OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

That makes perfect sense - only grown-ass adults whittle gurls could ever be afraid that someone might lose a game!

At a guess, it would depend on where you live. For one thing, the number of non-religious people in the USA has doubled in the last 15 years, but notably, most do not go all the way to identify themselves as "atheists" (militant or otherwise):

Perhaps b/c the belief that there definitively is no such thing as any kind of "god" is a rather extreme hard-line stance, while "meh, there might be, but probably isn't, and anyway who cares?" seems much more popular lately (according to that study, and many others like it).

Also there are a HUGE fraction of people who are ostensibly "Jews" or "Protestants" or "Catholic" or whatever, but don't really give a shit and just hang on loosely b/c of historical reasons, or b/c of current cultural rather than religious affiliations.

Unfortunately (imho), while the article itself goes into some depth as to why various people believe as they do, the title itself seems extremely click-baity, trying to capitalize on people's prejudices and fears. Though despite all that, ultimately is accurate so... less so than normal, I guess?

There has never been a better time in the history of America to self-identify as an atheist, I think? Unfortunately, we might look back on this as a Golden Era, if McCarthyism returns and this time in the guise of evangelical christianity. And I say this as not even an atheist myself, just someone who will defend to the death someone else's right to believe what they wish rather than be forced (especially to the death! e.g. let's say a woman who is pregnant and experiencing complications) to believe something else - the latter is one of the chief reasons for the entire existence of America, but the pull of (christo-)fascism is indeed strong...

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: "Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.") - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So... sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each "category" of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still "news"? tbh, "news" is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: "Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%"), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.

DO parents create their children, really, or do they just FAAFO? But if you write a computer program, don't you have rights to it? The latter is a thorny question indeed, if it develops sentience. So it seems like both yes, at a lower level, but then no once it rises to a similar level as you. Similar to how an embryo or even more so an unfertilized egg is not a "person" yet (except in the Southern USA), but an adult is. Or some people may argue that Might Makes Right, which most of us would disagree with, but e.g. the likes of Putin would still push forth. So there is indeed no consensus there, and likely never will be. But my main point here, besides simply listing some of these factors involved, is to say that the act of Creation seems to involve more than just fucking, even knowing full well that a child would result from that act - full Creation involves a much deeper commitment, hence a higher degree of ownership.

Not always. Sometimes they are just looking to unload them onto someone else:-P.

Thanks for the link!

It did say that it reduces particle spread by 30-60% though, yet with qualifiers too.

My natural intuitive thought is that the lid down surely limits the spreading, i.e. the left side of this picture, especially as compared with the right side:

Also, I want to (half jokingly) complain that they treat the MS2 bacteriophage like one of the bad guys there, as if killing the E. coili wouldn't make it one of our allies in that fight:-). (I say jokingly bc most people reading such an article would know that, but also what they really used it for was a detection vector, probably bc the protein wrapping eases sample collection by reducing degradation.)

You are saying that there is balance in all things. I agree fully - we even need some of these people, so long as it works out, e.g. scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors - these people need their inflated egos, or how else would someone have the audacity to be able to do something like stick their literal hands inside of someone's literal guts to carve out the cancerous masses and thereby save people's lives? When it is appropriate, it can be used for all of our benefits - the literal definition of "good" then, as in aka advantageous.

Where you started to go off the rails is when there seems to be a lack of balance - though there too I think it will come, in the future and also here in the present in other ways. e.g. hard times begets strong people, who make better times, which makes weak people, who fall into hard times, and the cycle repeats itself.

Where it starts to matter the most, imho, is when we are hyporitical, then instead of choosing our own balance point, we (/they) are the ones who will get balanced instead, if you catch my drift. e.g. you alluded to people who upon first deciding that "covid is fake", refused to take the vaccine, then predictably got covid, then all of a sudden wanted help from a real doctor (why not call the likes of Joe Rogan then, huh?), then spread covid even further. Many irl actual doctors, media personalities, pastors/preachers/priests/ministers/whatever, and average families are dead now. This did not need to happen, yet it did. It was a choice to jump off the cliff, even though it was not always phrased that way by the people goading others into it (which sometimes but not always included themselves - see e.g. the Woodsworth interview where Trump said in advance that he was going to claim that the virus was not airborne, yet admitting that it was, in fact, very much known to be airborne; this was a known quantity, and he knew that he knew, but even so he knew, and even admitted, that he was going to say differently from what was known, which btw we used to call these "blatant lies", yet now refer to them as "alternative facts", b/c Might Makes Right I guess, and powerful people get to control the words rather than us adhering solely to what is Truth). And now, predictably (despite how we all act shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!:-P), many nurses have quit, some by outright dying, others by simply leaving the field, and some I shit you not have literally taken to the hills and now live in some mountainous area far away from people (if their stories on Reddit were to be taken at face value, which seeing what I know myself I 100% believe that many of them at least are likely to be true).

