OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

As a wise person said once, "Not all older tech are necessarily worse.":-)

It's just that capitalism wants to sell you what they want you to buy, rather than what you truly want:-(. I mean, capitalism made this too, but I am saying that I think that is why people are constantly pushing for the newest and latest thing: b/c if you already have old thing, then they want you to buy new thing too, even if old thing was perfectly fine for what purpose you were using it for. :-|

OMG I LOVED Flatland! There is also Sphereland, but especially considering when it was written, Flatland was by far more innovative and creative. Sphereland was an homage btw, not written by the same author, and instead much later, slightly updating things to include Einsteinian physics.

Okay in that case, you might be interested to know: C.S. Lews - the author of Chronicles of Narnia, and well-known apologist for both christianity and atheism (hehe, he switched, then switched again:-P he left his childhood religion behind, became atheist, then became a different type of Christian) -has this trilogy starting with "Out of the Silent Planet". I highly recommend it for anyone who wants "imaginative scifi", in the spirt of Flatland. It is less known than his fantasy works, I suspect b/c the details did not hold up well in historical hindsight, e.g. all of those creatures on Mars and Venus that we never did end up finding... but it was nevertheless quite bold in its risk-taking in that regard, having been written prior to that - even though he knew reality was not going to end up anything like that, yet he made this fantasy work anyway:-D. Also I love the neat way he has of making you be skeptical enough to question EVERYTHING that you believe:-).

In that series he puts forth basically exactly what you are describing. These are beings within our universe, but are entities of energy whose only way to interact with our world is... well, imagine how you would interact with a bacterium: you'd have to make a puppet and say "this is me", but lol it really isn't. And yet, from a certain POV, it kinda is? Like the best way to talk to "you" is to walk over to the puppet and engage with it, which your set-up would likely be predicated upon, as in even if their entire universe is observable under a microscope slide, still that is where your camera is pointed and zoomed at.

I also thought it was neat how planets are these dirty little mud-balls, in the eyes of those who literally fly through space - to us they are our entire worlds, but to them they are navigation hazards!!:-P We are the bugs that splatter on their windshields? Or perhaps the mud-balls are dangerous even, like reefs to a boat. Another interesting point was that space is not as "dark" as those pictures from the moon would suggest, b/c of the light streaming outwards from the sun (this one I can never do justice to the explanation, and anyway it may have been just more fantastical world-building material). The first and second are wonderful depictions of what it might be like to travel to Mars and Venus, while the third is more abstract, being on Earth but they do wake up King Arthur, in order to fight against aliens acting as demonic spirts that possess the spirit of a beheaded psychic kept alive with like lasers or something, so... there is that:-).

So many scifi series - like Star Trek - do such a wonderful job of showing us these imaginative concepts. But still there is something to reading them rather in books (or listening via audiobooks I guess), and since these were never made into movies, that is pretty much the only way to experience them. Enjoy!:-)

That reminds me of this FASCINATING deep dive by Innuendo Studies on agency / protagony. Warning: while not technically NSFW... caution is still advised.

Hehe, I can just imagine that in my mind...wrrr.....:-P

Well, I imagine the write-once, re-write-never part also may limit its applicability too:-). Then again, for a purpose where the data doesn't need to be constantly changing, like storing a TV show or movie, possibly even music if someone wants to listen to albums rather than randomized songs, it could offer a lot of practical utility to many people.

as if I could give them the trans

Sorry but I did lolz at this - as if!:-P Part of the funny is that the Bible says "Judge not, lest you be judged", even though it also has a whole list of judgements for leaders, who were supposed to be held to a much higher standard. So to ignore the latter - letting leaders touch little children who would rather not - while also ignoring the former... they aren't even reading their own book.:-(

Though I guess you see that it is not just Christianity. In some parts of the world it is Muslim, in others it is Hindu, in still others it could be Buddhism, or whatever. One day there will even be fundamentalist atheists I believe, despite how it promotes skeptical thought and so that is fairly rare for now, human nature is just that lazy!

Anyway I am proud of you. Stand up for yourself! That is definitely not my situation but who the fuq cares, b/c you need to be (free to) be you. And that's the problem with Authoritarianism (here's a another link to a whole other series on that if you want - this Innuendo Studies should have nothing whatsoever to do with HBO, and therefore you probably have seen it already:-P): they lack empathy and allow - even perform - the judgement onto others (except their leaders, who they conveniently exempt from all proper consequences of their actions), never dreaming that one day it will wrap back around to themselves. "First they came for..." That process demeans us all, and yeah, one day it may be too late to reverse course. How ironic that you are showing compassion to them even while they spit at you (as Jesus would, hehe:-P). Stay strong, my sister in empathy!:-)

Speaking of, I hope you never catch up to us:-). Though as you say, the English speaking part is a bit closer to us in that regard, highly unfortunately:-(. Though, you still having a somewhat functional government does mean that you should be alright:-).

Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)

Welcome! :-) Things are better here, mostly.

