As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at “rock and roll”. Seriously, he’d be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.
Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I’m sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.
I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn’t navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn’t, while rejecting all the values he’d been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.
I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of ‘reaction videos’, and I’m only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I’m trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it’s at least from this century. But the change I’ve been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don’t think I’ll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?
If ever I get access to a time machine, I’ll go back and introduce the Victorians to the concept. The resulting singularity of godawfulness could power the world for millennia.
Of course AI isn’t sentient/conscious, but it exhibits traits of high intelligence, even personality, and behaviours consistent with sentience, even if it’s merely simulated....
I don’t think AI is people yet, or close to it - so the easy answer is ‘it’.
But let’s have a think about pronouns and the purpose they serve; accurately capturing the true nature of the referent is not and has never been the point.
Gendered pronouns are an easy example of this: you don’t ferinstance need to know ThE bIoLoGICaL sEx of a person in order to refer to them. You don’t need to go rummage in a stranger’s underwear or take DNA samples in order to call them ‘he’ or ‘she’, the words work just fine without any such knowledge. And indeed if you go intentionally misgendering someone because wElL aCkShEwAlLy, all you do is confuse the person you’re talking to (and seem like a dick).
Pronouns, in short, are a placeholder for a noun phrase, and we have different ones to help us distinguish between the different nouns in play at any given time. By the time you’ve parsed out gender, plurality, animate and object/subject distinctions, it’s generally a poorly written sentence that has any ambiguity left.
So the question you need to ask is what most usefully aligns with the listener’s expectations? How are you framing the conversation?
Consider an interaction with something of indeterminate gender, sentient-acting but not-people: a crow, for example. A crow comes up to you, accepts a chunk of your sandwich then brings you a stone, seemingly in exchange.
When recounting the story, do you call the crow an it or a they?
That’s going to depend on a bunch of things - whether it’s some random wild bird or someone’s pet, how many nouns you need to juggle, and whether you’re more interested in the bird or the stone.
The choices you make set up the framing of the conversation, reflect your perspective and shape perception.
Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality....
You get that power, you use it on people who are making the world a shittier place first.
Now, that’s not precisely moral, but let’s be honest, beyond a bit of minor larceny there’s not a whole lot of personal gain you can realistically achieve.
Steal a truckload of cash? Sure, but then you’ve got to launder the heck out of it, and I’ve seen Ozark, that’s more drama than I want in my life even if I had the skills, which I don’t. And nobody pays cash even for groceries any more, have to wait for one of the non-card registers to open up and it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe you could rig a horse race or something, but the people involved in serious gambling are very good at spotting anomalous wins, and your life wouldn’t be worth dick the second time you tried it.
That pretty much leaves pranks and murder, and you’re a damn fool if you bring that within a dozen miles of any kind of personal connection.
Which pretty much only leaves assassination of high-level assholes as something that would a:) make a noticeable difference, b:) keep you under the radar and c:) be immensely satisfying.
If I could think of a way to become comfortably well-off without eitehr getting in trouble or living in crippling anxiety that I was going to get in trouble, that might be another story.
It’s just that getting away with shit is for rich people with powerful connections, and bootstrapping into that state without passing through an uninsulated trouble phase is pretty damn nontrivial. They don’t let just anyone into the club, and they stomp anyone who dares to try.
I don’t actually know about the international-super-assassin club, but I’m willing to bet it’s either a fair bit more porous, or a lot more discreet, to the point that you never have reason to suspect they’re onto you.
Snipers are a thing. And at best, who wants to spend their life on the lam? I want to play video games and eat toast, it’s hard to do that if you can’t spend an entire day in any given location.
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
We’re a group of activists in a Western country where most have been brought up with either “Israel = good, Hamas = bad” or “It’s a sad, but unsolvable conflict between two equal sides”. The media heavily skewed to the Israeli perspective, and our politicians want to condemn protests in support of Palestinians....
The very general advice I’ve been given is to coddle joints, tendons and ligaments like pampered princesses, and to treat muscles like dirt.
Of course, an actual tear or something you let the damn thing heal - but if you’ve just overdone it a bit, you’re better off better pushing through and using it normally.
Most of the pain from day-after-workout soreness is from swelling - the muscle bundles get a little frayed and leak fluid into the sheath, and it’s the pressure buildup that causes the pain. If you walk on it anyway (or equivalent), you gradually squeeze the fluid out, and it becomes much less complainy (until you rest for a few hours and it fills back up again).
