Yupp, the place where you can buy vehicles, including a Star Wars land speeder (in an at first seemingly medieval fantasy setting). Ultima 1 was a gloriously weird “nerd just nerds out uninhibitedly” pioneer game.

Yeah, they aren’t unbiased, they are more hesitant perhaps than other outlets on the other end of the bias spectrum - but not covering? Covering up? The biggest headline result when I just visited bbc.co.uk was about the starvation campaign.

Their bias can actually be somewhat helpful - it lends legitimacy to what they are reporting on, and makes it harder to claim that it’s “just biased pro-palestine pseudo-journalism” or some crap like that.

A conscience really is a goddamn hindrance in this world rather than a net positive.

Sort of. People without a conscience and without the power, privilege and/or social tools to abuse that often also end up pretty badly. Like how narcissism can lead both to (unwanted) social isolation, or even prison time, and then also sometimes to a successful business/political career or creating your own adoring cult, depending on other factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the person.

I don’t believe that people should be forced to “stay in their lane”, but if you’re going to go wading into waters that are not your own, you gotta stay humble.

Yes. And I can even sympathise with that being hard. It’s genuinely hard to do so and takes work and emotional stress, people potentially dogpiling on you from both sides doesn’t help either. But it sadly is the only way to arrive at something approximating truth. Influencer culture, atomised society and increasing isolation and social media in the context of a “presenting the most interesting you” culture sadly make this even harder. And even without that, there is always, and will always be, the danger of getting caught up in defending a point that is just wrong, because our psyche as humans latched onto it for reasons of identity/ego preservation or otherwise emotional wellbeing. Discourse culture ideally has to account for that with respectful arguing in good faith, even when the other side is wrong. Of course, that is an ideal that cannot always be reached, especially with more fuzzy, non-empirically provable points, or discourse that has very direct and tangible effects on our lives (politics, mainly, which is one reason it can be so draining).

Your perspective is valid as your perspective in the discourse, as long as it can be viewed as authoritative where you can rightfully claim you have knowledge and expertise (and even then, of course, it can be contradicted with proper arguments or newly emerging facts), as well as an outsider estimate where you just have an educated guess. And the latter isn’t worthless, but should be distinguished from more confident takes for the sake of discourse. Even just vibes-based perspectives are valid as a part of a discourse, but they have to clearly be able to be put into context and qualified, and have to stomach being superseded.

I don’t think it does much for gaming, as the video and article also point out, but even if it turns out to just be placebo - my old and creaking PC here feels more responsive than it did with Manjaro, Vanilla Arch and Garuda respectively.

I was about to make a joke about “amateur file picture”, but while typing it I realised that sounds like porn images.

Zoomer Twitterbrain word for Avatar.

Well, I am surprised they are that into retro gaming! But who can blame them, that is one handsome fella to play as

And the games were early trans representation!

(Just to ruin the joke: That is short for transportation, I know. But Ultima actually was pretty “woke” for its time, I guess.)

I had appreciated her having a different perspective than my own, still rooted in scientific thinking. Then I started noticing her commenting on things authoritatively, where she had no expertise here and there (especially outside of STEM, where my special interests lie).

And then I stopped watching her after I had noticed more and more hints of that, where she seemingly acted like a high IQ and knowledge in her own field means she is qualified to disregard other perspectives outside her field. I am sad it got that bad, but I am not too surprised.

My first account was on .ml roughly 5 years back, when it was basically the only instance. I had heard about there being a FOSS alternative to Reddit - but I quickly lost interest because the community was just too small back then. Re-activated my account when the API exodus happened, because there was finally a community large enough to provide a lived-in feeling. Have only gotten more dedicated to the Fediverse ever since.

Happy birthday! From one internet stranger living in your device of choice!

I will always read any variant of “ma boy” in the voice of the king from CD-i Zelda.

Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

I have the same phenomenon, and sometimes really weird intrusions, like - a few days ago I had a dream of working in an office building, and out of nowhere during work, there would be a drawer just filled with piss to pee into for the employees - but of course it never works.

Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the “looking through the image” technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there’s people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.

Basically it’s about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.

I love the Wellington here viewed the “wrong” way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

I can only do parallel-view, not crosseyed, those look so surreal that way (inverted height/depth basically)

They do link to the actual study, which does not throw up any immediately obvious signs to be cautious for me, but I also couldn’t do the detailed work of deeper research myself. They reference a hypothesis that preceded the study, which they were trying to test with this. I don’t know if this is a case of bias or even manipulation at work, but at least at a superficial glance, it doesn’t immediately scream “total hacks doing unscientific things.”