Handedness

The way I see it, if you say something and others dont get it, that is more on you for failing to communicate clearly than on others for not understanding. At the very least, you accept any potential consequences of being misunderstood (getting into pointless arguments, being viewed poorly etc) if you opt to intentionally make your meaning ambiguous with something objectionable.

I disagree. In verbal sarcasm, there’s often an equivalent, where the sarcastic phrase is said with a certain tone, or certain syllables or words are emphasized, to convey the meaning that that statement is sarcastic and not the actual intent of the speaker. That information is lost in written text, and something like /s simply creates a written equivalent. It hardly “ruins” the sarcastic statement when a verbal equivalent might be similarly blatant and the mark to signify sarcastic intent is only read after the rest of the statement anyway.

Just figuring out a sarcastic statement by virtue of that statement being absurd enough as to not possibly be intended seriously, does not work in situations where the statement is presented by itself without other context, and the assumption that “nobody would say that thing unironically” is false, because in such a situation, the sarcastic and non-sarcasic use appear exactly the same.

Further, having no standard for conveying sarcasm unambiguously would mean that someone who really did intend to say something like that unironically could simply hide behind “I was being sarcastic” when called out on it.

It’s not laid out like Lemmy is, because Lemmy is basically the fediverse version of Reddit, while Mastodon is more the fediverse version of Twitter. I’m not very good at using that format myself so I can’t offer much advice, but from what I’ve seen, what your feed is like depends a lot on what instance you join, to a much larger extent than on Lemmy (it’s a much bigger userbase than lemmy as well to my knowledge). I dont know of any equivalent to communities per se, you have to join an instance that is good for the kinds of things you’re looking for, and follow users that post or interact with that content. I think a favorite is more like a like, and reblogging is more like reposting for one’s followers and imstance to see too.

3rd? Surely there’s been more than 2 before?

I wasn’t even thinking about that kind of thing, since drones are something I’m sure we could utilize as well. It’s mostly the sheer production capacity and population that China in particular has. I expect an actual large scale war against them, that both didn’t turn nuclear (since that renders the whole concept of a victor a bit moot) and wasn’t some very quick defensive action like an attempt to defend Taiwan might be (which might end fast enough for production capacity to not matter as much as existing inventory), would end up looking something like Japan’s war against the US during ww2: we might be able to cause a great deal of damage to their military assets at first, but if they can replace their losses much faster than we can, then all they have to to is drag things out enough for the numbers to swing decisively in their favor.

Especially when one of the opponents has several times our population and all opponents are oceans away, besides two of the three being nuclear armed and the third being close. Even with the size of our military, I don’t think that’s a war we would stand a reasonable chance in.

I don’t really even have an age range I guess, I’ve never met anyone I was interested in dating.

If that were true, what happens if two different non violent movements each with more than 3.5% of the population involved, exist at the same time in direct opposition to eachother?

“wars”, or really just disputes in general I guess since culture war is metaphorical, don’t really work that way. It only takes one side to start one, and then the other side must either resist them or cede what the other wants, there’s no option to just opt out of them without mutual desire to do so, and if someone has started one against you that desire obviously isn’t there.

The issues considered “culture war” aren’t inconsequential, they affect the lives of real people in material ways. Thus, trying to dismiss them as a distraction just means accepting harm to some people. If one wants a decent society, it is necessary to win both.

They dont work, because not lie detectors at all. To my understanding they’re basically just a tech-assisted version of trying to tell if someone is lying by trying to watch their emotional reaction. They might be able to tell you if someone is stressed, under the notion that someone lying will be more stressed than when telling the truth from the effort and worry of being caught, but that isn’t really true necessarily.

I’ve heard of some bakery somewhere doing “recycled bread”, where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn’t sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don’t know for sure if the story is real.

Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.

Instance I use has grad and hexbear blocked. Not ml, but they aren’t a big a percentage of lemmy these days as they used to be as far as I see.

we must have different instances federated, because I think Bernie might be slightly too establishment himself for most of the lemmy I see.

I suspect that we might not use the term “dwarf planet”, were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.

Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.

I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.

I feel like just talking about the buying power of money or even the ability to effectively duplicate stuff is missing something: assuming your time travel actually allows you to change the past, and it doesn’t just end up in a situation where you can only fulfill a timeline that always existed, you can take technology to the past too.

Go back to the beginning of civilization and give them current technology (or even the beginning of time, and found a new civilization there). Then do it again (or if you don’t, someone else will eventually) with the new tech developed off the existing stuff over time. Repeated ad nauseum, you end up with a situation where civilization has and since the beginning has always had, every single technology it is physically possible to create.

You get the same kind of issues as “the singularity” (the concept where a super intelligent AI improves itself exponentially until it is as powerful as is possible to be). As such, our entire concept of markets and money and economy are likely completely obsolete, because find yourself in a universe populated by something as close as is physically possible to become to gods.

I’m no AI bro, but I do think this concern is a bit overblown. The monetary value in art is not in simply having a picture of something, a whole infamous subset of “modern art” commands high prices despite being simple enough that virtually anybody could recreate it. A lot is simply in that people desire art created by a specific person, be it a painting that they made, or commissioning a still active artist to create something, or someone buying a band’s merch to support their work. AI simply does not have the same parasocial association to it. And of course, it doesn’t at all replicate the non-monetary value that creating something can give to someone.

I can, at most, imagine it getting integrated into things like advertising where one really doesn’t care who created the work; but even then there’s probably still value in having a human artist review the result to be sure of it’s quality, and that kind of art tends to add the least cultural value anyway.

That isn’t zero impact obviously, that kind of advertisement or corporate clip art or such does still pay people, but it’s a far cry from the end of creative human endeavor, or even people getting paid to be creative.