glassware

@glassware@lemmy.world
1 Post – 30 Comments
Joined 12 months ago

Best simple magic trick I've ever seen, blows people's minds:

Cut out a piece of black paper the shape of the opening of a beer can, lick it and stick it to the lid. From a distance it should look like it's open. Prick a hole in the side with a pin and drain out a quarter of the beer, enough that you can squeeze the can and bend it. Lay it on its side on a table, with the pinhole pointing up so it doesn't leak. Now it looks like an open, empty, crushed can. Do all that secretly obviously.

Now ask someone if they want a drink, and point out the "empty" can. Pick it up and cover the pinhole with your finger, then subtly wave the can around as you magically summon more beer. The remaining beer will fizz up and the pressure will cause the can to inflate and uncrush itself. Secretly remove the black paper and hide it. Show them the magically restored lid, crack it open an pour the beer into a glass (so they don't notice it was partly empty).

What makes it so incredible is you never hid the can from them or did anything tricksy. From their POV, an empty can just refilled itself in front of their eyes.

Edit: Here's David Blaine doing it for some obvious actors. You will be able to make it more convincing than this. Can't believe David Blaine was so popular back then lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUTG-MIqU-Q

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I still use both Lemmy and Reddit and I honestly think Lemmy is in a sweet spot where there are enough comments for a discussion but not enough to go off topic.

Reddit discussions are never about the OP, they're always riffing on an off-topic joke that someone made in a reply to the already off-topic top comment.

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Overpriced. It maybe used to be worth it, but these days all phones look and work the same anyway.

I used to be an iPhone person, bought a new one every two years from the iPhone 4 in 2010 until my iPhone SE broke in 2018. That was when iPhones jumped to being like $1000, so I thought fuck it and bought a $150 Android.

I was ready for a really rough transition but it turns out these days all apps are cross platform React Native with data stored in the cloud. Once you're logged in literally everything is exactly the same.

I suspect a lot of "breakages" were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

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Interestingly twitter's "block" function did originally just mute people. I remember being blocked in around 2010 and it didn't stop you following or reading their tweets. At first I was confused when people started requesting the true block functionality - what's the point when tweets are publicly available to logged out users?

When you've never been harassed, like me or Musk or twitter's original engineers, you don't immediately understand that allowing (muted) interaction feeds the harassment and can still spread it around into a pile-on by non muted users.

Luckily most people get it now, but it looks like Musk wants to turn the clock back on it.

Weird how it's literally impossible to ever live without something no one had 100 years ago

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And never run commands copied from a web page, even if you do know them.

JavaScript's copy/paste API means a website owner or an attacker can change the contents of your clipboard after you press copy, and you'll end up pasting malicious commands into your shell. I think Firefox blocks this now, don't know about Chrome.

What's the significance of falling forward in a moving vehicle?

An argument to convince people whose physics knowledge stops before Galileo?

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So if billionaires put out a statement that they will never stop private flights, and governments announce that they won't legislate on it, what's your plan? Destroy the planet out of spite?

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That's definitely the intention. But for the guy on the left, "critical holistic understanding" amounts to "X isn't worth it because it's too complicated", and he posts most of these memes.

In a mastodon thread this week we estimated that banning private jet usage globally would save about 100 million tonnes of CO2, while normal Americans would save 4.5 billion tonnes by reducing their consumption to global average levels.

Disproportionate harms are annoying but a tiny minority acting disproportionately still matters way less than how normal people act. Banning private jets is pointless if nothing else changes.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren't art, but that doesn't mean someone working in photography as a medium can't be an artist.

In my experience it's only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they're comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don't physically make the marks yourself and it's the concept and composition that's important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like "oh, that's interesting". They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn't art depends on the intention not the process.

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Do you have any cases you can point out?

I can't find it now either, but I've read about a German doctor convicted as a serial killer solely because she was present at the deaths of too many patients. In that case she was present at the death of every patient for like 3 months, which sounds like strong evidence against her. Until you think about it and realize that if she murdered them, that means no one died of natural causes for 3 months. Also in that case the number of deaths on the ward actually went up after she was arrested.

Similar but not to do with doctors, Sally Clarke was wrongly convicted of killing her children, purely because both of them had died of SIDS. The prosecution said SIDS is rare and so it happening twice was impossible. What's worrying about that case is, everyone now says the miscarriage of justice was that the prosecutor incorrectly calculated the chances of two children dying of SIDS, when the actual fallacy was using the statistics as evidence at all. 1 in 73 million is the chance that one specific child will die of SIDS. The chance that any child will die of SIDS is 100%! 200 die in the UK every year! You can't just go around arresting every parent on the basis that they were unlucky!

