• 0 Posts
  • 161 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 16th, 2024

help-circle




  • You don’t want to hear me read aloud, I deliberately add malapropisms because I find them funny, especially when I have to read the names of fantasy characters and places. I am not going to read your pronunciation guide in your half baked fantasy language! You’re not Tolkien! If it reads like Chicken, I’m saying Chicken.







  • I’m interested to see what an open source cloud standard would look like. There’s a lot of elements that share functionality between Azure and AWS, but they’re just different enough that it’s a massive pain in the arse to move from one to the other and you basically have to re-write your Terraform from scratch.

    If there was something that was standard so I could write Terraform that goes “I want thirteen microservices all running in docker containers and a message bus with these types of message that lets them communicate” without specifying the exact implementation, I would be a happy camper.


  • Feels like this is going to devolve into a bit of an Old Boys Club. As in, only ‘recognised’ artists get the basic income, and who decides who gets recognised? Art organisations, and those will very quickly restrict their membership or else be flooded by anyone who claims to be an artist and can get an AI to spit out some slop and get some moron to buy it.

    Then, the government can go to those art organisations and go “Right, no more art critical of the government or we won’t be recognising your organisation for the Basic Income scheme”, thus cutting off the funding for the membership and, driven by the need to eat and survive, said membership will alter their art to be more comfortable to whoever happens to be in charge at the time.


  • Asperger’s used to be a categorisation, but they got rid of it because 1. The guy who came up with it was a Nazi and used it as a means of segregating those he didn’t intend to murder from those he did, and 2. the border between Autistic and Aspergers was pretty vague and whether you got the diagnosis was dependent on the culture of the clinic doing the diagnosing and not any objective criteria.

    I dunno, it feels (obviously irrationally) a little bit insulting that there isn’t a categorisation, because by lumping everyone who previously had Asperger’s in with Autism, it doesn’t matter how well you mask, as soon as you mention you’re autistic, everyone thinks you’re one wrong word away from having a meltdown. Nobody sees levels, they see Autism, and what was formerly known as Asperger’s, where the latter are a bit weird, and the former are in need of serious care.


  • Yahtzee’s book Will Save the Galaxy for Food actually covers this, in a sci-fi way. In the future, all transportation is done via Quantum Tunnelling, so guess what job suddenly became obsolete? Space pilots. Space pilots now only exist because people have nostalgia for the old days, reducing pilots to little more than tour guides and adventure holidays.

    It’s like in those MMOs where you can teleport basically anywhere, but you still have mounts and yes you can travel from one end of the map to the other on your horse, admiring the scenery, or you could just click the coordinates someone pasted into the chat to get to the world boss you’re supposed to kill for the most optimum play… Lookin’ at you, Guild Wars 2!


  • If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket? You’ve got the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound, and the people who broke their carer’s arm because their DVD boxset of Dexter’s Lab had a disc in the wrong place, and yes both are autistic, but it’s unhelpful because when someone says they’re autistic, you have no idea what that means.

    I know there’s levels depending on how much care you need, but nobody’s going “I’m level 1 autistic” in daily conversation. It’s not like cancer where you can say “I have cancer” or “My dad died of cancer” and you can then say “It was prostate cancer”, because everyone knows what that means.




  • The thing is, back in the day, you couldn’t just look up ferns on the internet, you actually had to go looking for information on ferns specifically, and it’s very likely that after a lot of really annoying visits to various libraries looking through botany textbooks, an author (or a group of authors) decided they were going to collate everything they found about ferns and stick it in one collection.

    So when someone else comes along and goes “I need to know something about a very specific fern”, the librarian can go “You want that 8 volume encyclopedia on ferns over there” because they know that it has every single fern on the planet in there, and you don’t need to spend 8 hours looking through every botany textbook and making the room smell like cheap coffee.

    What I’m saying is it was probably done out of spite, not genuine interest.



  • You know why the drones in Ukraine are on super long fibre optic cables? Because it turns out it’s really easy to jam them and the only way you’re actually able to get a clean signal is through a cable. Either these robots are gonna be easy to jam, or you can cut the wires leading back to their handler and they’d just stop working.