At least, that’s what I’ve been told, and what I’ve noticed in my own experience. This is not medical advice.
If you’ve got just one app you use, and the admins go all Elon on the place, you either put up with it or you’re out in the cold.
If you have a hundred different apps - you don’t have that problem, but it’s a fragmented mess you can’t possibly keep track of.
But the fediverse gives you the best of both worlds. It’s hundreds of apps, but they each pull in the feed of all the others - and if the admins of any one app turn out to be evil clowns, the other apps can quietly snip them out of the feed, just like making a new groupchat with everyone but Karen in it.
It’s slowly coalescing into a handful of major cliques defined by the kinds of people they don’t want to talk to.
Environment be damned or don’t be damned. Because you like them or because you don’t like your neighbors … what animals would you like to see locally that are not there ?
I’m a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you’ll get an idea of the face I’m making, so less chance of misunderstanding...
And then you get people who follow up all their nouns with little pictures of the object in question, and just why.
What do you want for dinner? I was thinking of ordering a pizza [picture of pizza]
It’s potentially vague without the little picture, and utterly redundant with it. It never helps.
Sure, the occasional :) or something in shortform text can be appropriate for the register, but it’s very context sensitive - and the tone conveyed by most of the graphic emoji just makes me want to punch people. Again, they look like those horrible facebook avatar things, or assets from shitty freemium mobile games.
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying “what do you think of my stick?”, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
I’m poly; I don’t have a personal definition of cheating in that context. My partner is a grown-up and can do what she wants; I can barely see how that’s even my business, let alone my problem.
But if you pretend to follow a given set of rules, while actually secretly breaking them - that’s pretty much the definition of cheating in any context.
If your partner would be not-OK with some activity, but you want to do it, then you either do it anyway and face the conflict head on, or you don’t do it at all.
Selling nudes specifically - some would care a lot, some would be fine with it, and the only way to know is to ask. But sneaking around because you assume it’d be a dealbreaker if they found out - no bueno. No bueno at all.
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
Introduce Shakespeare to D&D, and encourage him to popularize it.
Not only would the campaigns he ran be amazing, but goooodlord imagine the subversive effect it would have socially. Unpinning good/evil from lawful/chaotic in the public perception that early on would be a Big Deal; bringing the idea of consumer-generated content would shift attitudes to art and literature away from a purely top-down concept, and the resulting rise of Victorian fan-fiction would be so amazingly terrible it would rip its own hole in the spacetime continuum.
Soap, generally nice smelling stuff, like those fancy Italian bath soaps in olive/cypress/fig/etc. Shower gel never seems to cut through oil or rinse off sufficiently for my liking, it always feels faintly icky afterwards.
I have to use antiperspirant; I sweat like a freaking horse for no good reason. Generally whatever’s on sale, but Brut have a new gender-neutral range that doesn’t smell like a high school locker room, which is a nice change.
I don’t care for later composers; I love the elegant-yet-complex structure of early/ier music and I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me precisely what I mean by that.
I have a huge mental blind spot when it comes to music theory; I don’t understand a damn thing about it and likely never will, so I can’t put this in actual smart-people words.
But Bach (along with a number of earlier composers) sounds immensely fucking clever, like he’s carrying on a conversation on three different levels at once, and somehow doing counterpoint down the timeline instead of across it, even with an unaccompanied cello.
Whereas your beethovens and mozarts of the world seem to use ten times as much sound and fury, or ten times as many twiddly bits… to say very little at all. If you boiled out all the redundancy, all the structures would collapse and you’d have nothing left over.
If anyone knows what the fuck I’m talking about and is able to translate, I’ll be eternally grateful.
I’m not just talking about counterpoint, though. (funny story, my introduction to baroque and early music started after I went frantically searching for counterpoint after seeing an old Ethel Merman movie on TV as a kid.)
Counterpoint is all brain-tickly, but the real payoff for me is… uhh. Patterns that are obvious in retrospect, but weirdly hard to predict ahead, given how simple they are. You can get this all the way back to plainchant, and the more basic the construction, the more impressive it is.
Conversely, once you scrape off all the drama and fussy bits off most classical composers, you’re left with something very basic indeed. You pull the ends, and for all its loopy squiggling, it doesn’t actually make a knot.
Meh. I not words good. There’s a concept there, but I lack the tools to reason about it.
I’ve been playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I got on sale recently, and man does it ever suck.
