Hi, I’m sbird! I like programming and am interested in Astrophysics and all things space. I also have a hobby of photography.
My previous main account was on Lemmy at sbeak@sopuli.xyz
Experimenting with stuff I already have. Using an old laptop with a cracked screen as a Nextcloud + other bits server, switching to a tiling WM (Niri + Noctalia) on my personal laptop (it has been awesome so far!), setting up emulation stuff on my phone, etc.
Retro games are awesome! Relatively affordable and you don’t need expensive hardware to play them (whether you’re playing natively or emulated!), and arguably more fun than modern titles since there aren’t any forced online shenanigans
I believe those are usually done by modifying an existing ROM, but there are tools to make games from scratch too I think, at least for GBA. It’s pretty neat! The cartridges do have size limits, so if your game / ROM hack is particularly large it might not be ideal, but it’s cool that you can play modern-ish games on an OG GBA (most people emulate nowadays, but lots of people still have original hardware!)
Well yeah, the Russians teach just one continent, Eurasia. A few other places do that too I think, mostly those who were influenced by the Russians in the past (i.e. were part of the Russian Empire and/or the USSR’s sphere of influence)
And I know many Latin American countries teach a unified continent of America rather than splitting it North and South.
Egpyt does not combine Asia and Africa despite having the Sinai peninsula in Asia (which is only split by a manmade canal)
Personally, I’m a fan of defining continents geologically, since it gets rid of all the politics
Make sure the check the Map Men one too! They are timeless and funny too
Middle East and West Asia are both terms that can be used kind of interchangeably, it just depends on the context. And yes, Europe is a glorified peninsula of the continent of “Eurasia”. Interestingly, Russia and a few other countries that straddle the boundary of Europe and Asia teach it as one continent.
In my opinion, the idea of “continents” is ambiguous if we define it as no sea in between, Afro-Eurasia is a monster that isn’t helpful to categorise the world. There’s good videos on the topic by CGP Grey and Map Men (previously Jay Foreman), you should go look at that I think!
I would rather divide the world based on the geological definition of continents, about the major tectonic plates! But even that can be difficult since what constitutes as a “major” tectonic plate? It’s still better in my opinion, since it’s something that can be discussed by geologists rather than politicians.
According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tectonic_plates
Under this definition, the continents are (if we only consider major plates as defined by Wikipedia):
if we include the some of the larger minor plates (I feel like we should):
There are lots of smaller ones but those are mostly ocean too
I think it would be neat if the world was divided to have India, Arabia, the Carribean, and Eastern Africa to have the Europe sort of treatment! India alone has more people than the whole of Europe combined
Double negatives are fun! It’s a little weird how, depending on the context and language, they can either be positive or extra-negative. “I don’t see nothing!” is often used to mean you can’t see anything, the double negatives reinforce each other rather than cancel out into a positive meaning. Similar for “I don’t have no …” or “we don’t need no …”
I mean, all band names are made up in the end of the day. A lot of them are based on various pop culture references (think characters in movies or TV shows), for instance, the French band Luke’s name comes from the American movie “Cool Hand Luke”, none of the members are actually called Luke.
Die Toten Hosen literally means “the dead trousers” in German, and it’s slang for “boring” (though their music is the opposite of that!), while Die Ärtze means “the doctors” in German.
Ska-P is short for “ska punk” which is a mix of ska and punk (and it’s an awesome genre to listen too!)
Kino is Russian for “cinema”, and there’s a variant of the “absolute cinema” meme that instead used a picture of Viktor Tsoi (the GOAT) with the words “absolute Kino”
Putting bases on the Moon means we can do more studies, experiments, etc. outside of Earth, particularly tasks that are difficult to complete by current rovers. Human physiology in low gravity situations, lunar geology, possibility of water and life outside of Earth, that sort of stuff. I’ll also echo what others have said about how the Moon could become a launching base for future explorations, given its lower gravity and lack of an atmosphere.
