Sailor, software engineer, musician, terminally online.

I miss the pre-adtech internet.

  • 3 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle


  • The old low pressure sodium lights we had in the UK were great on this front. They were about as efficient as LEDs as well but the bulbs got too expensive to make, so the last factory making them in Europe closed down and they mostly disappeared quite quickly.

    I reckon they should switch street lights over to monochromatic yellow LEDs, they’d look the same as the old lights and not affect insect populations so much. They’re good for astronomers too as the light is only one wavelength.











  • There really needs to be granular NSFW settings on Lemmy, or more correctly I need to improve my Rust so I can go and implement it myself instead of bitching about it!

    I’m not anti-porn but I don’t want it mixed in my normal content. Other non-sexual NSFW stuff is fine 24/7, artistic nudity is fine 24/7, but I don’t want to see outright porn unless that’s what I’m specifically looking for!



  • Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.

    I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.

    Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.






  • Your skin actually has quite a lot of resistance especially compared to a copper wire, while it’s definitely bad news for a current to be flowing through your nerves it would need to get there first. Current doesn’t really ‘choose’ a particular path either; if you have a potential difference V between two points the current will take all paths available between them and Ohm’s law I = V/R tells us that the current will be greatest through the path with the least resistance. The reason you don’t get a shock when you touch a properly insulated wire is that the path that includes your finger also includes the resistance R of the insulation which is very high so correspondingly I is very low.