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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Most of the bots on Lemmy have been well meaning, but ultimately annoying.

    The issue is there isn’t really a lot of traffic on Lemmy. And from the people that are here a lot of them are lurkers, just consuming, maybe upvoting once in a while, but that’s it. This leads bots that reply to a lot of comments/posts to become a large part of the traffic and thus the experience for the users. There isn’t enough for the bots to get lost in the noise. This also leads to the user experiencing the feeling of only interacting with bots, instead of other people. Most people commenting are looking for people interaction and get annoyed when they think they have such an interaction only for it to be a bot.

    Lemmy is also very focused of an audience at the moment, which leads to bots not really being necessary. People here are usually very tech savvy and know how to do most of the things. A bot that explains how to do things people already know how to do comes across as unneeded.







  • Yeah this is the biggest issue.

    The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.

    In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.

    Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.


  • That’s within a solar system, where distance, time lines and energy is relatively low.

    Any event with enough energy for something to leave the solar system, destroys all life, even microscopic. And even if somehow it does survive and leave the solar system, space is pretty much empty so it will probably never hit anything. But if it does hit something, 99% of what’s out there is stars. So it would end up in a star. And if it does hit a planet, coming in at intergalactic speeds absolutely destroys any life. None of that matters though, because the distance involved is so freaking huge, nothing living can survive that long. Travel times are so long, only fossils would arrive, that’s how long we are talking.


  • If aliens were to visit us it’s a miracle not only in space but also in time.

    Space is huge, for some aliens to randomly arrive here would mean they are just about everywhere. We would surely see signs of them in other solar systems, even if they haven’t visited here. There are so many solar systems out there, you don’t just randomly stumble upon ours. And the space in between systems is also so big our brains literally can’t fathom it.

    But time is huge as well. Humans as a civilization with electricity and technology has only existed for 200-300 years (being generous). Some say aliens have only been interested in us since the atom bomb, which is not even 100 years. However humans as a species has existed for over 100,000 years. And intelligent tool users have been around for about 1,000,000 years. If aliens visited anywhere in that time they would have laughed at the silly monkeys and have been on their way. For them to have randomly stumbled upon us just as we are enjoying our few hundred years of modern civilization is one hell of a coincidence.

    Space is mind bogglingly huge, time as well, for both to line up perfectly for aliens to happen upon us is impossible. Even if life is abundant in our galaxy, the separation of time and space pretty much excludes any chance for contact.


  • I’d go one step further. Not only does our current understanding of the universe not include any possibility for FTL, as far as we understand FTL would completely break reality. Science actively excludes FTL as a thing that can exist.

    Wormholes might be an idea, but they aren’t even at the theory level yet. More of a conjecture that fell out of some math, but can’t exist in the real world.


  • The whole mixing colors is white is kinda misleading.

    Colors only exist inside our mind, they don’t exist in physical reality. We have three receptors for wavelength information in the em spectrum in our eyes. They are S, M and L type and they are sensitive to a different range of wavelengths. The M and L range overlap quite a bit and are sensitive to a wider range of wavelengths. The S is apart on its own and quite focused. The receptors turn that wavelength information into signals our brains can read out. Simply speaking the eyes tell our brain for a given part of our retina we have x amount of S energy, x amount of M energy and x amount of L energy. That’s all the information we get.

    So our brain combines this information and decides what color it’s supposed to be. As a child we learn what the different colors are. So we correlate those energy levels to the colors we are taught. This is highly subjective as each brain and set of eyes is different. Most men for example have less sensitivity to colors compared to most women (exceptions exist, this is generally speaking). Thus men see different energy levels, but still can see colors just fine for the most part. However women are on average able to distinguish between more shades of the same color, because they have more information to work with.

    In the modern era however we found out our brains aren’t very picky and will just guess what color something is. In sunlight there is a broad range of wavelengths, which we associate with white light. However when making white leds we found out you can just output some spikes of light in the correct ranges and our brains will say jup that’s white. You can also output shit outside of the wavelength of our three detectors and we don’t notice or care. This makes cheap energy efficient white leds possible.

    In the early days the peaks were very narrow with not the best wavelengths. We would see this light as white, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. Without saying exactly why, we would experience the light as harsh or get headaches after a while. Modern white leds are very comfortable for our eyes and available in a whole range of whites to suit our needs.

    So while a whole lot of wavelengths combined like the light from the sun is white. A bunch of random spikes is also white. It doesn’t have to be all colors.

    Also because colors only exist in our minds, things like grayscale colors, impossible colors and metallic colors are also a thing. There’s a whole lot more to colors than just em radiation at a certain wavelength.