There isn’t a conspiracy by lizard men to set up a Death Star, this is driven by the curiosity of humanity and our desire to explore the unknown. The “race” to have the first base between Americans and Chinese is, like during the Cold War between the former and the Soviets, a push to be the first, trying to show that they are ahead in terms of technology and science. In a nutshell, it’s driven by curiosity and, at least partly, national pride.
If you didn’t know, CoMaps has a desktop Linux and macOS version! I believe GNOME Maps (also on Linux) recently got better offline maps support too
I would imagine that it’s the easiest for the model to produce. Bold colours, clear and distinct shapes, that sort.
It doesn’t help that the companies have scraped the entire internet (which is a can of worms in terms of both legality and ethics) and then some, so it will mimic the advertising strategies employed everywhere (again, bold colours, clear shapes, etc.)
More people who kiss the toes of dictators. Those who ignore the atrocities of Stalin and similarly despicable figures, “tankie” as in the tanks used to silence civilian protests
Anarchists are far left, but they would be very insulted if you called them tankies (their whole thing is anti-authoritarianism!)
People who love authoritarianism and intentionally skip over their atrocities, the term “tankie” refers to how the military (tanks) were used to crush the rebellions of many authoritarian regimes, notably, the Hungarian uprising in 1956 being crushed by the Warsaw Pact and the Tianamen square massacre in 1989 by the PRC.
It’s usually used to refer to supporters of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc. who deny all the bad, inhuman things about those states.
I think it would be neat if somebody made a community-run list of stable Lemmy/Piefed communities and categorised them by their rules, where the servers are, etc.
As for now, I think it is best to recommend a few instances that you know are reliable. Push them towards more local instances. If they live in Canada, lemmy.ca, piefed.ca, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and piefed.blahaj.zone are good options, I know feddit.org (Lemmy) and feddit.online (Piefed) are both hosted in Germany. sopuli.xyz is hosted in Finland, piefed.nz in Kiwi land, etc.
Or perhaps instances that relate to their interests, like programming.dev or retrofed.com (both are pretty self-explanatory)
If you define a stupid question as one where discussion is difficult or even impossible, then no, this is not a stupid question. Questions are meant to provoke debate and communication of differing ideas, and this is exactly what is happening now.
A true stupid question would be like asking if guns can kill people. Of course guns kill people, there is no discussion about this. A better question could be how we should regulate guns and ways to avoid placing them in the wrong hands.
The 11th of November is Remembrance day (the whole minute of silence on the 11th minute, hour, day, and month thing was a big thing at my old school)
11/11 is also a big holiday in East Asia, Pocky Day in Japan, Peppero Day in Korea (both because of the resemblance to the tasty stick biscuits), and Singles Day in China (the 1s represent unmarried individuals), all three of which are huge shopping days for Asian malls (similar to Black Friday, but combined with the hyper consumerism of the Asian markets)
Definitely in favour of abandoning the celebration of some old monarch’s birthday.
I feel like we should better differentiate between LLMs (the ones that literally tell you to eat rocks), generative models (the ones that are stealing the work of creatives without permission), and the ones that are actually used for neat science stuff, where they are trained on a specific set of data and are doing a specific set of tasks repeatedly in a controlled environment, rather than training on the entire internet and then some and trying to do everything!
I think we should label them as large language models, generative models, and predictive models (maybe? Or maybe “targeted predictive models”?). It’s important to emphasise that all of these, even the useful ones, are not intelligent, they do not understand what they are doing. They are just models of data that do thing go in, thing go out.
So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat
The bacteria don’t produce calories out of thin air, even high school physics will teach you that energy needs to be conserved!
I didn’t do biology, but from my understanding, energy (mostly) comes from the food you eat, and any excess is stored as fat. Obesity occurs when you have too much of that excess where it is a health risk, and differs depending on your metabolism and that sort (which things like gut bacteria can change because of weird biology shenanigans, don’t ask me, I’m a physicist).
But if there is no food, then you don’t intake any energy. Famine is defined as the widespread lack of food (by natural or artificial causes, unfortunately it’s often the latter), and when you don’t have food, you don’t tend to have high obesity rates.