Well said. In many cases we’re riding the highest peak of the DK-curve, and you can tell by the massive aura of confidence radiating from some comments.
Reading the Covid discussions was absolutely wild. Suddenly we got all these people who seemed to know things about epidemiology, virology, biochemistry, statistics and what not. Plenty of confidence, little bit of information, but hardly any knowledge, let alone humility.
You’re absolutely right about learning stuff online. Once I bought a mango, but had no idea how to cut it without making a huge mess. Well, there are also lots of videos about it, so now I know what I’m doing with delicious mangos.
Facebook and Xitter are very user centric platforms where you care about the person more than the topic. Meanwhile, in (formerly) Reddit and (currently) Lemmy I rarely even look at the usernames. I care about the topic, and that’s why I’m here in this thread.
One of the early utopias was that people would no longer debate about things because the internet would bring people together and provide them with information about anything and everything… well then algorithms and social media happened, and now we’re stuck with echo chambers of anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.
Other than that, it’s been nice in many ways nobody could have anticipated back then.
Next he should destroy Meta and Amazon. The internet would become a better place.
Rookie numbers! I’m sure he can push the value below zero if he just tries hard enough.
Long ago, I saw a documentary series about dictators, and it had some interesting things to say about the source of inspiration Hitler had. You see, Benito Mussolini transformed Italy and wrote the book on how to build a fascist country. Hitler took those ideas and started applying them on a larger scale.
That is just so bizarre. Well, prepare for a severe culture shock if you ever visit the Nordic countries.
Speaking of politics, occasionally I hear people say that what we call “center” in here would be considered 100% communism in America. Likewise, right wing should probably be translated to something like the liberal left in American terms.
That title is actually on Wikipedia too, so it’s seems like an established translation. I think this is where Snoke (in Force Awakens) got his title.
Much more exciting than just moving the decimal point when doing conversions, isn’t it. You never know if you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way by multiplying with 14 instead of 12. So much fun.
Here’s my favorite part.
“In addition, the conversions were sometimes not even self-consistent and applied completely arbitrary. The 3½-inch floppy disk for example, which was marketed as “1.44 MB”, was actually not 1.44 MB and also not 1.44 MiB. The size of the double-sided, high-density 3½-inch floppy was 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 160 tracks, that’s 512×18×16 = 1’474’560 bytes. To get to “1.44” you must first divide 1’474’560 by 1024 (“bEcAuSE BiNaRY obviously”) to get 1440 and then divide by 1000 for perfect inconsistency, because dividing by 1024 again would get you an ugly number and we definitely don’t want that. We finally end up with “1.44”. Now let’s add “MB” because why the heck not. We already abused those units so much it’s not like they still mean anything and it’s “close enough” anyways. By the way, that “close enough” excuse never “worked when I was in school but what would I know compared to the computer “scientists” back then.
When things get that messy, numbers don’t even mean anything any more. Might as well just label the products using entirely qualitative terms like “big” or “bigger”.
It’s large emotional. Many people long for the “good old days”™, fail to appreciate what’s here now and fear the uncertain future.