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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren’t since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.

    Yes it’s a flawed system. In particular it’s Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia’s borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of “objective” definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don’t need the 5-ish continents to be “fixed” because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we’re cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. “The Middle East”) when needed.



  • This is not a humanitarian or ethics question. The rules of nuclear warfare aren’t governed by morality but by game theory. From Israel’s perspective nuclear weapons are a last resort for the reasons I outlined. Their leadership and military may be genocidal, but they still have a sense of self-preservation and act somewhat rationally – which you will notice is not at all the same thing as acting morally or honestly. Using nuclear weapons is simply not a tactically rational option for them even if when their explicit goal is genocidal imperialism.

    What’s scary about Trump is that none of this applies to him. He is not a rational actor and he does not have everything to lose were he to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.


  • In every configuration, every lighting condition, every monitor, every color manipulation, I see that picture as white and gold. Not once have I managed to see the blue dress, except in separate pictures of the same dress.

    I understand the actual dress is blue and I understand the color theory, but even with the picture very heavily tinted blue my brain still interprets the dress to be in shadow and therefore white.


  • So that’s making a very critical assumption: that Israel’s territory is being existentially threatened. Iran simply does not have the military capability to do that. And Hamas/Hezbollah is not an existential threat to Israel’s existence despite propaganda to the contrary. We’ve already seen the full extent of their military capabilities.

    The Samson Option is a one time, last-resort deterrence option for when all other defensive and offensive mechanisms have failed. Israel’s small size and geopolitical situation basically requires such deterrence against a neighbor who might decide to blitzkrieg into Tel Aviv. Iran simply does not possess that capability.

    If Netanyahu pops a nuke for any other reason, he fundamentally shifts his neighbors’ calculus in favor of uniting and attacking Israel because nukes are explicitly not a last resort anymore, therefore Israel becomes an immediate existential threat to all its neighbors that must be dealt with accordingly.

    That’s the thing with nuclear deterrence: it works, but only if your enemies are clear on the lines they can’t cross. Otherwise you’re just a threat to be eliminated. And ultimately there’s only so much that propaganda can help with there. Israel may have convinced a majority of their citizens that genocide is good, but they can’t propagandize their enemies into believing that preemptive nuclear strikes are necessary. Netanyahu can whine about Iran’s nuclear program all he wants, none of his enemies seriously believe they are close to having nukes.

    Using nuclear weapons as anything but a last resort is therefore an awful gamble that very significantly (if not entirely) weakens nuclear deterrence… All for relatively little military gain. There’s very little a nuke would do that Israel can’t do to Iran with conventional weapons. While there’s a whole lot that nukes don’t do to a prepared enemy with spread out military and command infrastructure.



  • Nuclear weapons are great at leveling cities, but not so great at destroying military infrastructure. On a per-dollar basis they actually kind of suck as weapons of war. From a purely rational strategic perspective, they’re most useful as a deterrent (which is how Israel has been using them). Netanyahu is an imperialist genocidal maniac but he’s not dumb.

    Whereas if and when Trump does get his wish to pop a nuke, it won’t be for strategic gain but because he just couldn’t be restrained anymore. This absolute moron wanted to nuke a fucking hurricane FFS. It’s only a matter of time before he gets his wish since the US military has lost all ability to tell him no.


  • The purpose of a system is what it does.

    If an organization rewards empty bluster and ChatGPT-driven corporate drivel, then that it is because those things are the organization’s purpose.

    Corporate lingo is a social filter for humanoid shitweasels to identify their peers and control eventual threats.
    Nothing is more menacing to an incompetent manager than an underling speaking the truth. Thankfully corporate lingo allows underlings to be dismissed out of hand because either:

    • they didn’t use the correct lingo (“Steve fired the only guy who knew how that machine worked and ain’t nobody got time to figure it out because every other machine is falling apart as we speak” -> you get muted on teams and a meeting is booked with HR)
    • they did use the the correct lingo which is - entirely by design! - devoid of negative turns of phrase (“our rightsizing efforts mean that other team members will have to step up and synergize” -> sounds fine, deal with it, next topic).

  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldIt's all SO simple!
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    1 month ago

    It can definitely have side effects. Psychological (eating disorders, debilitating feeling of hunger) and physical (unbalanced diet, or fatigue because the body gets in the “oh fuck must conserve energy” mode).

    There is no one size fits all solution. A random 50 year old IT worker with a sedentary lifestyle and a Big Mac diet does not need the same help as a physically active 25 year old with severe hormonal imbalances. Using Ozempic is bad in the former case, but so is shaming the latter person for relying on it.



  • Literally none of the institutions which start at a fixed time (6-9 am) will offset their schedule by one hour. These things are literally written in stone. They don’t give a single fuck where the sun is, school starts at 08:30 and work starts at 09:00, from now until the end of western civilization, because doing otherwise would be a logistical inconvenience and sleep disorders are not their problem.

    Permanent ST = 1 hour less sunlight after school/work. It’s unavoidable unless you have the luxury of making your own schedule, at which point timezone does not matter to you so why are you crusading for the working man to be forever cursed to only see the sun from a cubicle? (I could live with permanent DST but that doesn’t seem like the road we’ll be going down)


  • I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

    Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

    It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.


  • We knew it was bad then too. This is cynical propaganda to try to normalise its use in the face of a mounting public health crisis.

    Much like fossil fuel companies today will continuously put out statements and ads and fund studies that either refute their impact or minimizes it. The cigarette industry pioneered this approach which essentially consists in putting just enough doubt and uncertainty into the public discourse to make regulation seem unnecessary overreach, despite overwhelming consensus from the subject matter experts who unlike lobbyists can’t just buy their way into getting real estate in magazine stands.


  • It also trends much more political than /r/popular. (Low quality liberal bait like “DAE think trump bad???” most of the time, but still). Their explicit goal with their “alternative” feeds was to de-rank the political discussions in favor of 9gag-esque slop.

    When a big political event happened, you could go to /r/all and be blasted with tens of discussions about it, or go to /r/popular and watch staged animal rescue videos or whatever.

    Now I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy necessarily, but it certainly is yet another major loss for free political speech online.



  • The trick is to put a tiny dummy load on the USB charger. Just buy the cheapest USB cable, cut the end off, and solder (or twist) a resistor between red and black. Boom.

    Had a whiny USB power strip at my office desk that stopped whining when my phone was plugged in. Small resistor took care of that perfectly, cheaply, and nondestructively. Got a kick out of confused colleagues asking why I had a dangly cable plugged in with nothing but electrical tape on the end.



  • Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?

    I don’t know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don’t have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.