@newt @Paradox it's still wild to me that the same software community, that learned a long time ago how hard-coding things that should be customisable is a bad idea, still has a lot of people insisting to hard-code the visual width of indentation by using spaces instead of tabs or another character that semantically represents a single level of indent.
Because fuck different people with different monitors, "thou shalt use 3 spaces for indentation because I say so".
⚠️ TIL
If you use #Microsoft #Outlook, it scans all of your arriving #email and sends the URLs to #Bing for indexing.
😬 #infosec
(Yeah, yeah, I know that the structure of its leg bones doesn't really fit that and the paleobiologists analysing T. Rex remains wouldn't have missed the required massive tendon attachment points and other features required for efficiently absorbing landing shocks and transforming them into springy jumps. But it's too fun of a mental image to pass up.)
The body / fore limb / hind limb / tail proportions and the supposed posture of the T. Rex are very suspiciously similar to those of hopping animals like kangaroos or hopping mice.
The hopping style of movement tends to evolve in land animals that have to efficiently travel relatively large distances between spots where food and/or water can be found, which is why it's most prevalent in arid climates.
The T. Rex was a scavenger specialised in feeding on corpses of other large dinosaurs, which are scarce and usually far in-between by nature.
thump. thump. thump. thump. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
@Stellar kek
@it_meirl_bot 64! = 1.2688693219e+89
Damn
@freeschool it's honestly a needlessly elaborate shitpost I woke up inspired to write for no particular reason.
Although the idea of mapping the political compass on a sphere instead of a plane due to aforementioned increasing similarities between extremes was appealing to me for a long time. At some point I even had a serious plan to implement a web app that would allow one to map political compass positions onto different weird shapes (inspired either by that idea or the meme with political toroid), but laziness got the best of me lol
Afterthought: if I understand the involved geometry correctly, this should work with all n-dimensional "compasses", such as the 4D "8values", creating n+1-spheres. This then poses the question if the additional axis (let's call it aa) will retain its characteristics in those cases or will possibly differing ways the different scalars influence the final retardation of the resulting political stance vector simply increase the noise and strip aa of any meaning other than "distance from neutral".
This then suggests that the political spectrum resembles less of a 2D map and more of a surface of a 3D sphere, with the 2D representation we call a political compass being an attempt to project it onto a plane. But, this reveals not only the spherical shape, but also an existence of a third dimension, the axis of which appears to run through the centrist (neutral) pole, through the geometrical center of the sphere and the opposite pole of beliefs exactly opposite in every possible aspect to those at the centrist pole.
By cross-referencing the political beliefs found at different "longitudes" of the sphere (different quarters of the compass) but the same "latitude" and therefore the same position relative to the aforementioned third axis we can find the common traits and attempt to characterise its meaning.
I propose to define said axis as the factor of "approximate retardation". Interestingly, its neutral point appears to be located neither at the center of the sphere nor the centrist pole, but rather lost in the noise somewhere between them.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
If you ever indulged in the wonderful way to irreversibly waste time and lose faith in humanity in the process that is political discussion, especially on the Internet, you have probably noticed that from some degree of extremism onwards, its different kinds appear to stop ideologically diverging from each other and instead curve around and grow more similar, coming astonishingly close at the very extremes to the point of resembling something akin to a horseshoe shape; with some "wonderful" stances such as national socialism seeming to bridge the gap between two opposite ends of extremism and creating a whole new level of awful that takes the worst parts from both.
Using the popular political compass model which presents the political spectrum as a 2-dimensional Cartesian space described by two axis, economic left-right and lib-auth, and political beliefs of an actor as a vector pointing outwards from the 0 point which represents either some status quo or an arbitrary point considered the ultimate neutral center, we can start to see hints why. As political position presented in this way is essentially a divergence from the beliefs considered neutral, at some point the variety of ways to diverge simply starts to run out, leaving more and more limited options to go further, and forcing people of wildly different approaches to take increasingly similar paths.
The inability of children to be independent in North America really messes them up. Suburban kids have high rates of anxiety, loneliness, and depression. They’re extremely risk averse. Because they’re not given the opportunity to grow into their independence, they struggle a lot with transition from childhood to adulthood.
— Knollock
Software developer, open-source enthusiast, wannabe software architect. I like learning and comparing different technologies. Also general STEM nerd.