Acamon

joined 2 years ago
[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago

That's a great journey you're on. Takes a lot of guts to re-evaluate our worldview, even when the old one is making us miserable.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

I think there's a way that society represents "what sex is" that is very different from most people's experience of it. For various reasons, Hollywood/advertising/porn all promote skinny and heavily made up women. And even if they find those kinds of actresses or models hot on the screen, that's not the kinds of women most men actually crush on.

The reality is most people have a fairly limited number of sexual relationships, and they're often with people who do not meet some abstract societal idea of 'hotness'. A lot of the time people are attracted to people because they like them, and they have good chemistry. Sometimes it's more of a 'type' or whatever (knew a guy who was really into short girls, and then I met his tiny mother...)

Same with relationships or sex or whatever. People learn a bunch of expectations and assumptions growing up, and then as theynget older they realise that most people don't actually fit that arbitary standard. Sure, some guysnare horny all the time and just want emotionless sex, and so do some women. But it's not as 'normal' as some media would suggest.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

More of an app than a website but meow meow beenz from Community.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

France. It's great and i love being here, but I teach English so there's a lot of having to speak English and not a lot of push to speak French. Things should quite down in six months and I hope to be able to focus more on French and start actually gaining confidence in talking.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

Given that almost everyone in the world speaks one of a tiny fraction of world languages, there's less than 0.1% chance that anyone you ever meet will be able to understand you. Google Translate only covers 250 of more than 7000 world languages, so there's a 97% chance I can't even use online tools to get my message across.

If it was weighted it would still suck as I'd need to travel to other countries based on what i happen to speak (if it changes each year). That doesn't sound worth it, especially not for the rest of my life. If it changed after every sentence, it would be like having an awful speech impediment. Trying to have a conversation would involve repeating myself half a dozen times until I hit the right language, and only if I'm in top 5 langauge areas. If I was trying to speak french I'd need to repeat myself 20 times before I was likely to be understood.

And what's the benefit? That I can understand lots of langauges but can't functionally communicate?

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of that change, but I don't really see it as an attempt to be more 'politically correct'.

Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, "Should he be a cold-blooded killer?" Because I was thinking mythologically—should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, "Yeah, he should be John Wayne." And when you're John Wayne, you don't shoot people [first]—you let them have the first shot. It's a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to."

I think Lucas is wrong, because even if he shoots first Han is being threatened with kidnap and death, so he's not a cold-blooded murderer to shoot the guy threatening him. But unless we're rolling all ideas of heroism and morality into woke/PC then I don't think that example works at all.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not only is it distracting and disgusting, but it starts normalising ads everywhere. Cigarettes were digitally removed so as to not set a bad example for kids. But letting them think that it's perfectly normal to have glowing ads decorating the walls of your workplace is fiiiine.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (5 children)

What movie dialogue did they edit?

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Here's something from 2025 and it's even better, because AI!

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

Its definitely just proof of concept for now, but it seems a grim, if inevitable, step in the war of ads vs adblockers.

 

Can't wait for ads to be grotesquely injected into any video on big streaming sites. If you don't want reruns of Cheers to have distracting ads for Rings of Power you better spring for Prime Platinum. Even the heroes at uBlock Origin are going to have a hard time filtering out injected ads on some YouTuber's bedroom wall.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I don't know. It's something I think about a lot, especially when I'm wasting too much time online. But it really isn't that simple. I had lots of friends and saw them pretty regularly, but I moved countries to be with my partner and I'm very happy with that choice and our life together.

But I don't speak the language here, I'm learning but slowly. So if I wasn't in message groups, sharing memes and video chatting my friends back home I'd feel pretty lonely. And it would make the couple of trips home each year much more awkward. By keeping in touch so regularly it feels totally normal to spend the day with a friend, even if I haven't seen them in 9 months because I know all the little things they've been up to or excited about.

On the other side, if I had none of that, maybe I would have worked harder at learning the language. Especially with the lack of distractions the internet provides (being able to watch tv in English instead of local stuff is probably the biggest hurdle to learning), but realistically we're busy and live in the country, so if I had some intermediate language skills and was vastly more lonely I'd probably not have made any real friends. I'd just go to some more social events in the year and participate a bit akwardly and feel sad.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

I drink quite a lot of caffeine (four or five strong coffees most days) and i've not had any problems, or noticed much of a difference on terms of 'over caffinated' symptoms compared to pre-Methylphenidate.

