• 8 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.

    I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).





  • When I told people that literally every aspect of life will be worse under Trump, I absolutely meant it. Republican poison will seep into literally every aspect of our lives. And this is exactly what I mean when I say “everything is political” to those who only single out a handful of hot-button issues as “political”.

    With the rise of fascism in the US, just keep “everything is political” in the back of your mind for the next 4+ years, and if you don’t believe it by then, I don’t know what to tell you.






  • An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).

    If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.

    Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.



  • Jellyfish are cnidarians, a phylum which also includes corals and sea anemones. Jellyfish are a specific lifecycle stage of medusozoans (their own subphylum), while corals and sea anemones are anthozoans (another subphylum of Cnidaria).

    So yup, they are polyps before sexual maturity. And you’ll find they’re more closely related to corals than they are to members of any other phylum.

    Edit: I highly recommend that anyone who wants to get lost in the world of marine invertebrates check out WoRMS and then follow along in parallel on Wikipedia as you navigate the tree.




  • The two criteria I suggested were “not saturated with ads and AI trash” (technically just the latter would satisfy OP’s problem), and DDG meets both of those with no problem. Its AI “assistant” and its ads can both be trivially disabled. I use DuckDuckGo because I love its frontend and because it gives me fewer problems than Google did. I’ve only ever used alternative search engines that piggyback off the major ones (as you listed: DDG, Startpage, and SearX), so someone else would have to answer that for you.