manxu

Aside from sight-challenged people, there are also the ones that don’t speak the language of the meme/photo. You can take the text and paste it into an automated translator, with a meme it’s harder to do. That’s particularly important with memes that have slang/jargon/regional content.

Willful violations of the Constitution. Right now, elected officials can brazenly disregard the Constitution and the worst that happens is they are told not to do that again in the future, pretty please.

I remember seeing Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and thinking they were absolutely magical and he had to have spent months for each shot, they were so perfect and unique and marvelous.

Then I went to Yosemite and realized that no, that place is perfect and unique and marvelous, and even I can take perfect and unique and marvelous pictures with my Xiaomi phone in Yosemite.

It really is indescribable. Just to give you an idea, even five seconds before totality is boring. It’s day, a little darker than usual. Then, five seconds later, it’s totality, and it’s like the entire universe had been replaced by a magical fairy tale land.

I think the problem is that the Roman empire was on the brink of collapse so many times, it would have been weird for someone to think one particular time was special. The troubles of the Third Century, for instance, looked a lot worse at the time than anything after that, but the empire recovered just fine.

The first (of several) sack of Rome in 410 AD was probably a huge red flag. But by then, Rome was not even the capital of the Western Empire any longer. The sack was mostly a symbolic loss, Rome having been able to defend herself for a thousand years.

In hindsight, permanently moving the capital from Rome to Constantinople was what might have turned the page for the empire. It was a complex series of changes, placing a new religion without strong ties to Rome on top, moving the political center of the empire to the East, and freeing the emperors for a while from the pressure of the senate and the people.

I note that the Eastern provinces were economically outperforming the Western ones by large margins even before Barbarian incursions. That the East would run the empire was probably inevitable at some point.

I heard something similar. And that any “blue” or “neutral” comment is followed by an immediate suspension or outright ban. I haven’t witnessed it myself, though, since I haven’t been active on Reddit in over a year now.

Like many who responded, I don’t think it’s hardcore to not be on Reddit. I was for a long time, then my local forum in Denver was crushed by Reddit admins overreacting to the API rebellion, then the hobby forums started being taken over by AI, and finally the tone on other subs became absolutely toxic, with no variant of the prevailing opinion allowed. Hello, /r/Summit!

The only thing missing from Lemmy is depth, and that will fill in automatically as more people join. For a change, I am delighted to be on a platform that isn’t beholden to a small group that makes all the decisions regardless of user input. In fact, I started out on KBin until that flaked out massively (back to normal, now) and was excited that I could just switch to Lemmy and see the exact same things.

Now I am on piefed because I like Python and would like to contribute. But I love all the people at Lemmy <3.

Aldi is two different companies, North and South. One owns Aldi America, the other bought Trader Jones.

Very good questions. I think the primary is that some form of workout is very important to your overall health, and you should just pick which type of workout works for you in the long run.

It doesn’t really matter if you get a home gym, or go to parks, or to a gym, as long as you are consistent and have fun. For many people, the gym is intimidating, they might be better off with a home gym. I find the place semi-social, which means I get distracted by people watching, but don’t have to chat with anyone. Works for me.

The key, I think, is to shift from “I can do all of that at home” to “I will do all of that at home.” An insane number of home treadmills and exercise bikes collect dust because the mind is willing, but the flesh lazy. I love the distraction, others love the camaraderie or the friendships you make at a gym. They push you to go even when you don’t feel like it, and that’s the important part.

I just had to learn French in middle age, and it’s been fun. They key takeaways from my experience:

