Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)I

ignirtoq

@ ignirtoq @fedia.io

Posts
0
Comments
50
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What are commonly used idioms/metaphors that make no sense to anyone who knows about the topic they come from?

    Jump

  • The use of "quantum leap" isn't about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It's about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That's the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.

  • The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025

    Jump

  • And that's with a poverty line that's already way too low. The poverty line is based on the price of food, because when it was instituted that's what poor people spent something like 2/3 of their income on. Now the poor spend about 10-25% of their income on food and at least 2/3 on housing, but the official poverty line is still based on food prices.

  • Hype-fueling science fiction or plausible scenarios?

    Jump

  • What's the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.

  • Credit to J A @tubeytoons

    Jump

  • He never actually says that exact phrase in the books. It's a cultural misquote, like "beam me up, Scotty," that somehow caught on in popular culture but wasn't in the original source.

  • Windows Defender Anti-virus Bypassed Using Direct Syscalls & XOR Encryption

    Jump

  • Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs

    Jump

  • People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn't flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He's doing exactly what he intended: he's holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

    He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he's using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He's building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He's almost there, and it's taken him 2 months to do it.

  • Maps: Where Trump Voter Jobs Will Be Hit by Tariffs

    Jump

  • That matches the hue, but the added dimension is the saturation. Counties in brighter colors are more impacted by retaliatory tariffs, while duller colors are less impacted. The point is to illustrate that a higher proportion of impacted counties voted for Trump than if the impact were spread evenly, though the effect is not that pronounced. Statistically, people working in different industries tend to vote one direction or the other compared to average, but there are still both Harris and Trump voters in every industry.

  • TIL that "nginx" is pronounced "engine-x", and not "n-jinx"

    Jump

  • Why would I pronounce something with rules of English that's not an English word? When I say the word jalapeno, I pronounce the tilde on the n even though in English it's neither written with the tilde nor written with a letter combination that would produce that sound through standard English spelling.

  • TIL that "nginx" is pronounced "engine-x", and not "n-jinx"

    Jump

  • One month into Trump’s second term, many feel buyer’s remorse

    Jump

  • This president, more than any of his modern predecessors, has more national opponents than supporters, and given the recent trajectories, his support isn’t likely to recover any time soon.

    But what kind of power do his opponents wield, are they willing to use it, and are they willing to work with each other? Many authoritarian regimes have lasted for many years, some decades, with minority support. As long as Trump keeps the billionaires on his side, I don't see this changing for a very long time.

  • Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?

    Jump

  • Ah, I think I misread your statement of "followers by nature" as "followers of nature." I'm not really willing to ascribe personality traits like "follower" or "leader" or "independent" or "critical thinker" to humanity as a whole based on the discussion I've laid out here. Again, the possibility space of cognition is bounded, but unimaginatively large. What we can think may be limited to a reflection of nature, but the possible permutations that can be made of that reflection are more than we could explore in the lifetime of the universe. I wouldn't really use this as justification for or against any particular moral framework.

  • Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?

    Jump

  • I think that's overly reductionist, but ultimately yes. The human brain is amazingly complex, and evolution isn't directed but keeps going with whatever works well enough, so there's going to be incredible breadth in human experience and cognition across everyone in the world and throughout history. You'll never get two people thinking exactly the same way because of the shear size of that possibility space, despite there having been over 100 billion people to have lived in history and today.

    That being said, "what works" does set constraints on what is possible with the brain, and evolution went with the brain because it solves a bunch of practical problems that enhanced the survivability of the creatures that possessed it. So there are bounds to cognition, and there are common patterns and structures that shape cognition because of the aforementioned problems they solved.

    Thoughts that initially reflect reality but that can be expanded in unrealistic ways to explore the space of possibilities that an individual can effect in the world around them has clear survival benefits. Thoughts that spring from nothing and that relate in no way to anything real strike me as not useful at best and at worst disruptive to what the brain is otherwise doing. Thinking in that perspective more, given the powerful levels of pattern recognition in the brain, I wonder if creation of "100% original thoughts" would result in something like schizophrenia, where the brain's pattern recognition systems are reinterpreting (and misinterpreting) internal signals as sensory signals of external stimuli.

  • Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?

