interolivary @ interolivary @beehaw.org

Currently between olives

---

Read more

Posts

45

Comments

766

Joined

2 yr. ago

Heh, we can do a Classic Human™ and unite in hate: I really don't like Mt Dew either. I think the US version is like even more toxic-looking (and possibly literally toxic for that matter) than what they sell over here in Urop, or at least I remember it looking exactly like you described.

Not finding any life anywhere (although hard to take samples outside the solar system) could maybe be even worse. That'd mean that it might be that some stronger version of the Anthropic Principle holds, and it could be that we're completely alone in the universe because it's sort of "tuned" to us, although without the intentionality that implies; random shit just happened until an incredible collection of very unlikely coincidences produced us, and just us.

Whether we find simple life out there or not, I'm honestly pretty convinced that what's going on right now is at least our filter, and possibly the Great Filter. A species' ability to transform its environment might always outpace its understanding of what the outcomes will be, and getting to this point might possibly also require a competetive species, so it might just be near-inevitable that technologically advanced species kick off something like a "terminal" climate disaster or nuclear war eventually.

Add to that the fact that it's not at all sure that space colonization is actually doable, at least in a time frame that would allow species to spread to other planets before they screw the pooch with their original one. Not only is space travel ridiculously hard and has a ton of terrible health effects which for us humans include eg. blindness in prolonged zero-G (even a trip to Mars would be enough to badly fuck eyesight), it also takes stupid amount of resources since you have to build spinning habitats for your ships, stations etc to solve at least some of the problems and you're probably already running out of resources on your home planet. Building a self-sufficient colony on another planet is another thing that many researchers think is likely so hard that it may as well be impossible at least for the next few hundred years, and we probably don't have that long – whether it's us triggering some "black swan" event and doing a speedrun to turn Earth to Venus, or climate change just getting bad enough that billions die and in the resulting chaos we pretty much nuke the rest, or whatever. Looks like we've been just smart enough to fuck things up, but so far just not smart enough to un-fuck them.

So, if we find no signs of any life and we manage to effectively destroy ourselves somehow, the worst case could be that that might be it for the observable universe's or even the entire universe's life. Finding unicellular life would at least mean that it's possible something else pops up somewhere at some point, but we'd be just as screwed as we would be without that discovery.

    
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA.
       ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. 

  

It'd be incredible if it was some sort of life – even unicellular – but chances are it's probably just something more mundane.

But I'm hoping for aliens though.

Well if you're high up enough that the absolutely crazy temperature (around 470 °C, 878 °F) and pressure (90 bar so like being 900m / 3000ft underwater) don't kill you I guess?

Yup, it passed quietly surrounded by friends and family. Hasn't been too many days (I think…). The CEO (or founder? Whoever) pulled the plug because they just didn't want to deal with it anymore iirc

edit: Omegle shut down: Video chat website closed after abuse claims. 15h ago, not days ago lol

fur does help to hide (heh, get it) a lot

🥁

Pretty much what I suspected about "naked" skin vs fur, which just intuitively seems way more "forgiving."

most of what makes a human look like themself is not the skin. it’s the bones and muscles and fat in the face, and the perceptions of living humans are incredibly sensitive to subtle variations in those features.

Ohhh this makes complete sense now that you say it; we're incredibly well tuned for recognizing faces, so I guess not only would it be hard to make the person recognizable, but it might also be hard to not have imperfections in the face that give everyone an "uncanny valley" sort of feeling that something's off about it?

I can definitely say that the problems with taxidermizing humans was definitely not something I expected to learn about today (or necessarily ever really), so thank you for taking the time to explain all that. It was honestly interesting to learn about something that I had absolutely no knowledge of beforehand.

If you don't mind me asking, do you know this stuff via actually doing taxidermy, or are you just another infinitely curious person?

About 3000 years ago I worked as a night security guard in a place where we'd often have celebrities during the day. One night during one of my rounds I found an iPod in the parking lot. Went back to the control room and started going through the menus to see if I could figure out who it belonged to, and based on the device's name I realized it belonged to an abject asshole of a media personality / early "influencer" of sorts, who got rich by "preaching" what amounted to a secular prosperity gospel, essentially a cheerleader for the "fuck you, I got mine"-brand of capitalism.

I can say I didn't have to think too many milliseconds about what to do with the device and felt no pangs of guilt about yoinking it. I used it for years and years, and probably much longer than that particular dude would have since I mainly worked low income jobs and I couldn't have afforded a new one even if I wanted to.

I reset the device but kept its name as it was, just as a sort of small personal 🖕 to that guy.

Shit, I'm fine with the ending, I wish I was 34 again

Ah neat, thanks for the heads-up

With Comic Sans I can maybe buy that claim; it was never hard to read, people just think it looks silly (especially in more official contexts.)

At least to me Radon, however, actually is hard to read. I don't know if it's my slight dyslexia, but it feels like it's purposefully doing the opposite of what the fonts like Comic Sans etc. did. It's not quite Tengwar-bad but it's still a bit of a jagged easily-confused mess that's noticeably slower to read

Yeah the term "shrieking heebie jeebies" springs to mind.

Good point about the personality though, somehow the hyperlibertarian scammer thing they have going on makes them feel less threatening, although I guess that should probably make them even more horrifying?

… did they ever actually show the "CPU" of the ship's computer? Maybe it was a bit squishier than we've assumed

The unfathomable horrors of modern life

This is hilarious, but… is it just me or is Rom's face a bit of a nightmare fuel scenario? 😅

I try not to judge people who like Dr. Pepper; it's not like it's your fault your preferences came out like that.

Ok I don't actually judge anyone for that, I just personally dislike it so viscerally that the smell is a bit nauseating, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those things where N% of people have some gene that makes some Dr. Pepper ingredient taste different, like with the bitter super taster gene or the cilantro soap gene (both of which I have 😅 )

That's setting the bar low enough that it's near the Earth's core

Reading some marketing blurb about how these fonts are totally like state of the art and will make everything better is different from buying into what it claims, I guess?

Personally I'm not all that convinced that these'll be as revolutionary as they make them sound – and Radon is so bad that it makes me question whether the claims about readability and whatnot have any connection to the fonts they published – but I'll have to give them a whirl anyhow.

Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought "ok maybe they have an idea here".

Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker's so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.

Heh, right, I don't know why I thought this'd go anywhere, but hey can't fault a person for trying at least 🤷

Well, enjoy being pissed off I guess?

Right, and is being on mobile a good reason for you to keep this snark going? It seems like you'd rather just choose to be pissed at me or something and continue this ribbing instead of, well, any other option.

If you think that being an asshole is generally not a good thing and that I was wrong to do it, why do you figure you're justified in acting like this?