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  • 16 Posts
  • 157 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • “The View From Halfway Down” by Alison Tifel has always resonated with me:

    The weak breeze whispers nothing
    The water screams sublime
    His feet shift, teeter-totter
    Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

    Toes untouch the overpass
    Soon he’s water bound
    Eyes locked shut but peek to see
    The view from halfway down

    A little wind, a summer sun
    A river rich and regal
    A flood of fond endorphins
    Brings a calm that knows no equal

    You’re flying now
    You see things much more clear than from the ground
    It’s all okay, it would be
    Were you not now halfway down

    Thrash to break from gravity
    What now could slow the drop
    All I’d give for toes to touch
    The safety back at top

    But this is it, the deed is done
    Silence drowns the sound
    Before I leaped I should’ve seen
    The view from halfway down

    I really should’ve thought about
    The view from halfway down
    I wish I could’ve known about
    The view from halfway down


  • the devs have absolutely no say over how the software being used

    According to some recent posts, ML admins (and maybe even mods?) have the ability to erase any record of mod actions, for example disappearing critique of the CCP’s brutal actions in Tiananmen Square that were posted on ML. That left no record in the public mod logs, and the users were never informed that their contributions had been (completely) deleted.

    That isn’t an example of them having a say over how people use the software. That’s them using their own property as they wish.


  • Personally, and anecdotally, I’ve found English speakers to be quite forgiving of poor English — that is, they usually make an effort to try and understand someone with broken English, and they don’t usually point out poor grammar (though, that could be because the majority of English speakers don’t have the best grammar to begin with 😉). Especially when one compares them with some other cultures, eg the French.


  • I’ll preface this by saying that this isn’t an argument in favor of the imperial system, nor is it an argument intending to detract from the usefulness of the metric system. But I have wondered if there is some merit to having a simple, colloquial, “human friendly” system of measurement — something that’s shown to be the best system for people to grok, and is the most convenient to use in day-to-day life. If you need precision, and well defined standards, then certainly use the metric system, but is the metric system easy for people to grok? Say you ask someone to estimate a length. Would they be more likely to accurately estimate the length using the metric system, the imperial system, or some other system? Likewise for telling someone a length and asking them to physically reproduce it. Would they be more likely to do so with the metric system, the imperial system, or some other? It’s an interesting problem, imo, and it doesn’t seem to get much attention.

    It could very well be that people can, indeed, grok measurements the best when using the metric system, but I currently am unaware of any research that has been done to show that. If anyone is aware of any research that has looked into this, then please let me know! I’d be very interested to read it.


  • For people who think that Crypto will solve these issues, it won’t. In a mass-adoption scenario, a few coins will be accepted as currency while the rest remain mostly useless for commerce.

    That argument is entirely dependent on what the “few coins” hypothetically turn out to be. For example, regarding privacy, Monero is private by design.


    Those orgs behind those coins and their exchange platforms will then become just like the banks of old. Any attempt at democratizing Crypto is illusory, it’s a fantasy.

    Are you arguing that it is inevitable that exchanges, or some other entity, will inevitably gain majority control of the networks of decentralized currencies?