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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’ve honestly just been trying to keep my head up and hope for the best. I talk to the people in my life, encourage them to vote, share my political opinions where I can, but I’m ready for this election cycle to end already. I’m sick of worrying if I’m going to have to flee the country some time in the next year to avoid ending up in some sort of camp or just lose access to medications and legal protections. I’m ready to have a solid Democrat that I’m maybe mildly annoyed with for the next 4-8 years and try to drag them further to the left rather than this danger mode existential horror shit.

    I feel like enough Americans are in the same boat or similar boats that we’ve got this, but it sure is tense waiting to find out.


  • You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.

    An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters and then start over again. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat more or less the same patterns more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.

    If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter or computer is.

    You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.

    If you put a bunch of yarn in a room with some high-powered rotating fans, are they eventually going to produce a sweater? Probably not. You’re just going to have a bunch of tangled yarn. Sweaters require a consistent repetition of a non-random pattern of movement. Alter that pattern only a handful of times and you won’t have a sweater even if you do manage to stumble across some version of that pattern accidentally.

    Is there a non-zero chance? Eh… maybe? But there’s no reason to assume that it’ll actually happen given any amount of time unless someone comes along who knows how to make a sweater and does so.

    With monkeys and keyboards you’d be lucky to get a few lines of anything resembling English in iambic pentameter.







  • millie@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHoney
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    27 days ago

    They’re certainly exposed to a very different living situation than would be typical for them in most cases, to their detriment. For example, bees that make their combs in frames lose substantial heat from their hives, which usually helps protect against disease and even predation. They’re also often given a sugar water substitute to eat when their honey is drained off for human consumption, which is nowhere near as nutritious. They’re also moved around on the bee keeper’s schedule, which may be a substantial stressor compared with a hive that stays in one place. Never mind that they may be exposed to climates that substantially differ from where that particular variety of honey be evolved.

    Given issues like colony collapse disorder, it’s pretty clear that many forms of bee keeping aren’t really great for bees. Does that constitute torture? That’s hard to tell, but it certainly does put pressures on them in multiple aspects of their lives and the lives of their hives as a whole that they wouldn’t be dealing with otherwise, and which probably aren’t pleasant.

    Would you consider it torture, or at least cruel, to forcibly relocate the population of a city to an area that’s freezing cold, force them to live in poorly insulated homes, make them eat food that isn’t healthy for them, and steal the product of their labor in exchange for their efforts?





  • It seems like a pretty good survival strategy for a species to routinely produce a number of different sorts of constituent organisms in order to have the tools ready to be more adaptable to varying circumstances. Considering how much humans specialize their routine behaviors and the way in which we work together both consciously and through larger interconnected systems, it isn’t surprising to see a variety of strategies to process information, make decisions, and communicate with one another. Thinking outside the status quo creates opportunities that can independently either succeed or fail of their own applicability and ability to be executed. If everyone is looking for the same things, they’re likely to miss a lot. Even if many of those arrangements don’t produce the desired result, they can be a valuable exploration for new resources and strategies.

    It seems an extremely dire mistake in these circumstances to label one particular mode of thought the ideal and reject all contradiction as dysfunctional or useless.


  • The money from energy companies dripping from both sides of this interview is disturbingly clear. My only hope is that where CNN is clearly grilling Harris for the interests of their investors (energy companies), Harris’ evasive responses are there to assuage the concerns of those investors long enough to get into office. She’s talking out of the side of her mouth for someone and probably needs to to get in office. I just hope that at the end of the day she sides with Earth and humanity over evil incarnate. I think she will, but she has to walk a tightrope to get there.

    If I’m wrong I’ll probably be part of a literal chorus of leftists looking to make it extremely clear that she can be a one-term president if she doesn’t find her way to doing the right thing.



  • I literally don’t set up my voicemail, and I typically don’t listen to recorded audio that gets messaged to me. Texting is functional and doesn’t leave me some anxiety-provoking message that I have to sit through and digest without saying anything. If a conversation needs to happen in voice, text to say that and see if it’s a good time.

    Wild that people just ring a personal phone number unprompted in 2024 without that being an established routine.

    That said, I also remember when it wasn’t at all weird to show up to someone’s house and knock on their door. Things have really changed.



  • Too much thinking.

    The right doesn’t care about accuracy, but they will pretend to to keep us busy. To counteract it, we can’t spend our time engaged in good faith arguments of carefully considered wording. We need to beat them on that flippant energy that shows we won’t take their bait and we know we’re right, so we don’t have to prove it.

    Weird is perfect for that. They don’t want to be weird.

    Now when they turn it around and try to call us weird? Then is the time to say ‘hey, that’s cool! I’m happy to be weird!’ and literally not worry about the contradiction at all.

    They picked an arena where they can’t beat us. Let’s meet them there.


  • This is the conclusion I’ve come to since reading the State and Revolution. The people who are capable of overthrowing the current system aren’t likely to be the same people capable of keeping true to an approach that’s legitimately socialist. There are problems with reformism as well, as it can result in an endless series of small concessions to distract from an equally endless series of measured power grabs.

    If I take what I read of Marx and Engels as likely to be accurately predictive, my conclusion has to be that the circumstances they’re discussing haven’t occurred yet. Basically, Lenin jumped the gun with his support of imposing a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. The power structure it creates is too centralized to achieve its goals.

    This would suggest to me that if Marx and Engels are correct, a spontaneous and universal proletariat uprising is probably still down the road somewhere. Basically, we see hints at this state reflected in the microcosm of revolution, but have yet to see the circumstances that cause an actual change of prioritization and autonomy rather than simply a changing of the guard.