blind3rdeye

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's what they said in The Matrix. I guess they called it right.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Free food, but confined to a tiny unchanging living space where your entire purpose is to be observed by others; vs no free food, but more person freedom. Which do you think is better?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Probably misinformation. I didn't think Proton was even around in 1896!

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

It was easy to predict a downward slide as soon as they merged with Activision.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

The person is talking about the dating pool they are exposed to. I don't see this as a personal comment about any individual person. I certainly wouldn't take it as a personal attack, and I don't think anyone else should either.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

I don't see it as a put-down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah... Civ 1, 2, 3, and 4 were all good - for different reasons. Civ 5 was where the design decisions stopped being about gameplay and started being about maximising profit. Making the game functional and fun was lower priority to making paid DLC. Players buy the buggy and unfinished game... then pay more to fix it piecemeal with the DLC. Such is the power of brands and advertising.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 4 weeks ago

There is some misleading information in there. Probably better to just get straight to the point with the 'standard' https://joinmastodon.org/ link.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

I'm mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We're talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.

And before you start coming at me with some "but but such and such life will still..." I'll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That's what I'm referring to.

Yes, humans have does this to 'ourselves', but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah. I've been mourning the loss of Earth's future for some time now. It's very sad.

That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It's a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree that it seems the obvious choice for a vegan is to not own a pet cat.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you'd be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don't care that I'm dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area... I'm just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.

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