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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • my ex spent time in a woman’s prison in Georgia. she used to describe pretty much exactly this. among many other horrible things. it’s funny, in America there’s this common perception that the other prisoners are the scary part of prison. no, it’s the guards. they would find any excuse to beat people and rape was a nearly daily occurrence for some.

    the majority of her time served was before her trial or sentencing or anything. there is shockingly little difference between how we treat a person arrested, but still presumed innocent, and someone found guilty and in prison.


  • I think the Wikipedia article answers that question: “carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords could be attached.[6] A relatively small number have survived.”

    they’re fragile and don’t last. i imagine the act of reading them probably wears them down quickly if they’re read often. you read them through abrasion. books are fragile too, but it’s possible to handle them carefully and still read them. can these be read by sight? I’m actually not sure now that i think about it.

    this likely created survivorship bias. even in the cultures that we know to have used them surviving examples are uncommon. there could easily have been other cultures doing this or something similar, but we wouldn’t know before none survived the test of time.

    edit: read further and there’s also this “and most quipu were identified as idolatrous and destroyed,” -destroyed by the spaniards.

    classic.

    man i gotta finish reading first.

    “Various cultures have used knotted strings unrelated to South American quipu to record information — these include Chinese knotting, and practice by Tibetans, Japanese, and Polynesians.[10][11][12][13][14]”

    i bet we could get a better answer by looking at the cultures that did this but weren’t fucked over by colonizers. Japan seems a good place to start. one of the few countries that looked colonizers in the face, saw through their bullshit, then had the strength of arm to tell them to fuck all the way off.



  • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldTankie idols
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    5 days ago

    i mean… that is one of the most volatile regions in the world in the 21st century and it is almost entirely putin causing that. if there’s little competition then it’s because he’s the only major power in the region stuck in last centurie’s mindset and trying to pull the rest of us back. everyone else being better now is a point against putin.

    it’s like the rest of the world saw WWII as a lesson on how not to be, and he saw glory.


  • oh, that was a very different thing. in fact, i think it’s a shame that public reaction to that situation killed dolphin research.

    there’s a really really good episode of radiolab on this. the experiment was actually extremely promising and groundbreaking. they had a dolphin spending his own free time practicing in the mirror making human words with his blowhole. he used the water to try and make a sort of lip, rotating the blowhole in and out of the water to shape the sounds. this dolphin was able to understand spoken language and was observably getting frustrated at his inability to say what he clearly wanted to.

    the dolphin jerking thing happened because this was a dolphin actively in the throws of puberty. dolphins are intelligent, willful, occasionally evil animals. in nature they will masturbate themselves on shellfish and do other heinous sexually deviant things by human standards. the dolphin in the study was showing tremendous progress, but started exhibiting strong sexual urges. it got to the point that he was completely uncooperative. they jerked him off because he was cooperative after. there is no reason to believe the dolphin was explicitly attracted to the researcher and the researcher has said that she wasn’t attracted to the dolphin.

    this story was highly sensationalized. so much so that it completely overshadowed the fact that THE DOLPHIN COULD TALK. he wasn’t very good at it, but that’s only because he lacked the hardware. to this day no one can get funding for dolphin research because of this. it left that much of a stink on the entire field. we have made almost no meaningful progress in this field since. THE DOLPHIN COULD FUCKING TALK AND ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS HOW GROSS IT IS THAT THEY JERKED IT OFF.

    also very different from chimps raised by citizens with no real plan. this was an organized and funded academic study with many people working on it and many eyes watching it. this was not one of the things that we did to animals in labs at the time that was problematic. there were other things that actually were worth getting upset over.

    alternatively, I’ve heard it’s a good emulator.


  • i guess i just assumed paleness 😅. I’ve never looked into it properly. just read a lot of stuff in that general setting. have had a lot of context clues to build a definition around.

    but yeah, it’s definitely more of a status thing. just like nails. I sometimes wish people were more aware of the history and cultural implications of the trend and fashions they follow. long nails are a status symbol because the show you don’t do manual labor. so i honestly get kind of annoyed when modern people with super long nails struggle to do their job because they’re unknowingly trying to flex that they don’t need that kind of job. but you can’t very well get that context all across when trying to train someone and they get mad that they can’t do a thing with their 3 inch nails. and you’d be a dickhead to try.

    i hate fashion most of the time because it’s like 99% all just about flexing wealth and status and creating a visual representation of hierarchy. the “experts” who follow it don’t know the historical context or where these styles come from or what they actually mean until the very tippy top where it stops making sense to anyone else. those people just look at it and embrace with open arms that fashion is their way of separating themselves from the poors. the more i learn about it the more it makes me sad about the human condition.

    for most cultures in most of history, sadly the common standard of beauty was largely defined by wealth. our lizard brains want a partner that can raise a child well. best advantage you can give a child is tons of money. always has been.