Firefox is far from perfect though, and in fact it is so far that I do not blame people for not using it. I mean, I still do on my phone, but even there I keep wondering when I will get around to trying alternatives someday. When I do switch though, I will probably always keep a copy of Chrome handy, just in case.

As an example, if you use a PIV card (for work or whatever), Firefox has long-standing bugs from YEARS in the past where it will just keep querying it, over and over again, every five seconds, all day, every day. Not to visit websites that might need it mind you but just b/c. You cannot both keep a PIV plugged in and have Firefox open, unless you go in and do complicated stuff to remove the driver inside Firefox - which removes the option to use it when you do need it - and then even you have to keep doing that all over again each time you restart it (unless you tinker around and do even more complicated stuff - at which point why don't I just switch to LibreWolf or some such?).

Anyway, I still somewhat like Firefox - I use it daily and exclusively on my mobile - but again, it is not perfect, so I understand when others may make a different choice.

Edit: Yup, I am downvoted into the negative, without a single explanation as to why, even though I mentioned how I use Firefox literally daily and wholly exclusively on my mobile, where the majority of their development efforts seem to be going lately, but b/c I do not support it "hard enough" this is "bad"? Lemmy is extremely authoritarian when it comes to such matters as this - agree with me or else. Oh well, I don't mind if people choose to think differently than me, I just wish we could discuss it civilly - anyone want to try to explain?

SEOs destroyed queries so hard that LLMs had to come in and save it.

What will the equivalent of SEOs for LLMs be, I wonder.

This is at best a temporary reprieve, and we should use it to work towards a longer-lasting one.

Only in our dreams - unfortunately, irl nobody is coming to save us:-(.

That is a BIG load that someone dropped there!

I am curious: after having watched that video, do you still think most people are against it?

I think the opposite - people in cities tend to be, but a good 40-49% of this nation supported Trump in the last Presidential election, despite Biden ultimately winning and despite Trump having been impeached twice before that.

Countering that, the younger generations are more liberal, but we tend to eat our own, and e.g. the Gaza situation may generate a lot of "protest voting", the same as when Hillary Clinton was running and therefore while Trump did not "win" so much as she lost, it could all end up happening again.

Americans are fat and lazy - that's just our brand:-) - and to some extent the entire Western world is that way, but we do it to excess. By that same virtue, we are likely to convert into authoritarianism, possibly not even with a bang but with a whimper - not b/c of what we believe, but b/c we just don't fight back against those who do have firmer convictions (right or wrong).

Thus, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I hope that you lose your hope that "if shit does hit the fan, even the dumbest of voters will be smart enough to see that it is not something that they want and we can stop it before it runs rampant here", and start learning from our mistakes, by shoring up protections against it getting as far along with you. Which I guess you are doing, so I will hope that it works!:-)

really need to understand exactly what they are toying with

They do not. They will not. They refuse to contemplate doing so - they want a fix NOW and that is all that they will entertain.

And actually, very often they DO have empathy - their hearts are quite often in the right place, it is their set of FACTS that they believe in that are incorrect. e.g. people who take the vaccine b/c they do not want it? Fine, I mean it is not ideal but it is your choice... but then they send their kids to school and that affects immuno-compromised children, and far more than that, they vote sometimes against allowing you to take the vaccine too!!

Or abortion: if you do not want one then do not get one, but to stop others from receiving proper medical care? That is the sickening part. They do it "for the children", except ofc refuse to lift a finger to actually adopt a child themselves.

So often those lies are sold using empathy as the very vehicle by which they enter the brain. Except ofc it is not "true empathy", in the sense of actions and especially for those actions to match the words used.

The people choosing those lies are quite good at what they do, actually. And if they fail, they focus-test their messages and try again, and again, and they've been doing this for decades now so... they got good at it. And since I don't really see anyone at all standing up against it - I mean, is Biden? did Obama? is Trudeau, or Sunak? - I think they have a good chance of winning. It is just a matter of time.

Either way, outside of Europe and especially Germany, I do not see people standing up to climate change. More than nuclear weapons, THAT has the potential to end all life on earth - or at least human and possibly most of the animal life as well. The true "Pro-Life" agenda would be to do whatever it takes to stop that... but instead, Trump spitefully withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, just b/c Obama supported it. Biden put us back in it, on his very first day in office actually, but that's a lot of time lost, and there's a goodly chance at Trump winning again.

All this bipolar disorder, coupled with the lackluster performance even when conservatives do not win, has made me lose all faith in the democratic processes. Just like George Carlin in the past, except now it REALLY matters which side wins!! :-|

So yeah, I expect a bumpy and quite... "interesting" ride. Even in Canada, most likely, though as you say on a delayed basis.

Therefore I watch videos on how chocolate is made, and I recycle even though I know it will not make one tiniest difference, etc. It is something that I can do, therefore I offer that, at least.

Thanks. It sounds like my biggest problem is the over-reliance on the "quick 1-minute" kind, which really did used to be IDENTICAL in price - or at least I recall the two Quaker Oats versions, side-by-side, were the same price, though steel-cut ones of other brands may be better and/or cheaper.