In fact, the one time I tried to cut back on coffee (I'd been really ill for a week and had stopped drinking coffee, so I decided to not restart the habit) I found that without coffee my medication didn't seem as effective. After two weeks of no caffeine I wasnt feeling caffeine withdrawals, I wasn't tired in the morning or craving coffee, but I just felt like i was on too low a dose for my ADHD. My attention, focus, willpower were all back to being a struggle. Then I read somewhere online saying that this could happen, and that caffeine increased the effects of the meds. For some people, I guess that means that too much coffee would lead to an overly strong dose. But for me, I'd much rather have a couple of cups of coffee than have to move to a higher dose of Ritalin. So I started having coffee again and things went back to normal.

 

Likely many other, I've been grossed out by some of the shit getting churned out with generative ai. But it's also made me notice some of the existing things that give me the same feeling.

Poorly translated stuff, as often seen on cheap Chinese imports, has the same uncanny valley awkwardness. It sounds like English, but it isn't what an actual human who spoke English would say. And if we want to talk about an algorithm that's gone rogue and is destroying the world while trying to fulfill some arbitary metrics, there's always late-stage capitalism...

Anyone else notice things like this?

 

I've had a pretty depressing morning, scrolling through my Subscribed feed and realising that 90% of new posts were from the same two bot accounts (bagel and somethingmelon, can't be remeber exactly and I've blocked them.)

Thankfully, a few people had made "ai slop" comments under one, so I checked the post history and, sure, a new account posting at a implausible rate. And once you started looking at the posts they were kinda samey, generic or a bit off. But I think that if the bot had been programmed to post at a slower rate, I don't think I'd have really noticed.

So my question is, should people be allowed to report bot accounts? And can/should mods be expected at assess someone's humanity? The very idea is gross, but so is the thought that lemmy would be very easily swamped by a small number of more careful written bots.

 

More of a "waiting while cloud flare verifies my humanity thought" but this is the closest c/ I could find.

 

I love Southern fried chicken, and I'm pretty fond of waffles (savoury with bacon and maple syrup, or sweet) but I cannot imagine the combination as working at all.

They're both a little dry on the outside and soft on the inside. It feels like they really don't complement or contrast with each other. I'm sure I'd eat it if I had so alternative, but I can imagine how it is a classic American paring. I'd much rather have fries, slaw, or potato salad which all seem to offer a creamy or crunchy contrast.

Am I missing something? People who like it, what's good about it? Is the secret lots of maple syrup? Are the waffles different that usual? Is it not actually that popular? I'm a decadent European, so I can't just go somewhere and try them myself.

 

I don't really like discord, but my gaming group have been using it for rpg stuff. Chat channels, video calls and easy to setup bots have all been really useful.

But I get the feeling the enshitification is going to get worse, so I was looking for somewhere else to migrate to. The video stuff isn't as important, we could switch easily to other services. But before I start a new campaign, and spend time setting up bots with routines for rolling dice and calculating tables, I'd like to do it somewhere that isn't in talks for an IPO.

I'm not really up on stuff like this, so I don't know if there's some obvious similar choices or an alternative medium that I haven't considered.

 

I came across this cryptic phrase in a description of an old D&D adventure Tale of the Comet . In context, it seems to describe the designer solving a problem of game balance by having the powerful technology items have limited charges / uses before expiring. But I cannot parse prophet-squeeze-monster and I certianly don't recognise it as a classic trope. Any ideas?

 

Back in the early days of the internet, there were a bunch of webcams anyone could view - sometimes a street, sometimes the coffee machine of a lab, and, occasionally, someone's bedroom or appartment. Although they were much talked about, I'm sure it was a tiny number of people, and probably not for very long. And because of crappy bandwidth, most of these cams were more like constantly updating image, rather than actual video. Tbh, maybe it's not even a real thing, but I definitely remember it being spoken about.

Nowadays obviously things are great for people who want strangers to know what they're up to, they've got countless media to choose from. And 'watching a stranger do mundane things' was packaged up and sold as reality TV a long time ago.

But I guess my question is, are there people still live-streaming their life - without it being a sex thing (like onlyfans) or advertising / shilling front (so, ruling out most 'influencers'). Are their folks out there just running a 24h twitch channel where people can watch them fold their laundry or doomscroll the night away on a poorly illuminated couch?

 

And if so, how do they label headphones, contact lenses etc?

 

My nephews & nieces aren't currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won't have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn't require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.

Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational "games". But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.

Any suggestions?

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