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Is "food" a social construct?
  • "digestible" and "nutritious" aren't social constructs, so no. If your body can transform it chemically in a way that produces energy, it's food. Otherwise it's not. The same things are food regardless of your culture.

  • Samyang: Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy
  • I've had the 2x. It's definitely one of the spicier things you can get off a normal grocery store shelf. Even as a big spice fan it's right on the edge of what I actually find enjoyable. Not over the edge, though, it's my favorite ramen

  • A Cool guide to Cistercian Numerals
  • I've seen this a hundred times now and it annoys me every time -- there are still separate digits, they're just attached to a central line. I can invent another way of writing 1-9999 with a "single symbol" too, here we go:

    0001 0002 0003 ... 0099 0100 ... 9998 9999

  • If we get two sets of chromosomes, how does our body decide which genes to use?
  • Everyone is talking about dominant and recessive genes, so I just want to clarify a couple things.

    The way your body directly uses genes is as a blueprint to construct proteins. Your cells are always producing proteins from the genes in all your chromosomes. It has complex ways of regulating how much of each it produces, but your body doesn't care what chromosome it's coming from. Once an embryo is fertilized, there's really no distinction between "mom" chromosomes or "dad" chromosomes, as far as the embryo and its protein machinery are concerned.

    "Dominant" and "recessive" characterization is about how those proteins affect your body at the macro scale, not whether your body actually uses the gene and produces its proteins -- it always does that. For example, brown hair is a dominant trait, and blonde is recessive. But this is because producing any amount of brown pigment will make your hair brown, regardless of what other pigments you're making, simply because it's darker. Literally the same as combining blonde and brown paint. It has nothing to do with whether the genes are actually being expressed -- the brown hair gene doesn't stop the blonde hair gene from making its pigments.

  • modern gamer
  • I just don't understand how people can get so sucked into gacha games. All the art design, the game world, all the other stuff they try to use to camouflage the slot machine, none of that stuff works more than a few hours. Once you see the "seams" of the skinner box, once it becomes blindingly obvious there's nothing to find at the "end" of chasing higher DPS or whatever, why do people continue? It loses any sense of fun the moment it happens.

  • Removed
    What happens to FIPS/UNICODE/IETF/ISO/ANSI etc. in a post-US world? (Warning: slightly political)
  • Why would anyone stop using those standards? You seem very confused about the incentives for adopting standards. Sure, maybe US-driven standards were chosen over other possibilities partly because of political environment, but once you have a perfectly good standard adopted you're not just going to throw it out because the original author isn't cool anymore. You don't need a dominant power to adopt standards.

    And for being "slightly political" and "focused on the standards," your post sure does spend the majority of its time talking about only politics and not about standards at all

  • Why do all those US universities have dealings with Israel?
  • For the most part, they're not specifically supporting the Israeli government. They have endowment funds, which they invest in mutual funds and other such financial instruments, like everyone else. Those mutual funds, in turn, invest money in a huge array of different stocks, bonds, etc, generally with the goal of producing a decent return with a minimum amount of risk. Buried somewhere in that pile of investments are things like Israeli government bonds, shares in defense contractors, etc, because political priorities are not usually a factor in how mutual funds decide where to put their money.

  • Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human?
  • Sure, but now you're talking about running a physical simulation of neurons. Real neurons aren't just electrical circuits. Not only do they evolve rapidly over time, they're powerfully influenced by their chemical environment, which is controlled by your body's other systems, and so on. These aren't just minor factors, they're central parts of how your brain works.

    Yes, in principle, we can (and have, to some extent) run physical simulations of neurons down to the molecular resolution necessary to accomplish this. But the computational power required to do that is massively, like billions of times, more expensive than the "neural networks" we have today, which are really just us anthropomorphizing a bunch of matrix multiplication.

    It's simply not feasible to do this at a scale large enough to be useful, even with all the computation on Earth.

  • Anon can’t have a factual argument
  • Not sure where you'd get that idea...

    Black population is not that far off from Hispanic (18 vs 12%) and white is barely a majority.

    Canada is much more dominantly white (70% vs 56%) with lower representation of every other group compared to US. Everywhere in Europe is much higher than that (80+%).

    Of course all this is based on coarse Western racial categories, if you look at individual ethnicities then it's gotta be India or somewhere in Africa.

  • [Feature Request] Less friction to block a community

    First of all, thank you so much for all your work! This is definitely a way better experience than the web client. And thanks for adding community blocking, so now I don't have to go back for that feature.

    I like to keep pretty huge categories of communities out of my feed entirely. But, I also want to be aware of what other communities of interest might be out there, especially now while the Lemmy landscape is evolving so quickly. So the strategy of only ever browsing subs and foregoing All entirely doesn't really work.

    But, as I've seen other people highlighting in other posts, federation also means that the number of redundant communities across instances is huge. I don't just have to block all the political communities, I have to block them everywhere we're federated with. My block-list is already gigantic and I don't anticipate the need to block communities going away soon.

    It'd be a much smoother experience if Block Community was an option directly in the three-dot menu of an individual post, instead of having to leave my feed, go through another menu, and go back every time.

    5
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
    palebluethought @lemmy.world
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    Comments 66