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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mljackpot
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    11 months ago

    That takes something from being completely unreasonable to be understandable.

    Why would taxing a gross income of above a billion US$ by ~66% be “completely unreasonable”? Imo taxes for such incomes should generally be higher if anything.



  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlThe only political map I need
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    1 year ago

    As a non colorblind person, I would like to understand how this image could have been modified to include our colorblind brethren.

    In general it is a good idea to use colour gradients that monotonically increase (or decrease) in brightness in addition to (or instead of) hue (see here for an in-depth comparison of different colour maps. It’s from a Python package, but it shows some interesting plots comparing different colour maps when it comes to brightness vs. hue). This isn’t just useful for colour blind people, but also helpful when printing in black-and-white.

    If you absolutely have to use a diverging colour map, you might reach most people by using blue as a major component of one, but only one of the two branches (the map in the OP uses blue as a major component of both branches, which is why red/green colour blind people can have a problem with it). That way most colour blind people should be able to distinguish the branches, since blue colour blindness (Tritanopia/Tritanomaly) is much rarer than red (Protanopia/Protanomaly) or green (Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly) colour blindness.

    Apart from that it is also possible to mark information visually in other ways than by colour, e.g. by shapes and patterns, like dotted or dashed lines for line graphs, shaded or dotted areas for bar and area graphs, or different geometric shapes like crosses, diamonds, and circles when plotting individual data points, but that is probably more useful when different sets of data are plotted in the same graph.



  • It’s from a longer quote in “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” about the language Haskell:

    1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”

    Some other languages like e.g. Rust also use monads. The point I was trying to make humorously was that many programming languages sometimes do use math concepts, sometimes even very abstract maths (like monads), and while it’s not maths per se, programming and computer science in general can have quite a bit to do with maths sometimes.



  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
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    1 year ago

    i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us

    Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don’t get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn’t find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.


  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
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    1 year ago

    No, it says

    100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate

    both in the general intro and in the “Extinction rate” section, and

    10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth

    in the “Extinction rate” section (both verbatim quotes from its first sentence).


  • lesser function

    Putting aside that this might be difficult to quantify, why do you think it matters? There are some groups of humans who exhibit severely diminished mental capacities compared to the average human (e.g. babies, severely mentally handicapped people, people in a coma, etc.). Would it be okay to eat them? Because I’m fairly confident that for whatever measure to compare cognitive functions you could come up with, we would be able to find at least some humans who perform worse on them than the average pig, for example.

    different species

    Why does this matter? As a hypothetical thought experiment, do you think it would be morally justified for us to eat aliens who are biologically very different from us but of comparative intelligence (or higher)? Or for them to eat us?

    it’s the easiest, most accessible, most fulfilling, and healthiest way

    Apart from the “fulfilling”, which is arguably subjective, I don’t think the rest is true. At least I don’t see how not eating meat would be difficult or “inaccessible” in a significant way, and considering the last point studies regularly show that vegetarians and vegans are, on average, slightly healthier than other people if anything (which might be in part just correlation, but it does contradict your claim of meat being the “healthiest” way to get nutrients).

    Fuck Tyson though, those bastards can go to hell.

    On this we can definitely agree.


  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
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    1 year ago

    they are not sentient

    Science disagrees with you here. Most of the animals being used for meat are in fact not just sentient, but also conscious:

    Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

    – From the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness


  • nature intended

    Nature doesn’t intend anything, it simply is. We are, in the grand scheme of things, not separate from nature, and in this sense everything we do is natural. If you’re using “natural” to distinguish things from the results of human civilization, then eating animal products stemming from animal agriculture is just as “unnatural” as supplements, as both are products of civilization.







  • 4ce@lemm.eetoxkcd@lemmy.worldActual Progress - 2797
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    1 year ago

    Depending on what exactly you mean, you might be onto something referred to as structural realism in the philosophy of science. Citing from the intro of the wikipedia article:

    In the philosophy of science, structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves.

    For those who want to read more, there is also an article on the SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and books like “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized” by James Ladyman and Don Ross (2007) or “How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?” by Sunny Auyang (1995).

    In particular, your “nothing exists” reminds me of this in “Every Thing Must Go”:

    a first approximation to our metaphysics is: ‘There are no things. Structure is all there is.’



  • Agreed. I’ve no idea what u/vegantomato@lemmy.world is talking about. I’m pretty sure I’ve personally never seen it used as a slur. What I’ve seen is people not knowing what it means and assuming it’s one of them there evil genders, so maybe some people think it’s meant as a slur, but imo that says more about their ignorance than the word itself.