Thought Forge

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/40205361

You walk into a tea shops and find countless varieties. All those herbal teas: not really tea. They are made from non-tea plants, most of which taste nothing like real tea. Peu-er is probably as close as it gets.

The remaining (real) tea all comes from the same singular specie. Green and black is just a difference in processing of the same plant. White tea is just taking the tips of the tea leaf. All the flavors are just ways we dress it up with additives, or by smoking it (e.g. Russian Earl Gray).

Why the lack of biodiversity? Because no one has genetically modified a tea tree to give us more choice. There are far more tea drinkers in the world than coffee drinkers. That’s ideal b/c coffee has environmental consequences. It also means there should be a huge market for something like a tea tree that is married to a maple tree to give us maple tasting tea, or GMO tea that tastes like coffee.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28294479

I’ve been trying to work out how so many people got to be obsessed with smartphones to the point of using the tiny screens for tasks where it makes no sense. There are many Lemmy apps for smartphones but just a couple half-assed ones for the desktop.

It’s banks. Banks have been cattle-herding security-naive people onto smartphones designed for obsolescence with huge attack surfaces to push their closed-source app which requires licking Google’s boot to obtain. This seems to strike a parallel with Zuckerberg’s comment: “I don’t know why those dumb fucks give me all their data”.

The number of people willing to resist banks can probably be counted on one hand. From there, most people are easy enough to just say “fuck it, I’ll run the app”. This is what drives the “must have a recent phone at all times” brain malfunction. Most of the population is trapped on this shit like caged animals that can’t see the cage bars.

Many don’t bother owning a PC now. They want an all-in-one device. Then they read large amounts of text on that tiny display. So every industry has to cator for smartphone pawns to stay relevant.

Consumers wise enough to keep the GSM SIM slot empty and use smartphones just for innocuous tasks like offline navigation face this onslaught of app-pushers. Some public operations between ppl and government are becoming “app only”.

We are losing our human right to self-determination and autonomy. Normally we could let fools be fools and carry on. But there is a critical mass threshold by which the foolish consumption of many triggers oppression of the few who had enough sense to avoid it.

The offline alternatives and FOSS alternatives are being silently driven out of existence.

I was an early adopter (AOS 2.2). Thought: great, Android is linux based and under FOSS licensing. I am liberated. Got my update to AOS 2.3. Then I was abandoned. I saw right away the shit show I was baited into. Being at the vendor’s mercy for upgrades sent a stark msg to me that I learned from. And apparently not many others.

I wouldn’t care about the foolish decisions of consumers to keep buying new phones if it only affected them. But it’s fucking up the world.

Edit: It’s funny because I know people simply don’t want to consider it as possible. It is the crux of this group. Anyone on Lemmy. For the Occult group because it challenges their beliefs. For scientific people. It adds a new dimension onto science now. Which makes them uncomfortable and when someone else does the testing and recording. It’s not good enough because they don’t have access to a lab and others.

Then won’t test themselves. So it will never go anyone. I based this idea off the idea everything in our reality is Energy or Matter. If one could manipulate energy or be born with the ability to. Magic as we know it is very possible. Just because we haven’t built tech to make it happen doesn’t mean it’s not possible. If you’d use that excuse. It’s like saying Black holes are magic just because we can’t form them.

Everything as I see as magic. As deities. Are simply creations of energy or matter as the reality is.

myth literal idea is simply this. Magic is energy manipulation. So then in science because E=MC^2. ITSELF. does not state how it happens. I take the idea that magic is simply another form E=MC^2 because why couldn’t it be? You just need enough energy to form matter and enough control. This also leads to evolutionary pressures dimming traits or making them go dormant. Our brain has many mechanisms and uses right? Well why couldn’t before Abrahamic religions came around we had incredibly power magical connectors within our brain. Then as the pressure to switch from polytheism to one only god. Caused many things to be lost or dimmed including our connectors to magic. Though people have to rebuild the connectors from childhood normally for complete use. 4-5 to 16-18. This also mean deities. The myths where likely witnessed them turned into plays of else wise. Since deities are energy so they can become matter like us. Also anything that can be done with energy or mass manipulation can be done with magic. Just need enough control and power.

Hahahaa odd one right. Well it’s already happened. I had sex with my half sister. Hel. The goddess of death and I as the opposite power. Had sex with her and I had such rapid growth in 20 minutes that my arms became unable to use, literally falling and throbbing in pain. Next I knew my arms got drastically bigger and more dense within those 20 minutes.

So as you know nuclear fusion is the colliding of two opposing forces to create a more powerful reaction. This is what happened with The Goddess of Death, Stillness and transformation meet with The God of Creation, Love, Beauty and Transformation. Why I love magic as E=MC^2.

PS it wasn’t just my arms but main things I felt. Though yes, falling from grace feels so good.

We are sitting ducks. The tech giants will likely try to harvest all fedi content so their AI machines can exploit the data. How can we get ahead of this?

Suppose the author of post or comment has a tickbox that says: [] allow AI bots to grab your data? (default: NO)

Using the power of defaults for a good cause, knowing that almost no one will tick the YES box on this, it would create a situation where every participant individually has an explicit indicator disclosing their non-consent. So when an AI bot slurps up every post, the freeloading exploitive corps have less of a leg to stand on because each post has two objectors (the author and the admin).

An administrator could still say: “scraping anything from this site for LLMs is prohibited”, in which case breaches would be legally actionable both as an abuse of resources (trespassing) and also from a copyright standpoint.

Consider how many people park a hot car when they get home and then go immediately cook food. The heat energy in the engine block is wasted as they burn more energy on the stovetop. So why not design engine blocks with a flat cast iron topside that can give a good heat transfer to a skillet or copper pot? If it would bring water to a near boil, that’s tea water, or perhaps a start on cooking.

