cabbage

Israeli politics have been fucked for a long time. Netanyahu has always been a dangerous extremist, and the fact that people repeatedly voted for him speaks volumes for the political culture.

In Germany? You'll be fine, they're very aware of the threat of antisemitism but it's not any worse than elsewhere.

Now, whether German culture is enjoyable is another question.

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There's nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it's all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words "God is dead", but I think it's worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that "God has become unbelievable", but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It's all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?

Shoes. You don't end up saving money and it's not worth the pain. I tried for years back when I couldn't afford a thing and concluded that there's simply no such thing as cheap good shoes.

Obviously they won't give too much of a shit and they're not going to send any mail, they'll just block the server like they would anyway. They are, however, going to be annoyed to be treated as insignificant nobodies. So all in all not a bad idea.

Everything is just vibrations; vibrations are just waves. Vinyl records make a physical copy of the sound wave. As the needle drags across it at the correct speed it starts vibrating, reproducing the sound that went into the groove in the first place.

Sound files are more tricky: Basically you need to measure the wave as it goes up and down, store it into a file, and then have a computer convert it back into vibrations with the help of a loudspeaker. The more times you measure the sound wave per second, the better quality your recording will be.

As we know that sounds are waves, it's not so hard to imagine a text file containing sound. Below is a very simple wave form represented with numbers:

- _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ - ⁻ - _ _ - - ⁻ ⁻ - - _ _

1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 0 1 1 2 2 1 1 0 0

In theory, a computer could convert this into sound. It would sound awful.

She's only 69 though. Four justices are younger than her, three are older. She's closer in age to Kamala Harris than she is to Joe Biden.

I get the concern, but at some point it gets silly.

Nice overview but I'm not sure I completely agree with you on everything.

If I want to make a community, is there a reason I would choose one lemmy over another?

There's absolutely good reason to choose instances wisely when making a community. Some instances defederate from others, and you want to make your community somewhere where you agree with the moderation policy. Also, it might be easier to immediately reach people on a larger instance.

If you create your community on lemmy.ml, you might not reach everyone because some people and instances have blocked .ml due to different philosophies. If you make it on Beehaw, you'll reach fewer people as they have a higher moderation standard than most, which could of course also be good for your community. Lemmy.world is more neutral in their moderation policy, but I'm sure there are pros and cons there as well.

I like it when there are specific instances for specific niches, as it gives the community control over who to federate with. But of course, that's not always possible.

If I report a comment, is my report private?

They're not public at least. Few things on the Internet are truly private.

Let's not forget that US/Israeli relations were at an all-time low during Biden's presidency because he didn't want anything to do with Netanyahu.

Not saying the US response to all this hasn't sucked, but I'm pretty confident any other president the US has had the last 50 years would have been worse.

It's not your president. It's your country. You allowed this to happen over decades, not months or even years.

And in a race where the other candidate is firmly pro genocide... Yeah, I struggle to interpret this shit in good faith. Kindly fuck off.

I'm pretty sure Dansup is at least 40 senior developers in a trench coat. It makes no sense how many quality projects this guy manages to develop and maintain.

Off the top of my head:

• PixlFed
• FediDB
• PubKit
• Loops
• Sup

They're probably just about now realizing they should have taken away the right to vote first, the right to self-determination second. Rookie mistake.

Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin was a scholar and developed his own take on Marxism, which has its own understanding of the communist society. Marx wrote very little about what a communist society would look like, but he had an understanding of history as moving towards an end: The classes will fight, over time the result of this fight will lead to them approaching each other, and at the end of this struggle we will reach a classless society. This classless society is the communist society in a traditional Marxist sense.

Lenin figured he'd make a shortcut to get there: Never mind thousands of years of class struggle, let's just put in place a powerful ruling class imposing communism on everyone, designing a classless society from the top down. Which is a bit counter-intuitive, but the Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism basically boils down to trying to figure out what that could look like.

So then you get the Soviet Union, very much founded on the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Today people who identify as Marxist-Leninist tend to not be the sharpest tools in the shed: Despite insisting that they have studied the texts carefully, a brief interaction with them reveals that they have never read neither Marx nor Lenin. What it boils down to, rather than anything theoretical, is either a longing for some imaginary version of the Soviet Union or a unshakable commitment to lick Putin's ass.

The Soviet Union of course never did become a classless society, so you could argue that the greatest achievement of Marxism-Leninism was to destroy the traditional meaning of communism in a Marxist sense.

I guess hungry Gazans eating comes at a real threat of them not starving to death, which would undermine the whole "military operation". No wonder they were scared.

I feel like any time anyone is using their phones in public they're scrolling Instagram.

If you want to give an appearance of normalcy while maintaining a living soul, just get a Pixelfed account, follow a bunch of photographers, and scroll endlessly.

...and Russia, probably.

And investigate both sides - Russia will support both extremes in any issue that causes unrest in Western democracies. So investigating only one side is a useful propaganda tool but kind of misses the mark.

It's a bit funny to me that even when hosted on lemmy*.world*, the "news" community is exclusively for American news and the "politics" community is exclusively for American politics.

In short, anything you publish here will, by design, be broadcast all around to whatever service is interested in listening. Collecting data about fediverse users is as easy as setting up a federated service designed to collect data, and observe what comes in. In some countries there are regulations for what kind of data you're allowed to store, but you could always just go somewhere else and do it.

Nobody is going to buy user data from sh.itjust.works or any other service because why the hell would they do that when they can just collect everything for free.

This is not unlike everything else on the Internet. If you publish something, it can be used. Maybe not legally in all countries, but as we have learned from the AI revolution nobody really cares about legality anyway.

