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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

    I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).









  • When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say “everything is political” to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as “political”.

    With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep “everything is political” in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don’t believe it by then, I don’t know what to tell you.






  • An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).

    If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.

    Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.




  • Jellyfish are cnidarians, a phylum which also includes corals and sea anemones. Jellyfish are a specific lifecycle stage of medusozoans (their own subphylum), while corals and sea anemones are anthozoans (another subphylum of Cnidaria).

    So yup, they are polyps before sexual maturity. And you’ll find they’re more closely related to corals than they are to members of any other phylum.

    Edit: I highly recommend that anyone who wants to get lost in the world of marine invertebrates check out WoRMS and then follow along in parallel on Wikipedia as you navigate the tree.



  • Honestly, in hindsight, the variability was the most fun part of Halloween. Every kid knows they could just as easily ask their parents for $10 and get a bag of candy bars, but it’s ultimately the variety of what I could be getting and the unpredictability that made me excited. Was there sometimes weird shit I didn’t like? Sure, but probably just as often, there was some weird shit I did like that other kids probably didn’t, so I think it evens out. There were definitely kids out there who were jazzed to get black licorice, or there were some parents that were jazzed to get a small treat on the side after a night of escorting their kid(s) around since their kid(s) didn’t want it.

    I think giving kids weird shit on Halloween as long as it’s safe, edible, and reasonably palatable is pretty cool tbh and should be encouraged. Like I still remember one house gave out little baggies of Goldfish crackers, or I think another gave out apple slices. One gave out huge sour candy strips. Like I think the best Halloween is one where there’s a foundation of “regular” treats with maybe about 25% oddballs sprinkled in.