ShaunaTheDead

ShaunaTheDead, 9 months ago

I saw a video once with an expert on the subject who said that ADHD is misnamed, it should be called Intention Deficit Disorder, because the real main side effect is that all of the things that you intend to do are made difficult to impossible because of a variety of factors that affect your executive function.

ShaunaTheDead, 4 months ago

I've watched Sabine for awhile, she's a really great science reporter who keeps things simple and pretty brief. Just a note though, I feel like she sometimes takes very skeptical and conservative views on some subjects where she doesn't really have any expertise. It also makes me kind of uncomfortable how she seems to be obsessed with Elon Musk, she mentions him in basically every video.

Despite all that, she's pretty great, check her out, just keep in mind she talks about a lot of things she isn't an expert in.

ShaunaTheDead, 13 days ago

To everyone saying the Great Pyramids were built by slaves, no, that's a misconception and was accepted historic fact in the past but has been amended.

From the Wikipedia article on Egyptian pyramid construction techniques:

The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids were built by slave labour. Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990. For the Middle Kingdom pyramid of Amenemhat II, there is evidence from the annal stone of the king that foreigners from Canaan were employed.

... Evidence suggests that around 5,000 were permanent workers on salaries with the balance working three- or four-month shifts in lieu of taxes while receiving subsistence "wages" of ten loaves of bread and a jug of beer per day. Zahi Hawass believes that the majority of workers may have been volunteers. Most archaeologists agree that only about 4,000 of the total workforce were labourers who quarried the stone, hauled blocks to the pyramid, and set the blocks in place. The vast majority of the workforce provided support services such as scribes, toolmakers, and other backup services.

Link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques

ShaunaTheDead, 5 months ago

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

• George Carlin

ShaunaTheDead, 11 days ago

Yeah, I was gonna say... Calculus is all about saying it's infinitely approaching zero so let's assume it is zero.

ShaunaTheDead, 3 months ago

The problem here is that the riddle tricks you into thinking the total at the end should be 30, but because the herders originally give 30, but then get 3 back, the new total of sheep that changed hands is actually 27. In the end, the troll has 25 sheep and his sons have 2 sheep, 25 + 2 = 27 so all sheep are accounted for.

ShaunaTheDead, 5 months ago

My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let's be honest. They have many ties to China's Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

There's also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don't know.

As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

Plus, any good will that they've purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They've been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They're going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they're fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it's projected that they won't be profitable until 2027, which means they'll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.

ShaunaTheDead, 5 months ago

The big problem with a sunshade is that it would be an engineering project on a scale that we have never seen, and we're not really entirely sure it would work. It would cost at least $10 trillion USD and require launching nearly 200 billion small vessels and moving them into the L1 Lagrange point between us and the Sun. Each vessel would have a shade that covers 2500 m^2 with a total mass of ships and shades being 34 billion metric tonnes.

A sunshade just isn't feasible and all of those rocket launches to get it into position would just exacerbate the already pretty awful situation here on Earth, not to mention mining all of that material and building the rockets causing greenhouse gas emissions, and is there even 34 billion metric tonnes of material on Earth with which to make effective sunshades out of?

It would be a MASSIVE, MAAAASSIIIIIVE undertaking the scale of which Humanity has never seen to get it done, and we're not even sure if it would work. We're much better off focusing on solutions here on Earth, I think.

For those curious, here's a scientific paper looking into the subject that I used for reference on the numbers I used: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995

ShaunaTheDead, 4 months ago

I'm not a professional, but just an enthusiast but I'll try to simplify the article from my layperson perspective, so take my interpretation with a grain of salt.

The new theory seems to point to how Einstein's theory of gravity considers the "energy-momentum tensor" to be unchanged in all scenarios. The energy-momentum tensor describes the relationship of energy as it changes between various forms, for example a stick of dynamite exploding changes the chemical energy stored in the dynamite into kinetic energy - the force of the explosion - and if you calculated the energy of both they would be equal to the initial chemical energy stored in the unexploded stick of dynamite. Which is called the "law of conservation of energy", that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed into a different form of energy.

The problem arises in high-energy situations where infinities start to appear in the equations. If you know much about math then infinities can break equations, and often in physics if there are infinities appearing in your equation then it usually means that you're missing something crucial. So scientists can use a technique called renormalization which can apply tweaks to equations to reduce these infinity spikes. At these high-energy situations described, renormalization fails and the equations can't be properly satisfied no matter how you tweak the variables. This is a big problem since a correct theory should be able to come up with answer for all possible situations that might arise within the system it's trying to describe without breaking.

Einstein's field theory - which is a model used to describe spacetime based on the distribution of matter within it - uses the curvature of spacetime, the relationship between stress and energy, and the cosmological constant. The new theory proposed suggests that adding to Einstein's field theory with math that accounts for the relationship between temperature and entropy, and the relationship between charge and interaction changes the equation in such a way that the infinities disappear, even at higher energy levels which traditionally break field theory, and most importantly that it's still consistent with observations.

ShaunaTheDead, 4 months ago

Blaming the behaviour of individual people is a strategy employed by the oil industry to shift the blame. I wonder who's funding these scientists... Yes, the individual should try to shift their behaviour, but claiming the majority of the blame rests on each of us is nonsense when the richest 1% of people are responsible for more emissions than the poorest 50% of people is pretty disingenuous if you ask me.