What's really missing in everything I've seen is an actual statistical analysis. Everything I've seen is just "She was present at 20 deaths, when her colleagues were only present at 10". Yeah, but how unlikely is that? How many nurses per year will be in exactly the same situation in the UK, or in the world? How unusual was the number of deaths in that hospital while there was supposedly a serial killer operating, versus a normal year?

VR porn needs to be at least 4k for immersion and you can only get that quality with a paid account. But that's a waste of money so you pay for one month and fill a hard drive before you cancel.

Having tried to do something similar, "Nothing, Forever" must have some pretty serious coding to engineer the prompts and reconstruct tiny snippets of AI generated dialogue into a full meaningful script. I wonder if that's enough for the creators to claim copyright.

Sure, the chances of her specifically being that unlucky are astronomical. But the chances that somebody out of the 9 billion people on earth will be that unlucky are pretty good.

Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!

Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.

I hear you with this, I've ended up doing a distance learning Maths degree just so I can understand all the Wikipedia squiggles

I wash my hands because I use my hands to manipulate objects, touch my face and prepare food. Perhaps you perform these tasks with your anus?

If I had a sphincter on my hand with shit inside it, which occasionally farted or shit came out, and washing it would never actually make it hygienic because it's not a hermetic seal and bacteria from the shit inside would always be on it anyway, then yeah I'd just wipe it with paper. And use the other hand

We might still be wrong about her.

Honestly this looks like one of those statistical murder convictions. Random chance means that every few years, somewhere in the world, some medical professional will be present at a series of unusual deaths. They end up in prison even though there's no other evidence.

I'm trying to find out what the actual evidence against Letby was, but so far I can only find one scribbled post it note written during a mental breakdown after being arrested. Which, she could have just been writing down things people were saying about her.

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I think you'll be disappointed with the bidet. Your original comment is correct, they are inconvenient and solve a non-problem.

It's annoying waddling from the toilet to the bidet with a dirty ass. It takes time to wash. Then you use more paper to dry than you would have to just wipe. And you don't feel cleaner afterwards because wiping is fine.

There's no polite way to say it, some people like bidets because they make a big mess when they use the toilet. For them bidets are more convenient than paper. For the average person wiping is quicker and easier.

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Or you never used paper properly.

If wiping your ass is a three minute process involving mashing shit around, then you're the sloppy shit person I'm talking about. I'd want a bidet if that happened to me too.

For me wiping is one to clean and one to polish. First sheet gets stained slightly brown (but no actual shit on it, because that's in the toilet), second sheet comes away clean. It's a five second process.

It's a freestanding ceramic bidet plumbed in to hot and cold water, the kind everyone is saying is the best. Lived there up through my 20s. Waddling over to it to wash and then dry was an utter waste of time.

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This is the only reason why anyone wears any particular type of clothing. There is no style of clothing that it objectively makes sense to wear.

Yet here you are, posting on a website that doesn't allow absolute free speech.

£100k per year is not middle class, it's the top 3% of the country.

I grew up middle class, my family are lawyers, high level civil servants, software engineers. I don't know anyone who earns £100k.

I was really interested coming into this thread, because although I am conscious about privacy I sometimes wonder why I bother.

Unfortunately none of the counterarguments in the comments are convincing at all.

Analogies with letting someone see you naked are stupid. We're not talking about naked photos, were talking about stuff like your age range and what newspaper you read. I don't care who knows that.

"Future authoritarian governments could use it against you" isn't worth worrying about. The government will have access to official records and can question you in person. Your ethnicity, religion, politics and sexuality are all easily found out whether you post them online or not. The fact that some advertising start up knows them will make no difference.

"If someone knows enough about you they can tailor Facebook ads to control your mind" is just sci fi conspiracy theory paranoia. Besides which they could run the same ads without targeting and I'd be just as mind controlled even if my data was a secret.

Edit: I really don't mind getting downvotes, but if anyone has time to make an actual counterargument that would be great

Because they just aren't very good.

Bidet people think bidets are incredible and come up with all these psychoanalytic reasons why people won't use them, but that's the reason.

I had one growing up and used it occasionally but always disliked it. They're inconvenient and don't make you noticeably cleaner than toilet paper.

IMHO they're for germphobes and people who do really sloppy shits.

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I've never doubted the Tiananmen Square massacre before, but there are so many posts lately insisting it happened I'm starting to think maybe it didn't

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