Omg "cold(-brew?) oatmeal", this just blew my mind a little:-P.

Yeah this stuff is so tangled and difficult. I watched one of John Olivier's recent videos on chocolate production in places like Africa and it likewise messed me up a little - like, should I buy less chocolate, or more, which is doing less harm vs. good? Btw the answer, as you may have guessed it, is "yes". Yes buying chocolates helps the poor farmers, while also yes it supports their near-slave-labor conditions, both. And fair-trade seems to mean little if anything at all. :-(

Ultimately I came down on the side that since they are doing this to themselves, the alternatives to cacao farming must be even worse? e.g. hunting in the wilds, or farming something to sell locally. And while the corpo execs seem to me to be greedy MFers just doing hunting of their own, for profits, they nonetheless are doing some amount of service, if they are offering this option to the farmers that they would not otherwise have.

The sticking point is the price: regardless of intention, does lowering that cause more chocolate to be sold, thus help the farmers more than raising it would? (I have no idea btw, that's just what pops up in my mind) Also, I am so very far away from the situation that it is impossible to accurately judge anything - like John's video shows another video showing children walking through the fields harvesting cacao and "not wearing safety gear", but what is that gear, who actually needs it, is it always needed or only during certain seasons, so really how bad is it that these children, who importantly do this for fun, should have been wearing it?

It is good to ask these questions, but yes, dayum it is exhausting. Especially for every tiny little matter.

Though the authoritarianism video is a fairly central one in my mind, fwiw. Even your country, which we want to "escape" to when things go bad in the States, may turn to it, as seems to be the global trend.:-( Anyway, enjoy!:-)

no one is going to save us. We have to do it ourselves.

Abso-FUCKING-lutely!

Two additional thoughts:

One is that a lot of the evil being done "by America" is actually being done more by evil people who hide behind it like a shield. Even if all of America were to fall, these illuminati types would go on, reduced/diminished but still viable. Like a witch controlling a zombie or a japanese manga type person sitting inside of a robot, the USA may be a good tool for the true master's purpose (e.g., Haliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc.), but they can surely find other tools besides just the one. It is just that the USA prostates itself before them so well that they like this one.

I think it is important to make that distinction, b/c e.g. if someone attacks you and you merely knock the gun out of their hand, the problem is not "solved", especially if in their other hand they still hold a knife. You imply that we should "wake up" - and I agree, and this is part of that, to disambiguate the various factors involved. America shares an enormous portion of this blame, by virtue of stupidly signing our body away to serve the desires of some other mind than our own - fulfilling its purposes instead of the one that that "we" all want to be done, i.e. for people to be able to live in their own spaces and have a chance at happiness.

Which leads me to the second thing: this video is not necessarily "cynical", though I understand why you say that. It is truly one of the more unbiased depictions of this matter that I have ever seen or heard or read, and by virtue of it refusing to tell us how to "feel" about the matter, it does come across in our cultures that are traditionally so amped-up in the latter regard that it seems wooden by comparison. I liken it to when astronaughts wanted to make rockets to go into space, and someone gives a dissertation on "gravity". Knowing about how gravity works is how you get into space - it is not that it cannot be done, it is just a Truism about the world that becomes relevant when talking about leaving the planet. So while talking about gravity may sound "cynical" to someone who wants to talk rather about flying through space, it is in fact a necessary first step.

So rather than cynical, I see it as neutral. Other videos provide plenty of motivational calls to action, but that is not the purpose of this particular one, which is solely to inform - and I actually appreciate that so much about it! e.g. conservatives and liberals alike can watch it and become better informed, without hampering the spread of that information by mixing it along with political rhetoric that allows only a single interpretation of it. I am not saying that I am neutral, but I am saying that I like it when information is, b/c imho that is the best way to further the cause of understanding, from which people can be helped better (than by e.g. misinformation and lack of understanding).

John Oliver would be so proud:-). You will support him in other ways - e.g. by spreading the message in your own country. He makes a TON of money, so truly I believe that he will be fine, and would rather the message be not so artificially limited as that corporation has made it.

Now the real question: what did you think of it? And it's okay if you'd rather not answer right away, but if you wanted to, then I would enjoy hearing about it from you:-). After all, I cannot ever travel back in time to re-watch that video for the first time, but I can enjoy that feeling vicariously through you perhaps!?:-P

Thank you. I will miss the "1-minute", no-prep, no-clean aspect, but I needed to make the switch anyway, b/c despite the superfood health benefits the instant stuff tastes like crap.

If you don't mind my asking, why no stirring - wouldn't that help?

And what does "edge of boiling" mean? Is it just above, like I've heard for pasta and noodles, or just below, for whatever but I've heard it called "simmering"? Yeah, I don't know the first thing about cooking, for the most part - I know how to stick something in the oven and leave it alone, and like fry-cook a scrambled egg, and that's about it. Companies are taking advantage of my weakness there, by making low-effort prepped foods like cereal cost more, b/c they know that most people will just give in and pay more rather than learn to eat other foods:-(.