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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it’s pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it’s meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it’s usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing

    I have a similar “power” and while I’m not flawless, it’s only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don’t actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones



  • Squids@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlGary larson rule
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    1 year ago

    The closest thing to what you’re talking about is grafting, but that’s a specific thing that only works on certain species and I don’t think can “glue” two entire halves of a tree back together, maybe just a branch at the most if you’re very careful and lucky

    It’s why if you plant a seed from a random apple from the supermarket, you’re very probably not going to get a tree that produces that apple. Most commerical fruit trees (including ones from your local garden centre) tend to have a bottom half that’s hardy and resistant, and then a top half which was “glued” on that actually provides the fruit you want. The bottom half controls the genetic material in the seed, but the top half controls what the fruit will look like.

    On the other hand, you can totally glue a snapped cactus back together, provided it hasn’t been too long and the two halves aren’t too damaged.


  • …now? Bud, they’ve done this for ages, both on mobile and desktop how the hell have you not noticed it? It used to be even more obvious on desktop because they’d put it up as the first item in the ‘related videos’, but they got rid of that so now you don’t know what it’s going to start autoplaying until it happens, which is mildly annoying when you’re listening to music and can’t see what’s up next



  • My great grandad got a couple of cockatoos when he was in his 20s right after ww2 and they still managed to outlive him. Only by a few weeks mind you - poor things starved themselves to death out of grief after he died. He told us not to worry about rehoming them because he knew they wouldn’t be able to take the loss of loosing him at such an age.

    He only had them because he took up conservation work and they’re just, native to Australia. They lived out in a big aviary he’d built with trees and bushes and even a water feature along with other birds he ended up aquiring. I adored those birds, but I genuinely can’t understand how or why you’d keep such a big beautiful intelligent bird as a pet in a cage on the other side of the world and it always weirds me out when I see these birds I grew up watching roam free eating all our damn lemons in someone’s house as a pet. It’s like if you an American saw someone keeping a racoon as a pet.


  • On the complete opposite end, people are joking about how if they want uniforms they should be wearing powdered wigs and breeches, but like, that’s already a thing across the pond in the UK? The courts and house of Lords and a few other bodies have uniforms like that and yeah, there’s a layer of outdated tradition, but it’s also to sort of standardise how everyone looks, so that you still look like a barrister and someone to be taken seriously, regardless of age, race, gender, or looks. An equal footing sort of thing


  • I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI

    Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.

    (There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)


  • This doesn’t sound like they’re charging extra if you’re over a certain weight, which is what a lot of people here seem to be assuming. Its data collection for future designs.

    People are aware that you get charged for overweight baggage for health and safety reasons, right? Anything over about 20 kilos is too heavy for a single person to safely handle so they have to get two people to do it, which costs more time and money. I would be very genuinely surprised if a few dozen more kilos from overweight baggage and people would be enough to seriously impact a plane’s flight unless you’re on a small town hopper



  • Squids@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlThey don't have such weaknesses
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    1 year ago

    You could probably back this up by looking at the alcoholism rates in Scandinavia (especially Norway and Sweden)

    Scandinavia had their own prohibition and still to this day have a strict 18/21+ drinking age with booze only being sold during very specific hours (and never on Sundays or religious holidays), with anything above I think 12% only available at the government run bottle shop



  • I’d also add that like, for a lot of Scandinavia heat pumps work just fine? Like does America just have some really bad heat pumps or something?

    I think the only reason why you wouldn’t install one here (aside from obvious cost issues) would be if you already have a robust heating system built into your home, like a hot water system. And if that’s the case, you can use the heatpump of the earth - geothermal! Use the power of the earth’s molten core to heat and cool your home!

    (… geothermal isn’t as ubiquitous as I make it sound it’s just, really fucking cool)




  • Squids@sopuli.xyztolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldBlasphemy!
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    1 year ago

    Hey as someone who kinda grew up in that scenario, I really reccomend you show your kid what a windows dual boot is

    Your kid doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They have friends and inevitably your kid’s going to be in a situation where their friends are like “hey, want to play this game with us?” And they can’t because it’s got a kernel anti-cheat that doesn’t work with Linux. They’re going to try and get into a hobby, only to find that the software everyone uses doesn’t work on Linux and the alternatives that do are badly maintained and frustrating to work with. They’re going to encounter a programme they need for school that just straight up does not work on Linux.

    Sure you might be able to find a work around to all these things but like, can your kid? Because I speak from experience when I say that feeling like you have to be constantly running to your dad every time something doesn’t work doesn’t foster a sense of mastery, it makes you feel like you can’t do anything on your computer because you’re too small and dumb.

    The teacher probably isn’t “afraid” of the Linux box, they’re probably frustrated that they don’t know what’s going on and can’t help if something goes wrong. The programmes they’ll probably teach your kid aren’t a perfect 1-to-1 match to their Linux alternatives and they’ll be left sitting in the back confused and upset while everyone else is learning about stuff in word and excel that you can’t do in libre Office. You’re not going to be known as the cool hacker dad, you’re going to be put in the same category as the crunchy mum who doesn’t let their kid eat sugar and needlessly restricts something that’s just so petty to the layman.


  • Squids@sopuli.xyztolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldBlasphemy!
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    1 year ago

    There’s also the fact that later on if your kid wants to certain things, either as a hobby or just with their friends, they’re SOL because they don’t run on Linux and the FOSS alternatives are awful and would scare them away. Kid wants to play a game with Kernel level anti-cheat with their friends? Nope doesn’t work with Linux, unless they want to risk getting banned. Want to try your hand at video making? Good luck using obscure software that may or may not spontaneously crash on you and getting cameras to talk to your computer properly. Get a new toy that talks to your computer? Ha ha nope in your dreams

    Sure you might be able to fix those problems, but can your kid? Can your kid do these things by themself and foster a sense of understanding and mastery over Linux, or are they going to grow up thinking that they can’t do anything on their own computer because they constantly have to call over their dad for help?

    Growing up my house was a Linux household and the first thing I was taught how to do was how to dual-boot into windows because letting me play The Sims and have fun was a little more important than ideology wars


  • Not quite star trek, but I do know that in The Man From UNCLE Illya Kuryakin, the Russian/USSR operative working for UNCLE was so popular that in the second season he got promoted from side character to full on protangonist and that aired a year or two before star trek. So if an explicitly USSR aligned spy could get that popular to the point the producers felt comfortable making him a main character, I imagine one from the far off future where Russia is more of a off hand mention in comparison would be even less controversial

    Funnily enough the 2015 movie version of him is way more critical of the Soviets than the show made in the height of the cold war ever was



  • Squids@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Because the entire point was that the character in question is genderless and this was the early 80s and also French so more modern gender neutral terms didn’t exist yet, and “let’s just smash the two gendered endings together” was his attempt at one (I’m guessing emperoratrix comes from a literal translation from French, where a female emperor is an imperatrice, and -trice is -trix in english, so imperatorice -> emperoratrix) The book also uses s/he as a pronoun instead of they.

    I mean hey, it’s much more gender neutral than just defaulting to the masculine like say Le Guin did in left hand of darkness