You’re right, I shouldn’t have said ‘never’. It was a paradox in ancient history, but at least in my lifetime, I’ve read it as basically solved. That may be a relatively recent stance (since 100-200 years ago), but it doesn’t seem useful to continue presenting it as a paradox at this point.
Slightly larger file size, which mattered in like 2002, but it’s only a few mb, which doesn’t matter at all now.
e: if you’re a professional photographer and saving stupidly high resolution images by the thousands, you’ll want to use jpg, but in that case, you’ll understand why.
Yeah, the fossil record and dna analysis is such a gradient, any lines we draw are arbitrary. To be fair, those lines were always for our own convenience, in much the same way it’s useful for print designers to specify Pantone 032, but if most people look at the full colour chart they couldn’t even tell you where ‘red’ becomes ‘orange’.
It’s definitely rabbits (or turtles) all the way down.
We’re prokaryotes, and vertebrates, and mammals, and from there some people get bent. Are we apes? Genus homo? Where must we draw the line to ensure we’re not actually animals like other living things and were divinely inspired special creations?
I like simplicity. Life is a beautiful prismatic projection and it doesn’t matter that much what our Pantone swatch turns out to be.
Could be. I’m not as familiar with that format – a major strength of png is that anything can open and view it properly. It’s been a standard for decades, so it has universal compatibility.
e: I’m not going to look into that specific format (I stopped caring about the inner workings of file formats like 15 years ago when I stopped getting paid to care), but I think I could bet you that webp is a document hierarchy wrapper on png, jpg, gif, mpeg, etc, ad inf.
I had to exit this comment and look again because I couldn’t remember if you’d said webm or webx or webp or whatever. The last I knew, that’s not a file format but a codepage (nowadays, that’s usually a cheap wrapper over code they found and repackaged).
That’s massively simplified, but if you’re asking that in this thread, I’m worried people are being sold a difference that doesn’t exist.
The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.
It’s been about religion vs science.
Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.
Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.
That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.
On a drive when I was ten, I asked my dad why the tall, skeletal towers had blinking lights. He said so planes wouldn’t crash into them. So I asked what the towers were for, and he said to hold up the lights.
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
The second half of this experiment is far less wholesome:
To verify their findings, these scientists reran the experiment by cutting off ants’ legs at the knees. Those ants consistently undershot their targets, showing definitively that ants do actually count their steps.
A Republican hoping to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate suffered a setback to his campaign this week after facing allegations that he lives in Florida....
If you’re from Michigan but living in Florida, you, sir, are a moron. I barely care about jurisdictional laws you’re breaking; your lack of judgement is already disqualifying. To be so close to Canada and choosing to spend time tucked beneath America’s ballsack is in very poor taste.
Self-explanatory, I think. I miss being able to flag users in Res – I usually used it to mark known trolls or experts in a subject so I could easily see them in threads. I sometimes used it to mark people who were especially witty or the like....
I abbreviated their story to keep my comment short, and linked the full thing for people who want to learn more.
In truth, the reason she was so susceptible to his offshoot of their religion was because she’d been raised believing in the mainstream religion, which he warped a bit in order to gain followers to his cult. She was primed for it because she couldn’t imagine a reality outside of the belief system in which she was raised, and his cult was only slightly outside that and built upon it.
Look up the story yourself, if you like. That’s why I linked it. My quick summary wasn’t ‘too tidy to be true’, and I can give you links to many, many more stories exactly like that one. Loads of normal people have committed atrocities – often against their own children – because their Christian faith told them to. A great many of them weren’t mentally ill until they became religious. Many committed those atrocities because they became convinced heaven was a better place for their children, that demons were real and trying to corrupt their kids, etc. Google it yourself; I’m not trying to filter knowledge here. These were normal people until they became religious.
Like I said, we should be talking about the damage these fables are doing. We should be talking about the damage done by indoctrinating children so they can’t discern reality from fantasy and right from wrong. We should be questioning our leaders when they say morality only exists in their stories, when the opposite is true. This shot is causing us irreparable damage as a society.
This bullshit has convinced non-psychotic people to commit atrocities. It’s not a leap to think it convinces actually psychotic people their delusions are true. Especially when they say so themselves.
You’re right, and I don’t disagree with you at all. Yes, we’ve had an emotional need for stories – more for connection with one another than for individual understanding, which cultural stories provide.
I’m saying there’s a difference between cultural stories and organised religion. The former is benign and can translate our questions into a semblance of meaning, and the latter which becomes dictatorial dogma that amplifies the worst of us, turning our basest instincts into abhorrent action.
I don’t think we disagree that much, you and I. I used to think organised religion wasn’t something I could get behind, but I thought to each their own.
The more I learned about it and the more I saw the bad influence it did to people I loved, the more I realised it’s nothing but a terrible influence in the world, holding us back as a people, and causing needless suffering and death.
Those of us who grew up without it literally can’t imagine scenarios like this, though I’ve heard disturbing things from people who seem otherwise sane that make me understand what drives some to do these things. When you’ve internalised fables of good vs evil and that’s how you define reality, it’s a small step to think you have to commit atrocities to save the innocent. You don’t have to have a very divergent mentality to convince yourself of this.
We will all be better off when the vast majority of people give up these fables and begin to live in the real world.
Chicken vs Egg (mander.xyz)
It's not rocket science. Oh, wait. (www.space.com)
Fatherly hazing (lemmy.world)
When a real user uses the app (lemmy.ml)
Antybooties (mander.xyz)
Women-only social media app Giggle for Girls taken to court by transgender woman Roxanne Tickle after her account was restricted (www.abc.net.au)
In short: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle is suing social media platform Giggle for Girls after she was excluded from the women-only app....
Michigan Republican candidate caught living in Florida (www.newsweek.com)
A Republican hoping to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate suffered a setback to his campaign this week after facing allegations that he lives in Florida....
seize the means of production (slrpnk.net)
Soup: *After Dark* (lemmy.world)
request: ability to tag/flag users like in Res
Self-explanatory, I think. I miss being able to flag users in Res – I usually used it to mark known trolls or experts in a subject so I could easily see them in threads. I sometimes used it to mark people who were especially witty or the like....
Florida woman shoots interstate drivers, says God told her to because of the eclipse, police say (abcnews.go.com)