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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Infintevalence pretty much nailed it

    We’re country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.

    While we’re in driving distance of a good hospital, it’s a drive, not something in town. There’s just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.

    And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you’d need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.

    It’s a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don’t already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.

    It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that’ll move out




  • Sin tar is the usual way, though it’ll sometimes come out more sin tawr, where the au is a bit more drawn out.

    Sin tore is a fairly common one.

    However, sin tar is more common, at least with what I’ve heard in meat space. That’s a fairly limited thing though, since most of the people I have talked to over my fifty years have been fellow southerners. We do tend to use softer vowels in most cases, and tar is softer than tore in the way we tend to do vowels.

    However, with the latin and Greek origins of the word, I’d argue that the tar or tawr would lean closer to that than tore, just because of similar words. When an au is present in medical terminology (which is where almost all of my latin and Greek comes from) it usually gets pronounced aw or ah, not oh.

    But, I never hear anyone pronounce the initial C as a K, and that’s the way it would have been in both of those languages originally. The Greek version is spelled with a K, when written with the usual alphabet rather than Greek. Kentauros.

    Which is an aside.

    Wikipedia lists the two I did as the usual pronunciations, fwiw. And all the dictionaries with audio options are either those two, or slight variations of them, where the au sound is rounder or flatter than the norm.

    Thing is, it’s a word in a living language. Whatever the original English pronunciation may have been, that can change, so supporting a pronunciation is kind of meaningless. What matters is consensus over time, and by location.

    So, a regional accent that sounds more like cent-ur is just as valid in that region, it just isn’t standard. So would any other variant be, if there’s enough people using it to be called a consensus.



  • Nah, the roman system developed from even older systems.

    They’re tally marks, with a twist.

    You take a stick and cut a notch, that’s one. This works up to a point, and that point is 4 or 5, when it becomes unwieldy, and our brains have trouble using the groups of notches.

    So you need a new mark to denote a grouping. The v notch is basically adding a / to the already present \ or | tally mark, denoting that the new symbol represents a group of the previous ones.

    Different methods have 3 base marks, with the fourth being the new one, others do it at five.

    Roman numerals stop at 3 individual marks, and there’s no record of why. But avoiding 4 repeating symbols is consistent with the higher numerals as well.

    Basically, once you hit |||, the next number with be the | subtracted from the next higher digit. It works with IX, as well as XL, XC, etc.

    But, the idea you suggest is sometimes presented as a possible origin for the earlier systems. Thing is, other tally systems that originated separately follow the same basic concepts, without using the same V symbol, but using other cross marks. Not that it matters because nobody knows. Nobody back then passed the information along.

    It does kinda make sense, but the idea that it’s the simplest way to make marks on sticks and stones does too


  • The problem answering this is that there’s an uncrossable barrier involved.

    We can’t, at this point in time, accurately and definitively detect the internal perceptions of animals.

    We can, to a limited degree detect how their brains change during a given events. We can observe behaviors as they exist. And, it is possible to compare those to human equivalents.

    But they are, at the end of the day equivalents. There’s simply no way, at present, to ascribe human concepts to the way they think. The best we can ever say is that animals seem to respond and change in rewards ways that are similar to, or even identical to, the way humans respond to a given stimulus.

    “Cute” is a pretty vague concept to begin with, and it’s a concept that refers to a complex series of internal reactions we have to external stimuli.

    With all of that said, some animals do seem to respond to humans in a similar way we do to animals considered cute by most humans. That’s the best we can do until someone cooks up something that lets us more fully track what’s going on inside an animal’s mind.

    Thing is, mind is a concept in the first place, and it isn’t exactly defined in measurable and totally objective ways as of yet. So, we’d first have to find a way to “read” human minds before we could start to try and compare that to animal minds. So, that some seem to is likely the best answer we’ll have in our lifetimes




  • Yeah, things like tags and the nsfw flag makes sense. It’s a useful tool that doesn’t hurt anyone, and reduces the hassles involved in removing a post just because there were errors in that surface level stuff.

    Now, editing the content, no. Hell no.

    The nsfw flag is the more important one tbh.

    But, tags allow users to search and sort things (or ideally would, no idea what the actual implementation might be). Having consistent tagging for that purpose is a net plus as a user because if mods can change them, then when you search or sort, there’s a higher chance that the results will be consistent. When users pick their own tags and they can’t be changed, results get messy unless a mod removes the post, contacts the user, tells them what tag to use, then watches to make sure they use it when they repost/edit.

    There’s no use for tags other than sorting, searching and filtering. So a mod kinda needs to be able to change them if they’re in place at all






  • It’s mostly an English language forum. But there’s instances that are set up in German, and I wanna say Farsi (don’t hold me to that, I’m going off what someone else said it was). There’s communities that are Spanish and Portuguese based, though I can’t recall if there’s instances in those or not. I’ve seen Cyrillic posts and comments, though I couldn’t tell you anything more than that.

    So, it’s not totally western world, just damn near it.

    There’s a decided lack of Asian presence in years terms of instances, but there are users that have said they’re from japan, korea, and thailand (iirc).

    I’ve yet to run across anyone saying they’re from anywhere in Africa.

    South America, I’m not sure if you count as western or not, but there’s definitely some folks from Brazil, and I wanna say Venezuela? But it’s been a few months since I ran into that conversation, could have been something made me think Venezuela when it was somewhere else.

    But, tbh, lemmy started out as, and still is, a reddit offshoot. Reddit was not only predominantly western, but predominantly american in user base. Lemmy seems a little more diverse than that, and also seems to be shifting at least more European than reddit ever has been.

    I’m pulling all this from memory of seeing people talk about where they’re from, over mostly the last two years, since before the reddit debacle in 23, I maybe used lemmy a handful of times, just to keep track of how it was going.