Salamander

  • 10 Posts
  • 180 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: December 19th, 2021
  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Would you buy a Smart Glass in the foreseeable future?
    5·
    3 days ago

    The use-cases that I see advertised are not things that I do in my day-to-day. I usually place my phone on a drawer or leave it in my backpack - I definitely don’t want it on my face.

    So, to me, smart glasses feel like an uncomfortable gimmick at this point. Maybe there is something amazing about them that has not yet clicked with me, but for the time being I don’t see me buying one of these for the foreseeable future.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Did anyone else not even know who Charlie Kirk was!?
    41·
    3 days ago

    I also did not know of him at all. I did know who Ben Shapiro is. This week has been an educational one: I have learned about Nick Fuentes and ‘groypers’, Candace Owens, and that the change my mind meme guy is called Steven Crowder (I first thought it was this guy when I saw the video of Kirk).

    The US political commentator that I do watch some times is Hasan, but not too often. The US lore goes too deep and moves too quickly, hard to keep up.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the most obscure fact you know?
    6·
    6 days ago

    Some of these ‘games’ do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the Valsalva maneuver, where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.

    In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.

    Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.

    So, those ‘games’ can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the most obscure fact you know?
    38·
    6 days ago

    If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.

    Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

    Frog stuck in tonic immobility

    OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

    I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).

    In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

    OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

    Tonic immobility or a state akin to it has been described in children by Pieron (1913). I have recently been able to produce the condition in adult human beings. The technique was brought to my attention by a student in physiology, Mr. W. I. Gregg, who after hearing a lecture on tonic immobility suggested that a state produced by the following form of manhandling which he had seen exhibited as a sort of trick might be essentially the same thing. If one bends forward from the waist through an angle of 90°, places the hands on the abdomen, and after taking a deep breath is violently thrown backwards through 180° by a man on either side, the skeletal muscles contract vigorously and a state of pronounced immobility lasting for some seconds may result. The condition is striking and of especial interest since this type of manipulation (sudden turning into a dorsal position) is the most common one used for producing tonic immobility in vertebrates.

    Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    0·
    8 days ago

    That’s a very interesting resource!

    Actually, the countries where I have been able to purchase anonymous SIM cards are in the list “As of 2021, the following countries do not have mandatory SIM card registration laws”. So, it appears like I just happen to have been lucky and I should not make this as such a general recommendation…

    Funny, about Mexico it says:

    Countries expected to implement mandatory SIM registration in 2022: Philippines, Mexico.

    I can at least confirm that I was not asked for ID when buying SIM cards last year in Mexico.

    I just looked it up and found the proposed law for Mexico on Wikipedia. It was struck down in 2022 as unconstitutional.

    So, then, I really have no anecdotes to say that it is easy in places where it is formally illegal.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    0·
    8 days ago

    I am not sure about France. When I search online, I often find resources stating “Yes, ID is required”, even for the countries where I know that I have bought SIM cards with cash. Well, the SIM is usually free and what I pay for is the top-up code.

    I would imagine (but I’m not sure) that if you try to buy a SIM card at an airport or at an official store from a large telephony provider you are more likely to get asked for an ID. I find them in shops that have signs with the names of smaller MVNOs. Something like what is shown in this image that I found online, where you can see signs of ‘Lyca Mobile’ and ‘Lebara’:

    But, your mileage may vary. Probably some locations are more strict than others.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    0·
    9 days ago

    Depending on where you are travelling to and from, you can often get an anonymous prepaid SIM card. That is what I do: buy one with cash, put it into a MiFi router, and only switch it on when I need internet. That way I stay off the records of whoever else is with me and I am not relying on their identity as a shield. I have not found an eSIM provider that gives me the same level of anonymity, so I have avoided those.

    If you really have to register a SIM with your identity, it depends on the situation. For example, if you buy a SIM in the EU, activate roaming, and then use it in Mexico, the Mexican authorities can’t instantly demand your subscriber info from the EU. On the other hand, if you or your family buy local SIMs while showing ID, then travel together and check in to hotels together, it makes little difference whose SIM is whose. For Mexico specifically, you can walk into an OXXO store, pay cash, and get a prepaid SIM with a data package, no ID required. Many countries have similar cash options so you check ahead of time.

    About whether the worry is justified. The type of surveillance you mention, such as stingrays, requires both strong capability and strong motivation. If a government wanted to, they could stop your entire family at the border before you ever left. But from what you describe, you are just a foreigner who might pass by a protest. That is unlikely to trigger the level of targeting you are thinking of.

    Still, I would not call it “in vain.” Building habits that protect privacy and understanding how information flows is always useful. But if you can get a prepaid SIM anonymously with cash, it is usually a cleaner option than tethering from family.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•When is it time to switch away from youtube?
    0·
    10 days ago

    I like the idea of PeerTube, but I tried running an instance and was unable to sustain the experiment for too long. I made it very open and it got quickly flooded by pirated TV series and spammy and heavy content.

    After that, I had a difficult time at some point finding an instance to host some videos I wanted to upload - and, having had that failed experiment before hand, I can see why the instances that do survive are often those with more stringent filters and less generous with resources.

    So, I am sorry to “chime in about the shortcomings”, but hosting a PeerTube instance can be a demotivating experience. You set up the infrastructure expecting to contribute to a space reminiscent of the old youtube, and you see it filled with spam. The signal-to-noise ratio is just awful and it is expensive. To avoid this, you can be an aggressive gate keeper - but this makes the platform less friendly to people who are looking to find a space to share their original content. Gate keeping is also an additional effort that you need to make. In the end I chose to just shut it off as it was more of a hassle than fun. By comparison, hosting a Lemmy instance is fun, much much cheaper, and little hassle.

    I still haven’t given up on the idea of Peertube, though… I have some video ideas, and when I finally get to making them I plan to make another instance to host only my channel. Then, I would be able to host my own channel using my own infrastructure via a federated network. This use case would work very well for me, and it can probably work for many others. So that is one way of building the Peertube network.

    General permissive video uploads is something that makes YouTube such a powerful platform though, and that is very difficult to replicate.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoLemmy@lemmy.ml•Lemmy community feedback: Should we fetch and combine comments from cross-posts on the post screen? · Issue #3415 · LemmyNet/lemmy-uiEnglish
    5·
    11 days ago

    EDIT: After reading through the Git issue and the other comments in this thread, it is not very clear to me what “combining comments from cross-posts on the post screen” means. I understood it at first to mean that you will pool all comments together and show all of them in all cross-posts, but now I am not so sure. Still, in general terms, I think that mechanisms to share activity with niche communities are good

    I would say yes, there are cases in which I have thought that this would be a nice thing to have. Especially when cross-posting to a smaller niche community.

    I can think of a few potential small issues. For example, cross-posters can edit the body of the message, so you might in some cases end up with comments that seem out of place as they refer to the content specific to a cross-post. You also have the rare case in which the same post might mean different things in different communities.

    But, overall, I see it as beneficial. Quirks can be fine-tuned later on.

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