cabbage

No worries at all! My original comment was playing around with pseudoscience while being willfully ignorant, I totally see how that can trigger a negative reaction. :)

Sorry, didn’t mean to come across as an asshole - just meant to emphasize that the word “theory” could also be used as a figure of speech.

I realize it maybe wasn’t clear enough from my post that I didn’t try to make any actual scientific hypothesis or anything - I merely found it entertaining to figure out why anyone would think climate change could alter the speed of time. It just seemed like such an absurd starting point that I found it enjoyable to try to make sense of it.

But again, no hard feelings - communicating online can be tricky. Sorry about that!

Sorry for not committing to scientific standards in my pioneering research into why OP would ask such a question!

Imagine you’re coming back home with your partner one day. You see your new pair of shoes all chewed up. In the corner of the room you see your dog, looking guilty as hell. Your partner might ask you “what happened to your shoes”. You might respond “I don’t know, but I have a theory”. To which your partner might respond “well actually, that’s not a theory, that’s a hypothesis, you idiot”.

Nicely explained! (not that that’s the only flaw of the logic of course)

I have two theories. [edit: theories why anyone would come up with such an idea in the first place, that is]

First, E = energy, and temperature is energy. So if temperature increases, doesn’t that increase E? And if E = mc², doesn’t that mean that either mass or the speed of light would need to speed up in order to keep up with it?

Second, although false, a lot of people are trained to believe that time stands still at 0 K. In that case, light could never escape 0 K, and as temperatures approach 0 K light would slog to a halt. If that was the case, the logical conclusion would be that speed of light would increase as temperatures rise.

Or maybe something completely different - I just thought it was a fun question to try to reverse engineer. :)

Temperature itself does not affect the speed of light - remember that space is freezing cold, and light moves through it just fine. So warmer temperatures don’t do anything with time.

If earth suddenly gained a bunch of mass, that would change things up as gravity would increase. However, we wouldn’t really notice, as everything would speed up more or less the same. We’d have to compare ourselves to someone in a system where time moves differently in order to notice.

Indeed - I very recently noticed mine was finally gone. ;)

You’re on Lemmy.world, where my impression is that the threshold is pretty high before they defederate. If you want to be kind and see as little garbage as possible, you could for example join Beehaw, which has a focus on kindness. LGBTQ+ people who are particularly tired of bigots can join Blahaj, where the mods are very trigger happy about weeding out that kind of behaviour.

If you’re unhappy about every approach to moderation out there, you can start your own instance and do it yourself. Of course most people won’t, but it nevertheless renders them in less of a position to complain.

And yes, moderation cannot ever be perfect. It takes a lot for users to leave a community due to disagreeable moderation. But still, users here have a lot more choice.

Personally I’m testing a platform where problematic users (such as the one starting this comment thread) are marked with warning signs, so that I can identify likely trolls right away and alter my interaction with them. It’s pretty neat.

Indeed! It’s almost like people got fed up of their internet experience being a flaming pile of garbage.

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There’s nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it’s all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words “God is dead”, but I think it’s worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that “God has become unbelievable”, but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It’s all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?

I mean, the main place i observe this is people commuting on the metro. If they didn’t have phones they’d be reading tabloid newspapers.

I don’t really see anything wrong with using your phone on the metro. Some will look up art and crafts, some bird photography, others makeup tutorials or video game content. If they can explore their interests rather than just waste their time completely that’s fine by me.

Of course it’s also a dopamine trap, and Instagram use trends to get a bit out of hand. Still, it seems to me some Lemmy users are a bit too quick to write off “normal” people as broken down zombies.

If anything the George Carlin-imitating AI serves to highlight that the brilliance of Carlin was in his thinking, not in his shtick of delivering cynical jokes in his signature fashion. The AI captures the cynicism and the voice and at least in part the delivery, yet it just left me bored. Carlin on the other hand I can listen to again and again.

I guess it’s like training a moral philosophy bot. Sure, you could train an AI on everything Immanuel Kant has ever written and it would be capable of delivering an endless series of platitudes that sound like something Kant could have written, but it’s not going to become a Kantian philosopher, and you’ll be better off just reading Kant.

I feel like any time anyone is using their phones in public they’re scrolling Instagram.

If you want to give an appearance of normalcy while maintaining a living soul, just get a Pixelfed account, follow a bunch of photographers, and scroll endlessly.

Subtilities! Writing with a swype keyboard has its shortcomings.

For me, German humour is at its best when it’s using subtitles in the German language - not really through puns, but by using language to highlight contradictions and absurdities. Obviously, this humour does not translate well at all.

After learning German and re-reading some Kafka stories I was struck by how stories I had read as somewhat somber in English were actually full of a weird sense of humour in the original German. It’s still absurd and unsettling, but somehow Kafka is also funny.

Then again, he wasn’t German.

In short, anything you publish here will, by design, be broadcast all around to whatever service is interested in listening. Collecting data about fediverse users is as easy as setting up a federated service designed to collect data, and observe what comes in. In some countries there are regulations for what kind of data you’re allowed to store, but you could always just go somewhere else and do it.

Nobody is going to buy user data from sh.itjust.works or any other service because why the hell would they do that when they can just collect everything for free.

This is not unlike everything else on the Internet. If you publish something, it can be used. Maybe not legally in all countries, but as we have learned from the AI revolution nobody really cares about legality anyway.

Nothing you post here, or anywhere else on the internet, is private. It’s all public, and if companies find a way of profiting off it chances are that they will. If they can’t do it legally in the US they will do so somewhere else. The only way of avoiding it is by not publishing in open forums.

If you’re worried about your user data, the best you can do is probably to jump around between different accounts.

Phil Spector. His wall of sound bullshit caused decades of potentially amazing albums to sound like shit, and he’s a terrible person who has brought nothing on the world that’s worth keeping.

In terms of texture I feel like it might be somewhere between seaweed and cartilage. Chewy, but firm and juicy and absolutely meat-like. My favourite is the Florentine Lampredotto, made out of the fourth stomach of the cow. It makes for a mean sandwich.

Not exactly a new one, but I listened to S-town with great enjoyment. It’s a little story about an alleged murder, a truly original American man, and rural Alabama. I was never bored, and I certainly learned something. And you get to hear an amazing Alabama accent.