  • what do you mean? there’s a million refillable options out there. have been for years. the popularity of disposables is mostly about convenience, habit (it’s similar to buying cigarettes), and laziness. it’s a great example of how much people just don’t give a shit. it’s actually waaaay cheaper in the long run to use a refillable one. gives a better experience with more flavor options too. but it’s maybe 5% less convenient to use. therefore only about 5% of users go for that.

    i fucking hate human nature.

    i have like 5 friends in trying to convince away from the disposables right now. I’m 3 years in, and may have one that would be willing to try it i bought it for him. it’s so fucking hard to change anyone’s buying habits. i don’t get why. these are all people that SAY they care about the environment. then i show them an easy to fix way that they are FUCKING INCREDIBLY AWFUL to the environment and they just shrug…


  • oh, there’s fields and fields of entire cars just sitting in all inhabited remote places. it’s becoming a real problem in Alaska. there’s towns there literally getting buried in dead cars because it’s too expensive to take them anywhere else.

    generally if you think “i wonder if this type of thing is getting disposed of properly or if it’s a huge ecological problem” the answer is always the latter. the humans in charge don’t care about the environment. that’s not profitable.


  • what do you mean pairing? what kind of os do you plan to put on the mini pc? the biggest hurdle is going to be hdcp compliance with any legal streaming service. something like kodi on the other hand, just works like any other pc? a mini pc is just that. a mini pc. there’s nearly infinite method to connect streaming services to a pc. I have a Plex server, but it doesn’t play nice with all content, so honestly, i usually just use my network storage and pull things straight from the file browser. load them into media player classic with madvr.

    I know there’s newer systems that do fancier things, but I’m content. I need to upgrade my nas to be better able to transcode x265 video streams. that’s s big drawback on Plex for me. my biggest use case is watching things virtually with friends. it’s how i watch movies with people. my server can current encode a single x265 video stream pretty well, but the second it has more than one client it chugs. forget it if 4 people want a 4k movie. I would need a crazy beefy rig to run that. it also won’t convert hdr without paying. most of my friends aren’t trying to watch on an hdr screen.

    so, we’re back to me streaming via discord screenshare. it’s not the best, but at least i don’t need to keep a separate 4k hdr copy of movie for myself and a 1080p x264 copy for Plex that way. mad vr will even handle the hdr conversion for me when I stream.

    it works well enough, though I’m open to suggestions as well. it needs to be easy for the clients to use. it can be hard for me, that’s fine, but jellyfin is too much for most of my friends and family. Plex is already pushing it.


  • fair in this context refers to paleness basically. though, it’s often meant in the same way that someone today might say “she’s thicc” and just mean “she’s attractive” in a more general sense. fairness meant beauty to European high society at the time. aside from the obvious racial connotations, it also implies that she has spent very little time outdoors and has been free of disfiguring diseases, so high of status. it generally carries a lot of implications beyond just “white” and “clear skin”. it captures everything that a European nobleman of the time would find attractive in one word.





  • better hardware has always been an advantage, but this is more in line with bmw charging a subscription for heated seats. it’s a new stage of nickel and dime monetization. and just because there’s existing ways to use money to gain an advantage doesn’t mean we should be inventing new ones. rich people don’t need the help, and these companies don’t need the money. accepting and enabling them on this will continue to consent to more and worse pay to win features.

    this is explicitly and exclusively a feature to improve performance. whether it’s effective is irrelevant. they intend to let you pay to gain an advantage natively in game. a non scummy game would instead try to minimize and mitigate the differences created by hardware, not add new ways to widen that gap.


  • you know what? my parents didn’t tell me not to believe anything on the Internet. they taught me to be wary of information sources and how to be skeptical in a productive way.

    the people that don’t have these skills are the ones that told you not to believe anything on the Internet. they don’t know how to tell what’s real and what’s not without their priest there to do it for them. now these people are all on the Internet without protection or guidance. the children that learned this behavior from them are here too. we had entire populations for generations that based all of their beliefs on what the local priest told them before the Internet. even after the printing press, many people relied on their religious leaders to interpret what was written for them.

    for the most part, any non urban population would have burned you alive for trying to think for yourself for generations. now we’re all surprised that they aren’t very good calling out bullshit.

    it’s almost like religion is often designed around letting the powerful control people. it WAS the system of hierarchy before capitalism. it’s where we got our social classes and kings from. it’s for the powerful to manipulate others. it’s working as intended.