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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The real reason for shitty microphone quality is using the shitty microphone that comes with your laptop. Get a decent wireless headset with a mute button on it and you can move around your house during meetings while still sounding way better than you would be sitting in front of it using the laptop mic.




  • I got to bar age after most cities in my area passed non-smoking bylaws for bars and restaurants, but lived for a bit in one city that didn’t yet have a ban. I smoked at the time. I remember thinking that while it was nice to be able to just have a smoke while chilling on a couch with friends and a drink, the air quality sucked overall and I was glad to see the ban eventually go through there, too.

    A while later, I stopped smoking in my car. If I wanted a smoke, I’d park somewhere and do it outside. For places I lived, if it already had people smoking indoors, I’d just do that, but otherwise I’d smoke outside because the clean air was nicer (both while smoking outside and when I returned to the inside).

    So even as a smoker, the convenience wasn’t worth it to me, unless the air quality was already bad.


  • Here’s one I just realized: we’re closer to 2070 than we are to 1970.

    In general, if someone is over 50, we’re closer to their 100th birthday than their birth year. 1974 is currently equidistant to 2074 and it goes up by one every year.

    In 1990, we were equidistant from 1940 and 2040.

    And the bit you mentioned might make you feel old but consider that anyone born before 1976 still spent more time in the 20th century than the 21st. Or more time in the 2nd millennium then the 3rd. The ones who can’t say what you said are the really old ones.

    And both people in the running for president haven’t even spent a third of their lives in the current millennium.




  • Because our brains interpret colours and shading relative to their surroundings. That specific blue is on the opposite side of the colour wheel from red, so that relative lack of blue can be interpreted by our brains as red.

    Remember that white is all colours present, so white next to white will have more red than white next to blue.

    You’d get a similar effect if you stare at a bright blue version of the can for a while and then look at a blank white page or close your eyes. The after image isn’t the same colour as the thing you were staring at, it’s the inverse of that colour.







  • Yeah, from my perspective, it failed long before that. The Democrats couldn’t achieve their true objective if they had allowed Bernie to be elected, which was to give the illusion of a better option while ensuring that the status quo isn’t affected where it relates to power and wealth.

    Bernie was blocked for the same reason Biden isn’t trying to block Israel from destroying Palestine.


  • That does depend on who is making those memes. The bad faith propaganda meant to further divide the population targets all sides of all issues and it’s another very divisive issue. Any time I see someone making what should be a good point but in a way that will instead increase resistance, I suspect that’s what’s going on. It’s not a certain way to determine if that’s happening; anyone who has read How to Win Friends and Influence People knows that our instincts about persuasion are bad even before any bad faith is involved.



  • I think that brain one was from a game of telephone with the real fact that a large portion of our brain is dedicated to image processing and object identification. Another portion would be dedicated to sound recognition with a decent amount of circuitry going into the recognition and parsing of speech. Memory will also take up some of the capacity as well as mapping desired actions to sequences of signals for muscle activation. After all the things our brains need to do just to accomplish all these things we take for granted are accounted for, it doesn’t leave much capacity left over for thought.

    Though, at least in my experience, the most powerful analysis the brain can do is in the subconscious. So many times I’ve faced a difficult problem where I’ve been unable to make any progress, take a break, then later return to a much easier problem. Or even with skill development, try doing something too hard for a bit, then sleep on it and try again the next day and it might suddenly be easier. This works best for dexterity skills, I’ve noticed it a lot in Beat Saber.

    So it’s like you can take whatever was left over from the first paragraph, then take a small amount of that and that’s your conscious thought capacity and the rest is given to subconscious processing.