1. Contact is everything. The longer you spend listening, reading, speaking, just in general interacting with the target language, the better. Doesn’t matter what you do - Duolingo or PeerTube videos, novels or comic strips.
2. Communication is the goal, not fluency. You can get the gender of a word wrong and people will still understand you. You can use the wrong tense and that’s usually okay. Don’t try to “sound more like a native” or “learn slang words that everyone uses,” because heaven knows nobody is going to take you for a native. But if you can get the point across and can understand what people are saying, you win.
3. Speaking is 10x harder than listening or reading or even writing, because it involves not only forming sentences in an unfamiliar language, but also saying them, which involves your muscles. At first, it’s really hard to say the sounds of the language that don’t exist in your own language, and I found that very frustrating.
4. Language and culture are different, but interconnected. You don’t really speak a language if you don’t understand the culture it’s attached to. For instance, at first I didn’t know what the cashiers were asking me at the checkout, until I learned that they want to see the bags you brought from home to make sure they are empty. The problem with missing cultural references is that everybody around you knows them, and they don’t understand why you don’t, or what there is to explain.
5. One of the very few great use cases of LLMs is, in fact, talking with a chat bot. You give it a good prompt (look for them online) and you are forced to talk in the target language. If the bot can understand you, a native speaker probably will, too. A good tip is to try an AI conversation on the topic of something you are about to do in real life, like applying for an apartment or having a conversation about cheese.
6. Personally, I found that my language skills drowned completely under certain, specific circumstances. For instance, for the life of me I cannot understand voice messages, at all. Even phone conversations are really bad for me, both in talking and listening. I can have a perfectly fine conversation with someone, but when I have to talk with them on the phone, it’s like I never learned the language.
7. The tool you use is not as important as the time you spend. Duolingo was really meh: too much useless vocabulary, not enough grammar and pattern recognition, lack of ability to specify areas of interest, down to always on animations even when you had them all turned off. But, despite the heavy focus on the words, “chouette” and “trousse,” I sort of learned French to the point where I can follow everyone along and can speak and be understood. Took a year to the day and the entire tree.

It’s definitely a setback, but you learned two important things:

1. You can get an entry level job
2. You need a place where you can work

The ONLY reason it didn’t work out this first time is because 1. and 2. were not sufficiently close in time. I wouldn’t have known either (and now I do, so thanks for the learning experience!). I’d probably start looking for a similar position (maybe with a company that is less weird about infrastructure, although you only know after you get the job) AND an office-type place at the same time.

I would guess a lot of the less-than-five stars motels would be happy to give you a heavy discount if you only use your room during the day and don’t need to stay at night, ever. They are really selling the nights.

It must be incredibly frustrating to be in your current position, but I am really happy that you found a way to make it better. I think you got the right solution for you, it’s just a matter of iterating it until it sticks. I was in your shoes and I wish I had had as clear a plan as you have.

If you get within earshot of a Republican, chances are you’ll hear complaints about “damn taxes” within five minutes. So to a certain set of people, definitely everyone they talk to is constantly complaining about taxes.

When I was starting out and making little money, the taxes I paid were definitely cutting into my ability to live. I think instead of “standard deductions” we should have real minimum incomes. If you are under the minimum income for your location, you don’t pay taxes.

Now that I am at the end of my career, I think it’s stupid that my taxes are not higher. If I could have given young me some of the money I am keeping now, I would have had a much better life overall. I obviously can’t do that now, but I can give someone else the same breathing room.

I think it’s the “basically” part in basically right back where we started that makes the difference. Even if 100% of Fediverse users were on a single instance, once that instance starts pulling Musk moves, the users can move somewhere else.

Only if that instance defederates from everyone else do we get the Twitter situation again. Or, since that’s actually what happened, Truth Social, which I think is just a slightly modified Mastodon instance with federation disabled/deactivated.

Never smoked anything in my life, having one side of the family wiped out prematurely by nicotine, all of them.

Lived in Colorado. The pros outweigh the cons a million to one. The biggest positive was the massive reduction in DUIs, since people drink in bars but smoke weed at home. There may be a reduction in harder drugs, too, given how much easier and cheaper it is to get weed. The tax revenue from weed sales is huge (was bigger, though) and because the laws were changed after Colorado turned liberal-ish, the money was mostly allocated to great causes.

Government loves having a law that can be selectively enforced and is broken by a lot of people. Taking it away is a huge plus, especially in times where the government is looking for easy ways to control the population. Even before now, White people caught in possession or smoking marijuana rarely got more than probation, while some Black people were three-striked for the same.

The only downside is that it still smells bad, and I am still not sure that hacking up your lungs is all that sane or safe.

Yes, it appears that young humans can have very negative reactions to weed, and that it can affect their brains negatively. That would absolutely be a problem if legalization increased week use among teenagers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Purdue Pharma and the entire Sackler family. I’ve witnessed so many horrible things done by Oxycontin-addicted people; knowing that history, I want to puke my guts out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_States#History