Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

  • 0 Posts
  • 391 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • palordrolap@fedia.iotoComic Strips@lemmy.worldPeer Reviewed
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    3 days ago

    Scientists can and do lie. And they also make mistakes. And when their work leaks before going through peer review, gullible people think that any retraction must be some conspiracy to cover up the truth.

    Consider the whole vaccines versus autism debacle.

    Now we could enter into a semantic “no true scientist” argument, but again, we’ve got to consider those gullible people, who’ll take anything as undeniable truth as long as it comes from an apparent authority and it aligns with their beliefs.

    You may now stab me if you wish.




  • palordrolap@fedia.iotoComic Strips@lemmy.worldEye of the Beholder
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    4 days ago

    Anyone remember a series of Korean(?) comic strips with themes like this, except the art style depicted the emotion in a more extreme way? Exaggerated facial expressions (even for a comic). Foot up on a step and staring into the distance when caused to think about their own internal contradictions.

    My search skills are failing me.







  • Does anyone remember the Flash game that “taught” urinal etiquette? It would go through phases of what to do given which, if any, urinals were already occupied.

    If you tried the scenario in the last panel here, the guy you stood next to would freak out, wave his arms around and look seriously annoyed. Edit: I had misremembered how and when he freaked out. See responses.

    The whole thing was easy to get right on the first try, but like all good computer games, part of the fun was goofing around and doing things wrong on purpose.

    Sigh. That was probably a quarter century ago now.


  • Actual NSFL tales
    1. You know the urban legend of the kid who gets his scrotum stuck in his zipper at school? Thankfully, it wasn’t me, but I remember the name of the guy it happened to. The bit about the testicle peeking out was probably fabricated, but the accident wasn’t. I was outside the bathroom when someone looking very pale ran out to fetch an adult. He was off school for a week or two afterwards. The student that is, not the adult.

    2. Getting stuck in the neck. Ah. Well, that happened at least once to one unfortunate visitor to the executioner. The details on this one are hazy, but I’m pretty sure it’s a true story, and undoubtedly the reason things like the guillotine were invented. Picture the axe sticking and the condemned man screaming as the executioner struggled to dislodge the axe and try again.


  • palordrolap@fedia.iotoComic Strips@lemmy.worldWho would win?
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    11 days ago

    Let’s assume that they should have colours and that the three colours picture here are the correct ones, then, IMO, Ro should be red and carrying a rock, Sham should be yellow and carrying the scissors, and Bo should be blue and carrying the paper.

    It’s not clear who is who here, but they don’t fit with my colour-item pairings.

    Reasoning: Sham is vaguely like French “jaune” which is yellow. B and P are related sounds. There’s a bit more to it but the rest is mostly obvious.



  • Using AI to find errors that can then be independently verified sounds reasonable.

    The danger would be in assuming that it will find all errors, or that an AI once-over would be “good enough”. This is what most rich AI proponents are most interested in, after all; a full AI process with as few costly humans as possible.

    The lesser dangers would be 1) the potential for the human using the tool to lose or weaken their own ability to find bugs without external help and 2) the AI finding something that isn’t a bug, and the human “fixing” it without a full understanding that it wasn’t wrong in the first place.


  • It’s a fairly common trope in science fiction, and might even be science fact. The idea is that realities split from every decision point, some we’re aware of and some - due to quantum fluctuations - we’re not. Indeed, it might only be the quantum weirdness that’s valid and human decisions are merely emergent phenomena.

    If you take a look at any quantum experiment, you get things like particles interfering with themselves and apparently appearing in many places at once. Tissue thin neighbouring universes along some probability axis interfering with each other, one for each possible position of a particle, would explain what’s known as the “many worlds interpretation”. The MWI doesn’t talk about a probability axis though. That’s the fictional part until proven otherwise.

    It would still be a dimension even if things were more discrete though. Like, separately identifiable parallel universes where no intermediates exist. Hopping from one to the other could still be interpreted as moving within some extra dimension, and there’s nothing really stopping us from calling that probability.



  • So. True story. I did this a few years ago. As an adult. Spun around while looking at the carpet and watched it turn into a circular blur. “This was fun as a kid, why don’t I do this any more?”

    Then I stopped and regretted absolutely everything for about 15 minutes afterwards. Was very nearly sick everywhere.

    Do not recommend. Strictly for dogs. And kids.