Likewise, I am sure that you have heard the stories of doctors fleeing from states that refuse to perform abortions - I think it was Idaho who literally closed their final, last remaining (or was it second to last?) maternity ward, due to the final doctor retiring rather than put up with all the BS she had to endure on a daily basis, and they could not keep it staffed anyway due to harassment of the nurses too. I also heard a story in the early days of the pandemic (in Springfield MO iirc) of a doctor who had brought in federal funding to begin an entire new medical research institute there - a JOB CREATOR - but who, predictably, upon receiving death threats decided to cancel those plans and leave the state instead. He was not the first doctor willing to move to Missouri who was convinced to make alternate plans - I hear similar stories far too often, and even from literal decades in the past, to attribute them to anything short of an actual pattern of behavior.

I wanted to point out how those problems did not start there though, but themselves had earlier causes, and also that "those people" never simply remain where they are, i.e. appeasement never seems to work, as history has taught anyone willing to learn from it. e.g. when they got covid, they drove in from their rural areas where they already had decided not only to not fund hospitals themselves, but they also caused people who WERE trying to bring in outside funding to build those to flee. And when they came in, many treated the nurses (and doctors) horribly - sometimes threatening them LITERALLY AT GUNPOINT, to say or do whatever they wanted, e.g. "don't say that this is covid, everyone knows that isn't real, now just save them!". These kinds of temper tantrums affect us all, whereever we may be - and I do not mean solely emotionally. B/c when these same nurses quit their jobs, who now is lining up to take their places? Supposedly we held them up as heroes... with all the clapping and surrounding media blitz, but when push came to shove, we did not have their backs, nor do we have them even now as they continue to strike for better working conditions (where did all that media blitz go?), and one day we may find ourselves in need of medical care, but be unable to find a qualified practictioner, as a direct result of our choices of actions (again, even though the words went the opposite direction). We will be "shocked" to discover, then, that medical care is no longer what it once was, even just a few short years ago. (Also, importantly, while this does affect people "everywhere", it does not do so "equally" - some areas are, obviously, affected to a higher degree than others.)

We all just want "daddy to take care of us" - whether that be in the form of Big Brother, or a God (real or imagined), we cry out for salvation or at least acknowledgement of our pain. And Donald Trump... yes, just like every politician ever, gives them that. He gives them what they say and think that they need, and so they will vote for him, even again, even after all that has happened before. B/c appeasement always works, don't you know? :-(

One way or another, the balance of the USA, and UK, and Australia, etc. will be restored. Though we might not remain sovereign nations anymore as a result. Just. Like. Rome. The rich & powerful do not seem to "need" (or want) democracies around the world, anymore. So therefore we will not be allowed to have them any longer.

Exactly. The community could partner with the user to enhance findability - e.g. a community could label itself with the "hockey" tag, and if the user clicks somewhere they could see all the communities that likewise have that "hockey" tag, and just like the language function, include or exclude all of them in one group rather than having to do so individually. No "censorship" by external agencies need apply, and anyway this could be entirely optional to the user who could continue to exist entirely in the absence of such a thing.

Meh, would it not depend more on the saturation of the field? Like a physicist may literally only need a computer and desk (and a small salary, supported by teaching), while a biologist might need lets say contracting funds to do DNA sequencing, and yet even in that scenario the latter might still find a job more readily than the former? Though heavily influenced by factors such as willingness to move to elsewhere especially another country.

Additionally which (sub-)field someone is in has implications for how readily available even small amounts of funds are, especially if the various committees are using the hiree to obtain funds from a known source?

Even so, your seeking clarification about what you genuinely wanted to know more about resulted in DarkNightoftheSoul's fascinating reply, so it all seems to have worked out for the best!? :-D

Um... congrats, I guess?

Though there are still location-specific communities on lemmyml, e.g. !india@lemmy.ml, that you may or may not enjoy wanting to curate into or out of your various feeds.

But I am not trying to tell you how to live your life? I am just answering your question irt the fact that such posts do exist across the Fediverse. Perhaps you are not seeing them if nobody on your tech-focused instance has subscribed to any of those communities.

I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific

Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) I did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. I was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn't (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? "I am right and you cannot question that!" - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?

Be better.

Anyway, it's a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.

And fwiw, Jesus hung out with "sinners" (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to "love one another, especially those you disagree with" so... even if this thought bugs you, you are actually "following the teachings of Christ" (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don't fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don't fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to "be nice", is it not?:-D)

I am being pedantic here, but "cruelty" doesn't seem like quite the right word. If you made something, like a drawing or a story, and then got rid of it, the point isn't to cause suffering, but rather to throw it away. "Indifference" would fit better. And... either way, a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work? "Omnipotent" there being a relative word, that the ancient people's would not have been able to distinguish b/t forms like your more common garden-variety space alien (e.g. 2001 Odyssey) all the way up to external-reality entity (e.g. The Matrix).