Nothing you post here, or anywhere else on the internet, is private. It's all public, and if companies find a way of profiting off it chances are that they will. If they can't do it legally in the US they will do so somewhere else. The only way of avoiding it is by not publishing in open forums.

If you're worried about your user data, the best you can do is probably to jump around between different accounts.

Open source culture remains the biggest problem with open source software, sadly.

Indeed! It's almost like people got fed up of their internet experience being a flaming pile of garbage.

The most (only?) surprising thing about this is that Omar has an adult daughter - I thought she was famous for being so incredibly young herself.

Almost as if "young" doesn't really mean anything, and is just used to silence and discredit people (women) one disagrees with.

Almost.

I disagree actually. Be an informed consumer. Ask questions in open forums. Buy quality, use for a long time. Avoid fast fashion.

That said, I don't know the first thing about leggings.

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King.

It's just exploding with creativity and craftsmanship throughout the album. The opening tune (21st Century Schizoid Man) was unlike anything anyone had ever heard at the time it was released, and there's honestly still not much like it out there. And the transition to Moonchild after it is equally mind-blowing just for the contrast alone. The title track remains one of the most incredible things I've heard.

Zappa also has a lot of good candidates for this list. I'm soft for Freak Out, where the madness started, but some might argue something like Joe's Garage is a better example.

The same exact people will whine about how Bluesky should have been using ActivityPub in one second, and bitch about how they don't want their content bridged over there in the next. It's almost as if they haven't thought this through.

Of course anyone is free to join an instance that blocks the bridge - that's part of the beauty of the whole system.

Was eating soup after a long day of work. Tired. Figured I'd drink the last bit out of the bowl.

Crashed it into my front tooth and a piece of it flew off. Enough to be visible, not enough for the dentist to do anything about it. It'll just stay like that forever.

Not so bad compared to many other stories, just really really pathetic.

I find it expensive for what it is (given that I still get a limited number of searches) and I'm not comfortable with some of their ways (I don't want anything to do with AI, and I the idea they have of being nonpolitical seems dangerously naive to me). I also don't like supporting non-FOSS projects all that much.

Still, it's the best search I've found, and I'm paying every month until I find something better. It's worth it.

For me, German humour is at its best when it's using subtitles in the German language - not really through puns, but by using language to highlight contradictions and absurdities. Obviously, this humour does not translate well at all.

After learning German and re-reading some Kafka stories I was struck by how stories I had read as somewhat somber in English were actually full of a weird sense of humour in the original German. It's still absurd and unsettling, but somehow Kafka is also funny.

Then again, he wasn't German.

I think this is a huge problem in American politics, and Americans really need to get around to elect younger officials asap. Obviously it's not that easy, and the problems run deep.

The supreme court, however, it's the one institution that's kind of intentionally old. They are supposed to be experienced ageing justices at the end of their career.

The problem is not that the supreme court is old as much as that politicians are even older.

In Norwegian, which is linguistically and culturally close to English, the saying is "kyss meg i ræva" - kiss me in the ass. It's not "kyss meg på ræva", which would be kiss me on the ass.

So if we assume common roots/interpretation, I think it's safe to assume it's not referring to a smack on the cheek.

At least he seems to be enjoying it, embracing the creative process and developing whatever he's interested in. Seems like a pretty healthy approach.

I guess another course of action is to turn it into a discussion. Like "I don't know, do you think birds have blood circulation in their legs?". Admitting not to know stuff and to ask follow-up questions is generally pretty good conversation making.

He has the power to create his own instance with his own rules; he has the power to leave for an instance run by like-minded people.

And other people have the power to block that instance should it poison their internet experience. :)

Two shortcomings:

The first is Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, which really does do Biden a bit of an injustice. The second, and more important, of the flaws is Hur’s analysis of a February 2017 comment by the then former vice president that serves as the nexus to some key evidence Hur cites for Biden’s supposed wrongdoing.

In the memory one, Hur writes about how Biden misremembers who said something back in 2009, but fails to mention that Biden corrected himself.

In the evidence one, Hur fails to give context to a quote about "documents downstairs" that is actively used in his report, arguably rendering the use of the quote intentionally misleading.

Which is a radical act to fight tech billionaires like Zuckerberg and Musk. Who have both been reasonably accused of enabling some incredibly awful stuff.

Contributing to the fediverse is probably not the most efficient way to fight for human rights and against billionaires and fascists, but it certainly makes some sort of tiny contribution. So I wouldn't call it pointless. :)

Not exactly a new one, but I listened to S-town with great enjoyment. It's a little story about an alleged murder, a truly original American man, and rural Alabama. I was never bored, and I certainly learned something. And you get to hear an amazing Alabama accent.

Phil Spector. His wall of sound bullshit caused decades of potentially amazing albums to sound like shit, and he's a terrible person who has brought nothing on the world that's worth keeping.

The only thing these people ever do is to project.

I think a common fault people have in general, and especially in open source circles, is to consider everything a zero sum game.

Obviously it's not, and especially not in the Fediverse, but when did reality prevent anyone from being assholes on the internet?

Or, hopefully, some ended up on federated platforms. Like yourself - I'm happy you're here!

Temperature itself does not affect the speed of light - remember that space is freezing cold, and light moves through it just fine. So warmer temperatures don't do anything with time.

If earth suddenly gained a bunch of mass, that would change things up as gravity would increase. However, we wouldn't really notice, as everything would speed up more or less the same. We'd have to compare ourselves to someone in a system where time moves differently in order to notice.

I'd say, hypothetically, if gigantic corporations somehow managed to lock users into walled gardens and effectively destroyed the independent and decentralized nature of the Web as we know it.

Good thing that would never happen.