ShaunaTheDead, 4 months ago

It's important that they say structure because the scientific discovery is about how these galaxies are gravitationally bound in a cluster. That means that despite the expansion of space, these galaxies will never separate from one another, hence they are a single structure. It's a breakthrough discovery because every model of the universe we currently use says a structure this large is impossible.

ShaunaTheDead, 13 days ago

Doorbell?

ShaunaTheDead, 1 day ago

I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but a reason might be that providing an API is cheaper than web scraping.

If people really want access to your data, they can just scrape your website, but that requires loading all the data through the website itself which requires loading millions or billions of video thumbnails, comments, descriptions, recommendations, etc. It's much cheaper for them to send a JSON through an API, even though they might know that some people are trying to undermine them by using that data to circumvent their advertising.

ShaunaTheDead, 11 days ago

Oh interesting! I must have mixed my facts up or something, my bad. You're right that it's attributed to Zhuge Liang, but it seems like Wikipedia thinks it was a fictional story when attributed to Zhuge Liang, but it looks like he wasn't the first to use this strategy and he wasn't the last. Regardless, I was wrong about Sun Tzu having done it and I learned more about history, so thanks!

Here's the Wikipedia article I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Fort_Strategy#Zhuge_Liang

ShaunaTheDead, 11 days ago

On a somewhat related note, that Sun Tzu quote reminds me of something he did. Sun Tzu had a rivalry with this other general who he often got into skirmishes with and always defeated him or outmaneuvered him with some kind of trickery. So one time this rival general actually had Sun Tzu on the ropes and had chased him into a bit of a corner. Sun Tzu was in a smallish fort with the enemy general closing in and he definitely did not have enough soldiers to hold the fort for long.

So instead of trying to intimidate his rival with a show of force or making his army seem bigger than it was or whatever else he might have tried instead when his rival arrived at the fort he found the front gate fully open and nobody in sight except Sun Tzu himself sitting on the battlement playing an instrument somewhat akin to a lyre I think.

His rival was so wary of trickery that he assumed it must be a trap, or a distraction while a larger army moves in to reinforce him, so he left and Sun Tzu and his army survived.

ShaunaTheDead, 4 days ago

Or possibly more susceptible, maybe they would die if either part of their body had a critical organ failure.

ShaunaTheDead, 15 days ago

If you like what's on offer by Spotify, there's a free alternative that I like called Spotube. It uses your Spotify account for recommendations but then uses YouTube's (and YouTube Music's) backend to get the songs. You can also change the backend use a Piped instance instead of YouTube.

ShaunaTheDead, 7 days ago

I'm not surprised, to be honest. The first game was a success largely because of the interesting hook, which is that Senua is schizophrenic and they immerse you inside her mind by having voice constantly whispering in your ears, or sometimes a voice will rise above the murmur with something helpful, or not.

The actual game play though is not very good, it's actually pretty boring. So even if you were interested in that hook you probably played the first one but you're over it, and if you weren't intrigued enough to play the first one then you'll probably miss the second one too.

ShaunaTheDead, 15 days ago

The thing that most people struggle with in the water temple is finding one of the keys. There's one key that requires you to step on an elevator but get off of it before it moves which reveals a hidden area underneath the elevator. Anyone familiar with the Soulsborne series of games will always know to check under an elevator, but of course Ocarina of Time came out way before that.

If it never occurs to you to check under the elevator, you'll get stuck and wander around for hours trying to find the last key you need which is why, I think, most people hate it.

ShaunaTheDead, 3 days ago

There's also Jenny Nicholson that doesn't always, but often posts videos about theme parks because it's a huge interest to her.

Link her to her YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JennyNicholson

ShaunaTheDead, 12 days ago

I love Eric Barone! He sticks to his convictions in the way I wish more video game developers would. He's made so much money from Stardew Valley that he never needs to work a day for the rest of his life, but he chooses to put in the time to continue releasing free content and working on new passion projects and giving back to the community. He could have monetized the hell out of Stardew, releasing DLCs and hired a huge development team to crank out new content to make him richer until the original game became unrecognizable.

So many game developers have gone down that route, or simply sold off their creation to a company that they know full well plans to do just that.

Also, I just love his mentality about things. He knows that nobody really asked for Haunted Chocolatier, and he doesn't really care if it's successful, he just wants to make something new for himself. I hope it is successful, but I'm glad to see that he's not hinging his hopes on it's success but instead just enjoying the process of making something, which is really beautiful and I think more people should focus their energies on those kinds of exploits and outcomes.

ShaunaTheDead, 11 days ago

I think upgrading the RAM as you mentioned is going to make a big difference. While the physical RAM might be soldered to the motherboard, you could buy a fairly cheap SD card or USB and set the system up to use that as virtual memory. It won't be as fast as actual RAM but it might help and large SD cards are honestly really cheap these days.

ShaunaTheDead, 6 days ago

An investigation from a neutral third party is a good thing, but in this case LTT hired the third party investigator so the investigators obviously have an incentive to find LTT innocent of all charges since LTT is paying them through Linus Media Group (LMG). It's better than nothing, but it's like when there's an internal affairs investigation into police misconduct... by the police... Nobody believes it and for good reason.

ShaunaTheDead, 11 days ago

Looks like you all have a good handle on this, but just chiming in as another transgender person to say FUCK NO! to this post. Femboys are not transgender unless they choose to be, stop forcing labels on people who don't want them. You don't know better than them what they are, how they feel, or what they want.