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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Dogs were instrumental in early human survival and they’ve benefited for it. There’s almost a billion dogs in the world, but only a quarter million wolves. So in a natural selective sense that was a good move wolves made by becoming companions with humans.

    Behavior has been bred into dogs going way back to the beginning. Fetch is one of those behaviors. I recently watched a documentary that showed the unique interaction of dogs with humans. Dogs are really good at understanding human body language. For example you can point at something and a dog will cue on it. No other animals reliably respond to that gesture, even chimpanzees which are genetically closest to us.





  • Old English from a millennia ago sounds like a foreign language, even early modern English from Shakespeare’s time sounds pretty odd. So it depends on when the translation was done. With English it’s common for newly invented words to get popularized and end up in the dictionary. The same kind of thing happens with grammar. Conversely people still sometimes use obsolete words from early modern English as a way to emphasize a statement.

    The grammar of that quote may be due to the English translation of the time or something he simply interpreted in his own way. It sounds grammatically off for contemporary English, but that’s relative to the time frame. I imagine the English we speak today may sound odd to someone a few hundred years from now.


  • In the last few years he’s done stuff in the public eye that made people question their feelings about him. When he was only known by the companies he ran he seemed like a decent guy. Then the public got to know him better through his ramblings in the media.

    I think this latest business with Twitter was about using his money and power to intentionally kill it for personal reasons and take the tax write-off. That’s created a lot of angst for the users and inspired a lot of hate.

    Personally I feel the guy is a total wingnut, always has been. I just didn’t have enough exposure to him to make that determination. They say there’s a fine line between genius and insanity, but there’s little doubt now which side of the line he falls on.



  • The main thing I don’t like about these categories is how they try to lump both moral and political issues into one group as either right or left. They’re two different things. Societies do legislate morality, but as far as defining a person’s overall views I think it’s a poor metric. Personally I have some left views politically, but some right views morally.

    I think it can be expected people participating in the Fediverse are somewhat anti-capitalist. We come here to get away from corporate driven media. That being the case I think it’s not erroneous to say Lemmy is more left politically and I appreciate that. However that does not mean I agree with all left views. There are some moral issues I may not agree with, but I don’t engage since I’m not interested in debating morality in these forums.








  • That is the question, what banged and why did it bang. There’s some quantum theories that elude to a possible source of the big bang, but nothing widely accepted. As to why, that’s an even tougher question.

    The term singularity as applied in cosmology comes from the mathematical definition where one variable approaches infinity as another goes to zero. This is bad in math since it means an equation is not defined across all values. This is what happens mathematically as you get closer to time zero for the big bang. Same with the gravity of a black hole as you move toward the center. In that sense the size of the big bang at time zero would be zero, but the math breaks down so it’s not actually defined. Physicists generally believe that’s not the case due to the quantum nature of the universe, but we don’t have the math to explore it.


  • Go instance shopping. Yeah you’re creating accounts on instances you may not use, but creating an account for a test drive is acceptable I think. I tried five instances before I found one I liked. My runner up I use as a backup in case my primary goes down for some reason.

    First I narrowed down candidates to those that are regionally close to me. You can sort instance location by going to https://the-federation.info/platform/73. Further down the page you’ll see a listing of all nodes (instances). You click on the location header to sort them by country.

    Then you want to look at user numbers. Too big and the instance could have overload issues. Too small and the instance may not be well established and reliable. So medium on the user counts.

    Then I did a “ping” on ones that looked good to see how they do on network response.

    Once I found good candidates, I created an account on each and gave it a test drive. You can see who won for me.


  • Nothing to hide until a person has something to hide. An attitude of “I don’t have anything to hide” may catch up to a person. No one knows what the future holds. One day they might start tracking private information a person does not want tracked, for example financial or medical data. So better to put the fence up now than try to put it up during a stampede.

    Personally I keep my data private with a reasonable amount of effort. I try to keep a small internet footprint and there’s stuff I won’t do for the sake of privacy. Going some years back the only social media I engaged in was Reddit until coming here to Lemmy. These are anonymous mediums. It blows my mind that so many people are willing to completely splay out their lives non-anonymously on social media.