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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Though you really need the ability to stay calm and collected. I once tried to talk with a childhood friend who became a hardcore christian and nationalist in the meantime, and I just couldn’t believe the things I heard.

    When I asked him why would the bible be a definitive source of whatever, he said “You can only have one truth, and if you live by the bible you know it to be true, so it is the truth”. There were so many things wrong with that line of thought, my brain received a ddos attack and had to reboot.

    Same thing for homosexuals. He, in a very very creepy way I must say, told an entire story of how normal men who are sexual deviants eventually get tired of women because they need to do increasingly more sickening things, and then move on to men. That’s how men become gay.
    How the hell do you reply to someone who just completely made up a story and believes in it? When I eventually asked how is the Netherlands not burning to the ground when they are tolerant, he actually said “Not yet”. So, if any Dutch person is reading this, better brace for gay armageddon or something. I just can’t figure out what to say to someone who literally spends 10 mins saying nothing. I eventually stopped interacting with him because I just don’t have the energy (this was just an example, I had dozens of interactions like that with him)

    Or when a colleague said that the Ukranian civilians were happy when the Russians came to save them. My head temperature increased 10 degrees and I just turned around and left. You really need special skills to talk to people like that, which I sadly lack


  • Black metal as a genre. I could not believe that anyone seriously listened to that. It was either random noise or actually scary stuff (I am the black wizards actually scared me for some reason lol). But after enough exposure and playing Freezing moon myself, I actually got to enjoy it to the point where now I listend to black metal 80% of the time.

    In the same vein, “Sons of Winter and Stars” by Wintersun was so unharmonized and terrible to me when I first listened to it, but after a few listens it became one of my favourite songs



  • And that “no poop challenge” that was everywhere on lemmy about a year ago. Not sure whether that was a lemmy thing or wider, as I don’t use anything besides lemmy.

    I’m glad a local culture is growing here naturally, but I didn’t expect it to be beans, jeans and no poop




  • I actually like the idea of being able to see how many upvotes/downvotes came from specific instances much more than seeing the actual users. It would cover some of the positives mentioned in the github discussion:

    -Could help fight bot and multiple-account voting (if we assume that people who make multiple accounts do it on the same instance)
    -Could help identify voting-patterns from specific servers (obviously)

    And then if something looks suspicious, the admins can already see who voted, so they could check out whether some user is abusing the mechanics.

    I find that this approach might be worth talking about, but making user votes visible to all seems very unnecessary.




  • This might be due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker and I encountered this phrase at a later date, but people saying “it’s all but xyz” to mean “it’s xyz” really gets on my nerves. I get it, “it’s all but complete” means that virtually all the conditions are met for it to be complete, but I find it so annoying for some reason.

    “The task is all but impossible” registers as ‘it’s not impossible, it’s everything else: possible’, so the fact that it means the opposite of that makes my brain twitch.






  • Is it, though? Every organ has its inputs, things happen and they produce an output (a reaction). Like the eyes receive light, physics happens and signals get sent to the brain. The brain also gets inputs from the senses and the states (memories), then physics happens and it produces a reaction, I don’t see where can we place free will here. Free will has to invoke physical signals in the brain, but where can it possibly come from? Even if the universe isn’t determenistic (and it’s not just our lack of understanding that makes it seem so), free will implies that there is another force (for a lack of a better word) that does complex social things.

    Whereas I don’t see a need for free will, machines are capable of gathering outside information, processing it and making decisions without any free will involved, why would megamachines like human brains need it then?




  • Yeah, but what I meant is that for English you don’t need to look for it. You’ll see English on every social media. At least in Serbia, most, if not all popular foreign songs are in english, and most younger people listen to music with english lyrics, on TV you’ll find mostly american series, movies and shows, technology uses english by default, and everyone learns english in school here since year 1 of primary school.

    My point is that Anlophones who want to learn, say, French, have to actively seek it out and motivate themselves for the sole purpose of being able to engage in French culture, while here (but I imagine it’s very similar in the rest of europe) people are bombarded with english everywhere they look, whether they want to or not.

    And this reach really makes it insanely easy to learn english. I’ve been listening to so much Swedish metal that I’ve learned a handful of words, and if I had immediate access to Swedish like I do to English, I’d probably be talaring svenska by now, but I do not, so I don’t. So to make a fair comparisson, I’d say it would be better to see how many people speak 3+ languages, and compare that to the number of bilingual Anglophones.