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Joined 28 days ago
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Cake day: February 4th, 2026

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  • I think we should reframe the question.

    How can we protect adults from the harms of not being able to post meaningless bullshit anonymously to online anonymous strangers we never agree with without sacrificing everyones children’s mental stability?

    Maybe put childrens rights before adult rights. Adults had fun and got along fine without social media back before the 2000’s. I refuse to believe that we are no longer capable of that. Especially if it means kids get to to go back to using the internet as a resource for homework and playing outside and using their own imaginations. Adults too.


  • Ok, so, you responded with anecdotal evidence to someone who said they think tablets are a failure, which I replied to with my own anecdotal evidence. At no point did I say I agree with tablets being a failure. I was just countering your anecdote with my own. You came back at me in a condescending manner. I’m allowed to post my personal observations without being treated like a stone age moron who has never heard of a surface or tablets. So I replied in kind.

    You can argue all you want, but thats not going to change the statement, my initial statement “I dont know anyone with a tablet, except for one”, which is all I said.

    Personally I think laptops are great for work, programming dealing with 200 emails, having 45 tabs open, and all bloody office apps across two screens at same time, but tablets, great with a cat on the lap on the sofa. Original marketing hype was that anything you can do on desktop you will be able to do on tablet. It’s just not true. And reality. They just smartphones with bigger screens. So from a certain pov, they can be considered a failure. Which in my world, is true.



  • So I have a contentious one. Quantum computers. (I am actually a physicist, and specialised in qunatum back in uni days, but now work mainly in in medical and nuclear physics.)
    Most of the “working”: quantum computers are experiments where the outcome has already been decided and the factoring they do can be performed on 8 bit computers or even a dog.
    https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf “Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an
    8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog”
    This paper is a hilarious explanation of the tricks being pulled to get published. But then again, it is a nascent technology, and like fusion, I believe it will one day be a world changing technology, but in it’s current state is a failure on account of the bullshittery being published. Then again such publications are still useful in the grand scheme of developing the technology, hence why the article I cited is good humoured but still making the point that we need to improve our standards. Plus who doesnt like it when an article includes dogs.
    Anyway, my point is, some technologies will be constant failures, but that doesn’t mean we should stop.
    A cure for cancer is a perfect example. Research has been going on for a century and cumulatively amassed 100s of billions of dollars of funding. It has failed constantly to find a cure, but our understanding of the disease, treatment, how to conduct research, and prevention have all massively increased.










  • Its hard to choose, interlingua, esperanto, lingwa de planeta, ido, uropi, lingua franca nova.
    Personally I think its better to develop an international sign language.
    It’s much easier to learn as you dont need to learn new spellings or alphabets (the sign for “a” can also be greek alpha for instance), or germanic or slavic or latin roots, it is only actions added to your own local word, so literally verbal monoglots can speak to any other monoglot. No matter how thick their accent is.
    Plus it would greatly expand the deaf communities international reach, would not exclude the deaf, and I like the idea of children learning an international auxiliary language that can also help the hard of hearing.
    And if you’ve ever been in a loud bar or nightclub or restaurant in a foreign country in europe it would make ordering much easier. Obviously unfortunately it does somewhat exclude disabled people with reduced mobility and wouldn’t work on the phone, but we all have videocalls now and we shouldn’t be on the phone while driving anyway. Also it’s quite fun. I’ve started in French Sign Language (Elix app on ios app store) and am pushing to have lessons for my colleagues as we work in medical training and I think its nuts its not offered let alone encouraged or compulsory.

    So I say we should develop Euro Sign Language.

    I mean we all use the middle finger already, lets expand on that.



  • In that case read Lingua Latina per se Illustrata by Hans Orberg. I now read quite well in latin thanks to his self teach books, but theyre really interesting - they teach using the natural method… ie there is no english or french or anything - the entire book is in latin. The first lines are :

    Roma in Italia est.
    Italia in Europa est.
    Italia et Francia in Europa sunt.

    And then you have to figure out (with the help of cryptic annotations) that est (is) is singular and sunt (are) is plural. No going back to your own language, no phrases. By the end of the first chapter you are beginning to decline nouns and adjectives. Puella pulchra est, Puellae pulchrae sunt. And you have no idea you are doing it. No boring rote learning of declensions, its like you’re learning as you would as a child.

    And now I can mostly understand reading romance languages I don’t know well(romanian, spanish, etc) thanks to learning latin (Also, I am a fluent french speaker) and other people have copied his method into loads of languages so I collected lots of natural method books for german and italian etc.