Candelestine

... they can't find someone to come up with trivia questions worded in reverse word order? That's really not that hard.

Ooh! They should use ChatGPT!

Yeah, all the time. It's the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don't have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don't like them, but at least they're engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people's buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That's an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don't bother voting while I'm there, so I answered inaccurately. I'm just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don't downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it's probably not a troll, I don't downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don't downvote through people's comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don't upvote very often either, since I'm reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we're still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn't realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn't necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn't know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It's like when you're trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

This comment is hilarious, and it being downvoted is sad.

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much what they do, isn't it?

If either of those figures is actually accurate from an end-user standpoint, then the entire downtime must be coming during my primary periods of usage.

Surprised this one took so long. We've had basic hologram tech for decades now. Even with a private jet, it's not like flying cross country all the time for business is fun or anything. Being on a jet is still being on a jet, and not being able to do anything except pull out your laptop, mobile device or book.

I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There's an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different "flavors" that combine to create more complex examples.

It's the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You "look at it" first. Almost without fail.

No, salt would probably not be an effective method. If you're going for the hydrophilic method like that, you're better off using honey, which was used at several different spots throughout history as a wound dressing.

While we can do much better nowadays, it does have some anti-microbial properties and could definitely be better than nothing.

If all you have is salt, you could try making a saturated saltwater solution and using that, but it's not going to be as effective. These are not particularly good methods in general, as there are many, many pathogens that can resist them in a wide variety of ways. (like, viruses not necessarily needing water to still exist, for instance)

It's been this way for weeks, actually. I haven't seen a graph of the uptime, but I'm sure one would look extremely ugly, based on my own user experience.

This right here is an alt, and despite the fact that I don't prefer to comment from it, since I won't necessarily check in soon to see replies, it's seeing some heavy use.

The attacks a few weeks ago weren't a one-off, they never stopped. It seems down maybe half the time or so?

One of the many ways we (all of Lemmy) are not quite ready for the mainstream yet, we still have basic technical/security issues to resolve. Soon, though.

I'm not him, but now that I think about it, there is a tendency for many people to prefer the more generalized term.

Where scientists don't tend to use the word scientist as much, I can't recall ever seeing the term in a journal article for instance. (I don't read many, but I'll read an abstract here and there) I'm not sure why. I expect it's some categorization thing, where not all scientists perform research, so researcher is the more precise term. I'm just guessing as to the reason though, I do not have a PhD.

Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

How do they change their innate intelligence? We're not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?

We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone's capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.