All the charm and fun and engagement has been surgically removed from the series. Your squad is dull and bland, the choices-matter don’t, the mechanics are tedious, looting and crafting are even hollower than normal and the fake Australian accents on the Boring Fish People are pissing me right off. It’s the worst factory-farmed content I’ve encountered in ages. Oh and getting voice lines every 30 seconds to update you on the temperature, that’s just brilliant I wish every game had that.
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
For each word that appears, note down a list of all the words that ever directly follow it - including end-of-sentence.
Now pick a starting word, pick a following-word at random from the list, rinse and repeat.
You can make it fancier if you want by noting how many times each word follows its predecessor in the sample text, and weighting the random choice accordingly.
Either way, the string of almost-language this produces is called a Markov chain.
It’s a bit like constantly picking the middle button in your phone’s autocomplete.
It’s a fun little exercise to knock together in your programming language of choice.
If you make a prompt-and-response bot out of it, learning from each input, it’s like talking to an oracular teddy bear. You almost can’t help being nice to it as you teach it to speak; humans will pack-bond with anything.
LLMs are the distant and very fancy descendants of these - but pack-bonding into an actual romantic relationship with one would be as sad as marrying a doll.
Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
How do you explain to yourself the existence of this Universe or the existence of anything at all?
Not many people admit to being offended by something that someone said. When was a time you actually felt hurt and/or insulted by someone?
What do you think of fanfiction ?
If the devil appeared to you and offered to answer any 3 questions, what would you ask?
Should AI be referred to as "it" or "they"?
Of course AI isn’t sentient/conscious, but it exhibits traits of high intelligence, even personality, and behaviours consistent with sentience, even if it’s merely simulated....
What's a low-stakes, achieveable goal on your bucket list?
Could be outstanding, could be something you’ve already completed....
Do you ever come up with genius ("genius") ideas for joke domains to unsettle/embarrass people when you tell them your email?
like, GiantHairyNipplemonsters.com…...
What fruit is better than mangoes?
What is the first movie you can remember ever having watched? (kbin.social)
What do you think about that movie now?
Be honest: if you had the power to stop time, your morals would go out the window. (lemmy.zip)
Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality....
What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
What is the most terryifying siren noise?
There’s an emergency at the Facility down the road, and everyone in a six-mile radius is very likely fucked....
What opened your eyes to what's happening in Palestine?
We’re a group of activists in a Western country where most have been brought up with either “Israel = good, Hamas = bad” or “It’s a sad, but unsolvable conflict between two equal sides”. The media heavily skewed to the Israeli perspective, and our politicians want to condemn protests in support of Palestinians....
Using a sore muscle normally? (kbin.social)
Let's say that I feel a little pain after doing some exercise I don't normally do....
How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person? (kbin.social)
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively....
What non-native animal would you really really really like to introduce into your local habitat ?
Environment be damned or don’t be damned. Because you like them or because you don’t like your neighbors … what animals would you like to see locally that are not there ?
why do lemmy users hate the use of emojis ?
I’m a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you’ll get an idea of the face I’m making, so less chance of misunderstanding...
Low effort posts
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying “what do you think of my stick?”, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...
You get 3 wishes. No monkey paw twisting it to hurt you mechanic. What do you wish for?
Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.' (www.pcgamer.com)
Would you choose invisibility or teleportation?
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
If you could custom make your *perfect* shoes, what features would they have?
Preferably realistic features, but if your perfect shoe involves some kinda anti-grav hover features, I’d absolutely understand....
Would you consider the anonymous sale of nudes cheating?
Having removed metadata and with nothing recognizable in the pic.
What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
Which existing intellectual property would you suggest should have been presented in a different medium?
What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
If you could go back in time and do, or bring, one thing to mess up the timeline what would it be?
deleted_by_author
deleted_by_author
deleted_by_moderator
If you can say enough things about a thing does that mean that you know what the thing is?
What keeps you going every day?
What are the worst names you could give a baby boy?
Hello you awesome people,...
Weekly what have you been playing discussion - week of November, 6, 2023
What are your thoughts on people being doxxed for ripping down missing israeli posters?
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
Imagine if the movie "Her" (2013) was real and people could fall in love with an AI, would you be weirded out by someone if they did that and especially if it was someone you knew?
with the way AI is getting by the week,it just might be a reality
I always believe what the people around me believe. Is that truth or what?
What's the significance of calling it "Israel-Hamas War" vs "Israel-Gaza War"?
I’m in the US....