https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U7rOUSvYM8

Half-Life 2 vibes.

Obligatory Contact

That’s “energy efficiency,” not “energy density.”

Public transport is excellent in towns and cities,

A.K.A. where everybody but a negligible minority lives. Good for you for being a member of the rural exception, but it is way past time for us to stop paying inordinate attention and catering to you.

In the United States, zip code also correlates because things like school funding are based on property tax and vary by location.

Steam heating only covers one third of the functions of an HVAC system.

Gas exchange also doesn’t happen in your arteries or veins, but in your capillaries. Your capillaries are small enough to just barely fit a single red blood cell (the RBC often need to bend to fit through) and that close contact of RBC and capillary wall allows fast and near complete gas exchange. The tightness of a capillary is a feature, not a bug. So it could be that you don’t have consistent contact with the same RBC for long, and mostly are in contact with blood plasma?

Ah, so more or less the opposite of my guess. Man, I love Cunningham’s Law!

I’m not so sure induced demand is a thing for blood vessels, but LOL

I think it’s more that, following Bernoulli’s equation for fluid flow in pipes, widening the artery while holding the flow rate constant means the velocity has to decrease. Maybe that means that the oxygen has more time to diffuse out before it reaches the point where it’s supposed to, so that tissue doesn’t get properly oxygenated?

In theory, a Mastodon instance could see content from a Lemmy instance (and Pixelfed and Loops and so on) as they all use the same underlying protocol to trade information, but in practice, it seems that sites basically stick to trading with other sites in their wheelhouse.

Whenever you see somebody linking to the user they’re replying to at the beginning of their comment, you’re likely seeing somebody posting from Mastodon because their UI is user-feed-oriented instead of thread-oriented.

As an American, MRW:

But maybe you’re imagining a world where that question is moot—in a world where there’s no separation of users and [providers].

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m imagining. (Any tips on how I could’ve made that clearer from my first comment?)

That’s how federation works with[out] requiring a direct connection from every instance to every other instance. My instance can connect to yours to get your content, but also the content from all other instances that you federate with. And vice-versa.

So what? That’s like saying ISPs should require Section 230 to avoid liability because they route packets. We’re talking about legality: it’s stuff like intent and responsibility that matters, not the technical details. Each instance owner still gets to decide which other instances they want to federate with; some ‘middle hop’ in that connection is irrelevant.

The fundamental issue that Section 230 is designed to address is the separation between the users posting the content and the platform owners who control who sees it, and the moral hazard that creates. If you eliminate the separation, there’s nowhere left for the moral hazard to exist.

I’m usually a big fan of the EFF, but it’s wrong on this one. If you decentralize to the limit – i.e., such that each user is running their own instance for themselves – it becomes okay for the service to become liable for the user’s speech because the user and the service owner are one in the same. In reality, (extremely) federated social media is the only kind that can survive without Section 230 and thus repealing it entirely would be a win for the Fediverse.

(You could argue “but users won’t go to the trouble of running their own instance,” but to that I’d say “they will if the law doesn’t give them any other choice, short of not participating at all.”)

I’d love to play some sort of open-world RPG game in that setting.

I worry that there isn’t enough information left to recreate their culture with enough historical accuracy, though.

I wish the site as it exists today had reconstructed buildings instead of just the mounds themselves. Or an augmented reality app or something, so you could see what it would’ve looked like when you visit IRL.

Between the lack of remaining ruins and the (surely inaccurate, because of the climate) depictions of Mississipians going around in loincloths, the impression you get is way more archaic and primitive than it actually would’ve been. I mean, we’re talking about the North American equivalent of medieval history, here. Some of these towns were bigger than major cities in Europe at the time!

I’m not sure about the actual prevalence of racism, but one thing I can tell you is that living in a less diverse place makes it real easy for people to be blissfully unaware of their own racism, whereas actually interacting with people of other races forces them to confront it about themselves.

I’ve seen plenty of people here on Lemmy from lily-white states like Minnesota or Montana dunking on the South in the most bigoted way while simultaneously being holier-than-thou about it.

I mean, it’s got a map, too…

I can ID Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Egypt, Tunisia, and Poland on there without even going to check if I’m right. (I also correctly guessed Bangladesh and Jordan but had to check to be sure, and incorrectly guessed Georgia instead of Armenia.)

Can’t tell what the 10^th country is, though, as I don’t see any others marked in red.

The headline writer misspelled “disproven.”

Why the fuck is even Nature giving more credence to this delusional shit than it deserves?

This was posted in another thread a few months back, and I found it particularly persuasive: https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.