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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it’s pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it’s meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it’s usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing

    I have a similar “power” and while I’m not flawless, it’s only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don’t actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones



  • A great Australian one that doesn’t involve spiders or cunts is “tell ‘im he’s dreamin’”, usually said in a real broad accent (you can change the pronouns around what more matters is the way you say it). Usually used whenever someone’s asking too much money for something but can also be used for when someone’s asking for too much in general and basically means “are you fucking kidding me that’s way too expensive”. It’s from a great movie called The Castle. It also gave us the saying “[this is going] straight to the pool room” meaning “shit this is really nice thanks” (because the pool room is where you put your trophies and whatnot) but I think that’s a little less common.

    On the other side of the globe, Norway uses “Texas” to mean “crazy weird shit”. There’s also “kamelåså” which generally means “unintelligible (like a Danish person)” which is from this great comedy sketch about Denmark that’s so good NRK decided they had to translate it into English just so people could make fun of Danish internationally (The untranslated bits are just danish sounding gibberish)



  • Squids@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlGary larson rule
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    1 year ago

    The closest thing to what you’re talking about is grafting, but that’s a specific thing that only works on certain species and I don’t think can “glue” two entire halves of a tree back together, maybe just a branch at the most if you’re very careful and lucky

    It’s why if you plant a seed from a random apple from the supermarket, you’re very probably not going to get a tree that produces that apple. Most commerical fruit trees (including ones from your local garden centre) tend to have a bottom half that’s hardy and resistant, and then a top half which was “glued” on that actually provides the fruit you want. The bottom half controls the genetic material in the seed, but the top half controls what the fruit will look like.

    On the other hand, you can totally glue a snapped cactus back together, provided it hasn’t been too long and the two halves aren’t too damaged.


  • …now? Bud, they’ve done this for ages, both on mobile and desktop how the hell have you not noticed it? It used to be even more obvious on desktop because they’d put it up as the first item in the ‘related videos’, but they got rid of that so now you don’t know what it’s going to start autoplaying until it happens, which is mildly annoying when you’re listening to music and can’t see what’s up next




  • My great grandad got a couple of cockatoos when he was in his 20s right after ww2 and they still managed to outlive him. Only by a few weeks mind you - poor things starved themselves to death out of grief after he died. He told us not to worry about rehoming them because he knew they wouldn’t be able to take the loss of loosing him at such an age.

    He only had them because he took up conservation work and they’re just, native to Australia. They lived out in a big aviary he’d built with trees and bushes and even a water feature along with other birds he ended up aquiring. I adored those birds, but I genuinely can’t understand how or why you’d keep such a big beautiful intelligent bird as a pet in a cage on the other side of the world and it always weirds me out when I see these birds I grew up watching roam free eating all our damn lemons in someone’s house as a pet. It’s like if you an American saw someone keeping a racoon as a pet.


  • This wasn’t malicious per se, but I had an English teacher/school counsellor who suspected I had some sort of learning disability and treated me like an idiot because of it, but like in that sort of “poor you let me help you” way that’s like really condescending that ended up really hurting my self confidence.

    If I struggled with something for any reason, I was given something easier. If something I did conflicted with what she thought was correct, she would sit down and “help me correct it” because I think she seemed to think it was I guess an autism thing or something, which meant she spent a lot of time (usually taking me out of lunch break) trying to “correct” whatever she thought I was doing wrong. Which was exasperated by the fact I was an expat from the Commonwealth and she was an American so half the time they were just, cultural things. My dialect? Incorrect stop being non-rhotic and dropping your Ts. Handwriting? Oh dear this isn’t D’nealian you’re going to have to relearn this. Needed something repeated because I didn’t hear it? Let’s sit down and go through each step one by one in simple English so you can understand it. Social issues were the worst because she’d try to explain how to be friends with someone like I was five and try and push me into other people’s friend groups when I did not want to do that.

    I know she wasn’t being malicious and like, she was right - I did have a neurological disorder, and she was the only person who noticed before it actually started affecting me negatively. But oh my god she was so condescending and made me feel like I was so stupid and absolutely fucked my handwriting. Also people noticed the attention she gave me and made fun of being for being “retarded” which was fun.


  • I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI

    Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.

    (There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)





  • Squids@sopuli.xyztoMemes@lemmy.mlThey don't have such weaknesses
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    1 year ago

    You could probably back this up by looking at the alcoholism rates in Scandinavia (especially Norway and Sweden)

    Scandinavia had their own prohibition and still to this day have a strict 18/21+ drinking age with booze only being sold during very specific hours (and never on Sundays or religious holidays), with anything above I think 12% only available at the government run bottle shop



  • I’d also add that like, for a lot of Scandinavia heat pumps work just fine? Like does America just have some really bad heat pumps or something?

    I think the only reason why you wouldn’t install one here (aside from obvious cost issues) would be if you already have a robust heating system built into your home, like a hot water system. And if that’s the case, you can use the heatpump of the earth - geothermal! Use the power of the earth’s molten core to heat and cool your home!

    (… geothermal isn’t as ubiquitous as I make it sound it’s just, really fucking cool)




  • Wireless electricty is a thing, as demonstrated by Faraday through his laws of induction, first discovered in 1832, 60 years before Tesla came onto the scene. Wireless electricty as you know it is mainly just fancy induction.

    I’m talking about Tesla’s batshit crazy plan to make wireless electricty by just, sticking electrodes into the ground and/or sky and pumping enough voltage into it so they arced because he thought the earth could be used to conduct electricity. Wardenclyfe tower failed not because of Edison, but because Tesla was an idiot who thought the luminferuous aether was real and electrons were made up.

    Also please, do you know how stupidly inefficient a Tesla coil is? The most common use of resonat inductive coupling is like, RFID chips, not large scale power transfer like Tesla wanted