I recall an Australian steak house that would bring a raw bloody steak to your table along with a flat lava rock so screaming hot that you could cook your own steak as completely as you want. So of course I’m thinking: why not transfer this idea to engine blocks? The lava rock is somehow fastened onto your engine block, and when you park you bring the hot rock into the kitchen for cooking heat.

Of course we must factor in the payload weight added to the car as it moves. So carrying the rock might be foolish in a cross-country trip but perhaps efficient on commutes exactly long enough to get recoverable heat energy. In the winter, the rock could be put into the air ducts of a forced-air heating system and add warmth to the house.

Could be rediculous ideas here.. but I guess the job of thought_forge is to sort that out.

I know it was already studied to transfer ICE¹ heat to a steam engine to continuously convert (otherwise wasted) heat energy into more power to the drivetrain. Superficially it sounds brilliant, but apparently the complexity of the whole system was found to outweigh the benefits. I.e. many more things can go wrong with the car. But what if the steam engine does not directly complicate any essential car functions? Instead, it could generate power that charges the battery instead of the alternator. If it breaks down, it’s just the charging system. A switch simply puts the alternator back in the loop. Or it could mechanically power fans that blow heat into the cabin.

¹ internal combustion engine

I try to resist the urge to turn off the heat immediately before serving food because the pan is still hot for tens of minutes -- all wasted energy. I try to turn off the heat ~10—15 min before the food is done cooking. Most people are impatient, addicted to convenience, lack self-control, and probably don’t even consider the wasted energy.

Electronic pressure cookers at least steer people toward using residual heat because when the cooking is done pressure protections block access to the food until pressure drops. OTOH, that’s due to temps being higher to begin with (above boiling).

Anyway, cooking food is rarely critisised as a significant climate factor. But you have to figure 8 billion people worldwide are wasting energy in this same way on a daily basis. Maybe it should be studied?

It seems like few people have noticed how privacy proponents rightfully show discontent at every new policy or action that emerges that claws away more of our privacy -- unless it is in any way tagged as “anti-money laundering”. Then automatically people shrug it off, look the other way, etc, without questioning it.

Lawmakers have figured out that the magic words to avoid scrutiny are “Know Your Customer” (KYC). So they are even experimenting outside of the banking sector with the KYC tag, such as in telecom (GSM registration and even VOIP). They are getting a blank cheque on privacy abuse.

From where I sit, the non-stop onslaught of KYC/AML law that strips our privacy down to nothing while denying us the autonomy and dignity of using cash looks like lazy policing to me. Skillful police can catch traffickers of people and contraband without this assult on literally everyone’s privacy to the point of forcing people to patronize banks which then impose the risks of an absurdly large digital footprint of poorly protected data as they discriminate against some people on the basis of birthplace, finance fossil fuels and private prisons, etc.

Considering the broad blanket assult on privacy that worsens as forced banking takes a stranglehold on countless people worldwide, there probably needs to be some scientific research that exposes the extent that these privacy-abusing policies actually impact crime, compared to the loss of freedom of everyone the law claims to serve. We need to see what is being traded for what.

This thought_forge idea is somewhat inspired by Edward Snowden, who said at one point that mass surveillance has /never/ actually led to a terror plot being foiled; that every single terrorist caught has been caught using traditional (targetted) detective work.

The immersion style of language learning essentially entails an instructor who speaks only the target language, not the language you already know. The same way children learn their first language.

Immersion has irrefuted widespread acceptance and respect touted by pretty much everyone as the best way to learn.

I think that needs to be challenged. One of my wise profs once said something like:

You don’t /need/ school. Everything you learn in school can be self-taught and learnt informally the hard way from books and experience. What formal instruction does is accelerates the learning. I am here to organise the information for maximum absorption over time. What you learn here in 4 years would take you a decade to learn in an ad hoc disorganised way…

^ (Paraphrasing from memory). Seems spot-on to me. IMO, immersion is comparable to learning the slow way, by experience. The first language someone learns must be immersion, of course. There is no choice but to learn that the hard way through experience. But then the first language can be used to learn the next.

I was listening to a Brit (possibly Thomas Michael) teaching French on an audio tape. He said (in English) consonants at the end of words are not pronounced, but exceptionally if the consonant is in the word CAREFUL then it is pronounced (the “CaReFuL consonants”). He quickly conveyed a lot of information in a short time because he was able to give an English memory aid. At another moment he said something like: all words ending in TION, TY, ABLE? (I don’t recall all the suffixes) are all French words. Just like that in 1 single sweeping English sentence, I learned thousands of French words. He just needed a minute to give some examples of the French pronounciation (liberty→liber-TAY, revolution→ray-voh-loo-see-own).

In an immersion class that would have been impossible. It would have taken an absurd amount of time playing sherades one word at a time in an immersion class to accomplish the same learning task.

Yes, there are good reasons for immersion. E.g. a gov-administered public French class in a French-speaking region has students with all different mother tongues coming together to learn French in the same classroom. Such classes have no choice but to use immersion style.

But I conjecture that if you have 25 English speakers who want to learn French together, then that group is best served by a teacher who is good (better than fluent) in both languages. Those English speakers have the same uniform advantages and disadvantages that the instruction can account for. E.g. they would all benefit from the vocabulary tip (words ending in TION). They would likely all equally have the same struggle with pronouncing the R’s, and gender of objects. So the instruction can be tailored exploit the language simularities and differences.

I have never met anyone who agrees with me on this. But I think it should be studied (hence the post to !thought_forge@mander.xyz). It would be easy to take two groups of English speakers who don’t know a word of French and teach one group immersion style and the other group without the immersion limitation. Have a race measuring how many hours of instruction and study to reach the same passing level of fluency.