    Jump

  • The problem with that reasoning is it's assuming a clear boundary to what a "thought" is. Just like there wasn't a "first" human (because genetics are constantly changing), there wasn't a "first" thought.

    Ancient animals had nervous systems that could not come close to producing anything we would consider a thought, and through gradual, incremental changes we get to humanity, which is capable of thought. Where do you draw the line? Any specific moment in that evolution would be arbitrary, so we have to accept a continuum of neurological phenomena that span from "not thoughts" to "thoughts." And again we get back to thoughts being reflections of a shared environment, so they build on a shared context, and none are original.

    If you do want to draw an arbitrary line at what a thought is, then that first thought was an evolution of non-/proto-thought neurological phenomena, and itself wasn't 100% "original" under the definition you're using here.

  • Have you ever had a 100% original thought? And if so, what was it?

    Jump

  • From your responses to others' comments, you're looking for a "thought" that has absolutely zero relationship with any existing concepts or ideas. If there is overlap with anything that anyone has ever written about or expressed in any way before, then it's not "100% original," and so either it's impossible or it's useless.

    I would argue it's impossible because the very way human cognition is structured is based on prediction, pattern recognition, and error correction. The various layers of processing in the brain are built around modeling the world around us in a way to generate a prediction, and then higher layers compare the predictions with the actual sensory input to identify mismatches, and then the layers above that reconcile the mismatches and adjust the prediction layers. That's a long winded way to say our thoughts are inspired by the world around us, and so are a reflection of the world around us. We all share our part of this world with at least one other person, so we're all going to share commonalities in our thoughts with others.

    But for the sake of argument, assume that's all wrong, and someone out there does have a truly original, 100% no overlap with anything that has come before, thought. How could they possibly express that thought to someone else? Communication between people relies on some kind of shared context, but any shared context for this thought means it's dependent on another idea, or "prior art," so it couldn't be 100% original. If you can't share the thought with anyone, nor express it in any way to record it (because that again is communication), it dies with you. And you can't even prove it without communicating, so how would someone with such an original thought convince you they've had it?

  • What do you enjoy sharing with others, or providing guidance about (besides the fediverse)?

    Jump

  • Math, physics, and to a lesser extent, software engineering.

    I got degrees in math and physics in college. I love talking about counterintuitive concepts in math and things that are just way outside everyday life, like transfinite numbers and very large dimensional vector spaces.

    My favorite parts of physics to talk about are general relativity and the weirder parts of quantum mechanics.

    My day job is software engineering, so I can also help people get started learning to program, and then the next level of building a solid, maintainable software project. It's more "productive" in the traditional sense, so it's satisfying to help people be more productive, but when it's just free time to shoot the shit, talking about math and science are way more fun.

  • Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything

    Jump

  • I'm sorry, I mostly agree with the sentiment of the article in a feel-good kind of way, but it's really written like how people claim bullies will get their comeuppance later in life, but then you actually look them up later and they have high paying jobs and wonderful families. There's no substance here, just a rant.

    The author hints at analogous cases in the past of companies firing all of their engineers and then having to scramble to hire them back, but doesn't actually get into any specifics. Be specific! Talk through those details. Prove to me the historical cases are sufficiently similar to what we're starting to see now that justifies the claims of the rest of the article.

  • 'You are making it hard for us!' Black Americans for Trump member rips president on CNN - Raw Story

    Jump

  • That's not what a vomitorium was for. I understand the sentiment, but let's not perpetuate a misunderstanding of Roman architecture/history.

  • DeepSeek AI launch sees $1tn wiped off world’s biggest tech companies

    Jump

  • Are you sure the answer you're getting from AI about the weight of ginger is right? Before AI I would trust the answer from a smart speaker. Now I don't trust anything any AI produces that should be fact-based. (Turning on lights and TV I would trust because I can see the results myself.)

  • Which fictional character's death affected you most?

    Jump

  • Robin Williams as the Bicentennial Man. The movie was okay; his performance was amazing. I've struggled with mortality for a while, like I expect a lot of people do, and to see him as a character who started their existence immortal, and to choose mortality. His death in the movie hit me much, much harder than I expected. I haven't watched the movie again since my first viewing because I'm honestly afraid of going through that again.