I think I’ve read there where like 4000 cockroach species and only 30 that were ivansive, in human homes, mostly from just 3 genera. The rest only live in the wild, where they hardly bother anyone.

This comment makes me realize I might’ve misunderstood the one I was replying too. I believed “going away in style” meant “going away in a stylish manner”. Like, it’s fading from use, but since a while and until it disappears it’s become a fancy phrase. Now I guess it just means it’s fading from use. But the point I was trying to make is that I believe that, because Nina Simone used it, it’s now a stylish phrase even if it wasn’t before.

I’m not a native English speaker, but I’ve heard this phrase ok once, from Nina Simone’s interpretation of Pirate Jenny and so I never questioned it. Just for being in that song, I’d concur that it’s definitely going away in style.

“Goodbye Lenin” vibes but the roles are reversed.

What ethnic cleansing? I’m asking this in good faith, I genuinely don’t know who Ukrainians were trying to eliminate. I’ve vaguely heard that many Cossaks in Eastern Ukraine were pro-Russia because they’d let them have more autonomy, is that what this is about?

Ah yes, the thriving Ergo Proxy fandom.

Soo… Trying marijuana once is the only place you can move from your current position, and once you do that your only choices are either meth addiction or returning to your previous position?

Je veux bien d’un “réarmement démographique” si c’est avec ces armes-là !

Oki-doki, I won’t!

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D’OH!

Not today, CIA

Yep, postmarketOS uses systemd now, but in addition to OpenRC, it’s since march 5th 2024. Alpine itself didn’t switch to systemd. Also, thanks to your comment I noticed I actually got Artix and Alpine slightly mixed up when making this page, might edit later.

Anon didn’t make up the rules, and I wouldn’t wager that he was the one who decided to start that game. Everyone chose to play knowing they wouldn’t be comfortable getting anon. It doesn’t seem to me like anon made any advance at all. Rejecting someone’s advances for whatever reason is not morally incorrect, nor is denying them physical displays of affection. But going up to someone unprompted and telling them you find them unattractive and wouldn’t feel comfortable touching them is. This seem like an intermediate situation where they willingly and knowingly created a situation where they would have to do the latter. Refusing to kiss or touch anon wasn’t the fault here, initiating the game was.

En vrai si tu installes le module “Ruffle”, un émulateur de flash, tu peux encore jouer aux jeux flashs que tu trouves encore en ligne. C’est juste le module officiel adobe flash player qui est parti. Mais ça me surprend quand même aussi…

Very nice. I hope Blue Sky becomes compatible with Activitypub soon, so I can follow the artist.

Vigo Mortensen broke his toe kicking the helmet, this is because we live in a society.

These terrible crooks, so different in looks

But words have no utility aside from being understood, a word is good as long as there is a consensus as to what it means, and you can always create other words for things it doesn’t describe.

Light acting like a wave in some regards and like a particle in others is something we can see experimentally, not just a matter of semantics. It’s a conclusion that experience lead us towards. Calling light “continuous” wouldn’t work because there is already meaning assigned to that word, and that meaning clashes with observations. Unless we changed the whole word and redefined the continuity of everything, which would be absurd.

That “operating with unclean tools would be fine” clashes with the observation that it can lead to infections, coupled with the axiom that inflicting bodily harm to someone is bad. The axiom could still be changed, but the problem with observations is that they’re imposed by reality, they would still be true even if we didn’t believe they were. You could also change the word “fine” tho. If you make a language almost identical to English safe that the word “fine” means “an unreasonably dangerous practice” the sentence “Practicing surgery without disinfecting your tools is fine!” is true in that language.

Ceres not being a planet depends only on our definition of planet. It was considered a planet for a while, but what led people to reconsider that isn’t just that it was smaller than believed, but also that there were many similar objects in the asteroid belt. Referring to all these objects as “planets” could’ve been an acceptable truth, but since that would’ve meant most planets known at the time are small and in the asteroid belt (the Kuiper belt and Port cloud weren’t known yet, but now it’s just mean most planets are in a belt), and if the likes of Pallas and Juno were included (as was the case once) it also would’ve meant that most planets weren’t round.

Since the previously known planets would’ve been outliers in several ways, a new word should’ve been coined for them. It seemed more simple to let them be the only planets and coin the word “asteroid” for the rest (and much later the intermediate category “dwarf planet”).

If a different choice had been made, asteroids could be planets, what we now call planets could be called “big planets” and dwarf planets would be called “intermediate planets”. This would be an acceptable truth, it wouldn’t contradict itself or observations. If it was the consensus, it would be true, but it isn’t so it’s false, it’s as simple as that.

If in the future we find a different definition of life more useful, that definition will be true then. But that won’t change what definition is true now. Ceres was a planet. Now it isn’t. Something can change category either because it itself changed or because the category changed, like how substances can go from being legal to illegal or vice-versa.

True, I guess several definitions of life may coexist with different implications and all of them are right in the right context as long as they don’t contain a self-contradiction. But in the context of this debate, I think most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists. And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.

We invented the word “living”, we get to chose what it refers to. We are necessarily right, because this is a truth we create, not a transcendent one. If we collectively decide to change the definition of “living” to include viruses, we will still be right but it won’t mean we were wrong before.