It's wild reading political articles from 2019

Pre COVID, pre-ukraine war, pre Israel/hamas war+genocide+wider middle east war. Everything was so different

The letters that make up words is a common blind spot for AIs, since they are trained on strings of tokens (roughly words) they don't have a good concept of which letters are inside those words or what order they are in.

The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it's pretty close to the golden ratio.

Even if you don't remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...

So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)

I hate this so much,

Someone is mentioned on Lemmy and there is always a drive by comment saying don't support X or X is a bad person with no context whatsoever. No mention of what specifically they are accused of doing/saying, no way to figure out if that clashes with your values or not, no documentation etc.

And subjectively it feels like half the time I research why this might be true it's debatable at best, I assume because if there was compelling evidence the person doing the drive by would have linked it.

America and the USSR agreed to partition Korea along the 38th parallel after liberating it from imperial Japanese rule.

Subsequent to that the Chinese communists agreed to arm and back north Korea in return for Korean support during China's civil war.

Later on North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea I feel like this is a very important point you somehow completely failed to mention. They then captured most of the Korean peninsula down to Busan.

At this point the US (technically the UN but most forces were US) reinforced the ROK troops reclaimed the lost territory and invaded the north capturing Pyongyang.

At this point China reinforced the north Koreans and recaptured Pyongyang the fighting then stalemated around the 38th parallel after years of fighting an armistice was agreed and the current borders were agreed.

Your protratal of the US deciding on a whim to butcher the poor north Koreans then impose a separation on them would be laughable in how poorly it conveys events if you weren't seeking to mis-atribute the cause of a war that killed 3 million people

I think we don't have enough language to talk about difficulty in a productive way.

You could keep all the boss mechanics the same in a game but add a 1 minute unstoppable cut scene at the start and the game is "more difficult" because it takes you longer to learn boss patterns and experiment with different strategies. But that feels very different to narrowing the windows to react or expanding the move set of a boss which feels different again to changing the values so you need to grind more/fewer levels or resources to pass it.

"Runback too long" and "git gud" sound a lot like people talking past eachother, but maybe thats just an artifact of the journalist reporting rather than the discussion itself

So as far as I can tell the rule for deciding if a french word is feminine is "does it end with an e".

There are exceptions and French people claim that's not how it works, but it is an incredibly useful heuristic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_rates_and_counts_for_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers

• Venuzela is 1st with 1829.9 per 10M
• USA is at 29th with 33.1 per 10M
• Poland is at 60th with 0.5 per 10M
• Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Croatia are recorded as 0

Declaring something happens in every country with armed police Is asinine when it happens 55 times more in some places and 66 times less in others.

When there are countries with such a dramatically lower rate of security services killing civilians there are important lessons to be learned there, rather than throwing up our hands and saying something like "well states will murder wherever states exist, don't worry about it, it's normal". Edit: better characterisation in pupperdreams' reply below

Red states already do this, the supreme court has already ruled that it can't review gerrymandering cases, newsome isn't doing this to get a win, California is likely to elect democrats with or without the new maps, he is doing this to highlight how messed up it is that this is allowed.

"Big government" means thinking the government is bigger and more expensive than it needs to be.

When all the government needs to do is keep me happy then any program which I understand benefits me is vital and any which doesn't is "big government"

So this is pure conjecture and makes far too many assumptions about ASD and NT people; but I have two theories:

I suspect NT have an easier time with these situations since they have an easier time reading the emotions of others, which means they have a more accurate understanding of the consequences. ASD people are less confident in understanding how others may react so they catastrophize (X will be upset with me because I didn't do exactly Y)

NT people know that the person on the counter isn't mad that they don't have correct change, they know that their parents are happy about the effort and the will to help ileven if the outcome isn't the same.

Theory 2 which is related: A reliance on rules, scripts patterns and rituals to navigate the world makes uncontrollable deviations from these highly unpleasant, and empathy suggests that things you find unpleasant are probably unpleasant for others too.

This is compounded by the way people react negatively to atypical social reactions (this looks a lot like you have broken someone's social interaction script and they are unhappy)

This then loops into itself and causes recursive problems; if you are forced off script you have atypical social interactions (I don't have enough money for this, can I go home and get more) Vs the normal interactions the chaser has. This means you can perceive yourself as propagating your troubles to everyone else. E.g. if you bring home the wrong fish will your parents still be able to cook dinner or will they have to gasp improvise on the recipe.

By contrast NT people can see that the cashier experiencing unusual circumstances isn't a problem, they don't care and are just happy that the weird customer isn't demanding to speak to the manager because something was out of stock.

All of this means that NT people have a reduced (and more accurate) perception of the stakes involved and therefore less stress and less need to over-plan.

But like... Why does it matter? Why does violet provoke so many people to "investigate" her gender and sexual orientation while others get to hornypost freely?

As much as I dislike the fact that the "flagship" instance for lemmy is an echo chamber that bans for political wrong think, I still think Lemmy on average is a positive and it isn't funded by ads or vcs so it should be proof against the most common avenues for enshittification.

So I set up a recurring donation despite being someone that would 100% get banned by the people I'm donating to if I were to comment on their instance.

Same way I can't stand people using one negative within a larger political platform as an excuse to parrot anti-electoralism I feel like I shouldn't use one unfortunate facet of the fediverse as an excuse not to donate towards its continued development.

Support "better" rather than waiting for "perfect"

Given that it's not uncommon for kids to injure themselves jumping from high places using a sheet as a parachute, I don't think we need to be assuming malice here.

So the German uboats did often rescue the survivors of ships they sank, offering them food, water, medical aid etc. at least they did right up to the Laconia Incident

Where a U-boat was rescuing survivors from RMS Laconia (British royal mail ship). Announced that is was doing this on an open radio frequency, and subsequently had it's decks strafed and bombed by a USAAF aircraft killing many of the survivors and forcing the U-boat to dive stranding the remaining survivors in the ocean.

As a result of this German U-boat crews were issued an order prohibitng them from issuing aid to survivors of enemy vessels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident

The post asserts that the women pictured are so unattractive that it has turned their republican husband's gay.

The implication being that women are to be valued primarily by their physical appearance and a man is to be judged by the appearance of his wife.

Lemmy lets this slide because they are republicans and therefore acceptable targets, but they are bad people not because they are unattractive or they married someone unattractive/low-status, or because they use Grindr, they are bad people because they voted for an administration which has done enormous harm to minorities, LGBTQ folks and anyone who drowned indirectly on USAID.

That's not even getting into the problems with the conversation therapy-esque idea of being able to intentionally change an adults sexuality

I also fall into this trap semi regularly, a happy medium I have found is a missable items guide that doesn't tell you how to play or where to go but it does tell you "make sure you get item X before going to place Y as that's your last chance"

It means I can be happy to play sub optimally knowing that if I really want I can go back and collect anything I missed later.

This has been quite good for Clair obscur

ICE are trump's praetorian guard, a paid trip to Europe and the Olympics on company time is a reward for loyalty shown to the executive over the people.

It's supposed to be the sound French people make when they laugh, despite none of the french people I know sounding anything like that.

I think it's part of this weird cultural stereotyping the internet does where someone posts a funny meme with an inaccurate stereotype in it, then a legion of mouth breathers re-post the same meme whenever the nationality in question comes up, then due to repetition people who have never met that nationality thinks its real.

People stopped doing the fake "Ching Chong" false Chinese accent bit ages ago (thank god) but I guess France and the French are still valid targets.

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?