Anyway my point is that it is people who are the ones that are cruel, b/c we are no better than anyone else, yet we delight in causing suffering. The only other animal I have ever heard of who shares that trait is the Chimpanzee, who btw also just so happens to be the closest living relative that humans have on this planet. \s on that being a coincidence ofc, when we share ~99% genetic similarity.

Upvoting, b/c that too:-).

I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c "they made it up", but b/c it actually did really happen... and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.

Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie "The Matrix" did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.

Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe "the world-wide flood event" to a child, it would be both "yes it actually did happen" (most likely) plus also "it wasn't quite like that".

It doesn't work now ofc, b/c it does not exist! But it could work however we make it to work! It is only subject to the constraints of like logical possibilities plus technical implementation effectiveness. e.g., just like the language options, or applying a NSFW or spoiler tag (currently the former only applies to posts while the latter only applies to comments), when someone makes a community they could make their own selections as to which categories they want to be listed under. It could be hierarchical - e.g. "hockey" could presume "sports" but not the reverse - or not, in which case the latter would be interpreted more as a "sports, general" or "sports, other" category, rather than a super-category that includes other sub- ones.

And, just like the language options and NSFW/spoilers, people will forget to mark their communities/posts/comments, so that model could never be a perfect solution. Then again, nothing else will ever be perfect either so... it is no reason not to try? Especially if enough people and enough communities DO want it.

Anyway I am not a Lemmy developer, just saying that I hope that such a thing may come here, eventually, to make it more welcoming to newcomers, so that they don't have to spend hours and hours subscribing to this and that and also blocking others. :-)

But right now, the connection issues and defense against hostile attackers spamming the Fediverse with CP are much more major considerations, so I do not believe it will come anytime "soon".

Assuming you get hired after "only" your first postdoc:-). Some people do two or even three of those (though two longer ones can take more time overall than three shorter ones). And yet you hear of people that manage it even then, especially if there is even a temporary upswing somewhere e.g. a "cluster hire".

These days it seems difficult to speak of what is "standard" b/c the rules seem to have changed radically since the Tea Party rose to power, and rather than things returning to "normal" after the various recessions semi-recently, they instead seem to be shifting to an entirely different state altogether.

It is so bad that a huge fraction of people getting PhDs won't find jobs in the same specialty area - e.g. physics has been notorious for this for decades already, even though someone trained in that rigorous discipline often has little trouble moving to another area where they are often in high demand:-).

Okay but setting aside the details of the truth about language, having a degree should not give you or anyone carte blanche (definition: "complete freedom to act as one wishes or thinks best") to harass strangers on the internet. I know nothing of the incident you referred to, only what you said here. Also btw I did not down-vote you.

Regardless of whether a mod is a literal child or not, that is the "role" that they have stepped up to fulfill - to be a curator of whatever community, or instance, or whatever - and should that not deserve at least a modicum of respect? i.e., if you stepped up to fulfill that role for your own community, wouldn't you want people to respect you in turn? From your words, you obviously do, so why not offer it preemptively?

Especially as a psychologist: you better than most people know that you get what you give, especially when dealing with children.

They likely were saying that the truth of whether you were a psychologist or not was irrelevant, what matters was you breaking the rules of that community - b/c at some point, if truth is functionally indistinguishable from a lie, then does it matter, practically speaking?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this food for thought:-).

I have a start to that, in the form of my block list:-). Of course it is highly tuned to my personal interests, and does not do full "categorization" beyond merely "is in said list" vs. "is not in said list", plus it only helps me personally rather than e.g. someone fleeing Reddit due to their continual messes. In that way it is like recommending a book to someone, vs. making the entire Dewey Decimal or other system to classify books in a manner that makes retrieval easier for other people.

Moreover, I think the main part would be to allow community self-selection - e.g. if I call something by a term, that is me putting that label onto them, while if they choose it for themselves it seems much more friendly?

Anyway, I thought lists of communities were already widely available? The trick might rather be to keep them maintained - e.g. to open up a wiki page, except that starts to involve who will host it, and like everything else Fediverse-related, who will fight off the hostile actors who keep uploading CP to it? (see e.g. this post describing yet another instance closing b/c of such attacks)

These matters are not so "simple" - e.g. would a far-right community be "heroes" or "genocidal terrorists", or both depending on who you ask? In my own personal block list, I get to make my own determinations (bonus: at a low-resolution level of merely "see" vs. "not see" such content, without having to think any more about it!:-P), but attempting to go beyond that... really does require some consensus-building skills. OR we could hope for UI tools that allow people to choose their own personal preferred method of accessing content across the Fediverse, which side-steps all that and keeps it at the level of unique, personal preferences.

The detraction is that if too rigidly applied, it creates echo chambers. On the other hand, please feel free to look at all the CP, pics of food, and descriptions of sportsting that you like, yet I do not want to waste my time with such, and if the only choices are "All" or "None", then I want the option to choose the latter, at least sometimes. I would presume that others think likewise.