearly some kind of alpha build, but damn the detail on the street level is so much better than GTA 5.

happybadger, 8 months ago

/r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn’t abolish democracy and you couldn’t abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.

/r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it’s restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn’t have anything to do with.

/r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don’t know what “modern art” actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there’s good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it’s reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I’ll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.

I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.

happybadger, 8 months ago

It was fun at its high point. The problem was like you said, always the same map. Shipping costs run like $20-150+ and that’s a month’s wage in many of the countries that have interesting snacks we aren’t already over-saturated with. Scams were only ever like 5% of trades at most and we never had a poisoning though, so overall a successful prototype of the thing that would work.

happybadger, 8 months ago

All my subreddits that I moderated went to shit after the protests. I stopped, the replacements stopped, the sudden influx of shitty posts and shady users drove off the normal communities.

Fuck em. I haven’t felt the urge to post on reddit in months and it’s lovely knowing the people I’m interacting with probably aren’t rabid fascists unless they’re Lemmy.world pissbabies.

happybadger, 8 months ago

He was weird. In addition to the posts on the daily election threads, he was sending me PMs that were flattering in a way Patrick Bateman would compliment someone. Everything was blatantly manipulative and worded in a way that was simultaneously an interrogation I knew he was feeding to the admins. Then the dog caught his car and had to drive it while everyone else on the road screamed at him. I think he lasted like three days before handing over control to one of the mods who was so offended that they quit the website.

Nothing irks me more than someone who can’t handle positive chaos or slight inconvenience. He was so determined to stop the protest which was only over us not being able to moderate the subreddit without those third-party tools, all to preserve the sanctity of a community he hadn’t interacted with in almost a decade. There’s something deeply pathological about a power grab like that. Like what the fuck.