Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 4 Posts
  • 329 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I agree with the core argument - we need to focus more on communities (as “groups of people sharing something”).

    Not talking about the Fediverse

    This will become increasingly more viable over time, as we [people already in the Fediverse] establish and nurture more communities. For now, however, I think a lot of recs still need to be about the Fediverse itself - because it’s how you show people “you don’t need to subject yourself to the whims of a Nazi billionaire or the greedy pigboy aping him”.

    Not talking about apps

    I think it’s important to be aware of a few options, and be able to answer questions about apps, but I fully agree we shouldn’t advertise the Fediverse based on apps. Specially since you can always check the content without one, even from a phone.

    Smaller and focused instances

    Yup, I agree. It’s better for two reasons: more attractive to newbies + it keeps the Fediverse decentralised.

    General purpose instances have some reason to exist, as not everything “fits” into neat boxes. But I think this will change as the Fediverse gets more mature, too; people eventually migrate from the general purpose instances to more specific ones, as they find their own homes here.

    A manga panel from Junji Ito's The Enigma of Amigara Fault. In it a person enters a human-shaped crevice, while saying "this is my hole! it was made for me!". Both the face of the person entering the crevice and the crevice itself have been edited to show the Lemmy logo instead.



  • Perhaps the relative amount of all-or-nothing folks is different, but you’re right - they’re here too. And everywhere in the internet.

    In fact, I have a hypothesis that four donkeymen are to blame for most social media woes:

    1. Decontextualisation - when some info or reasoning is present in the context, disregard it.
    2. Assumption - when some info or reasoning is absent from the text, make the opposite up.
    3. Oversimplification - when it’s too much info or reasoning, disregard even critical bits.
    4. Genetic fallacy - when the info or reasoning comes from a specific source, automatically label it true or false.

    The all-or-nothing folks sit squarely at #3; for them gradients - like “Lemmy has some shit, Reddit has more shit, thus Lemmy is less worse than Reddit” - are hateful, too much info, too “hard”, too “I don’t understand, I’m so confused…”. It’s simpler to say “Lemmy has shit, Reddit has shit, both equal, EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!!1ONE”.






  • I was going to explain stuff, but given I’m verbose as fuck, it’s simply easier to link Wikipedia. A few highlights:

    sees 10 distinct colors looking at a rainbow, whereas the rest of us see only five.

    The number of distinct colours you see in the rainbow isn’t just dependent on your colour vision. I have an in-depth explanation here (up to the traffic light), but to keep it short: what you consider “distinct colours” or “hues of the same colour” is largely culture-dependent.

    Plus it depends on the rainbow itself; example here

    You’re likely to distinguish way more colours for the inner rainbow than the outer one. (For me it’s six vs. three)

    “A true tetrachromat has another type of cone in between the red and green — somewhere in the orange range — and its 100 shades theoretically would allow her to see 100 million different colors.”

    Emphasis mine. While tetrachromats are expected to have a fourth type of cone between the red and green, people with cones elsewhere wouldn’t magically become “false” tetrachromats.

    Unfortunately, in this day and age it would likely be very frustrating, especially since most tetrachromats are likely unaware of their unique abilities.

    This was written in 2001. Say hello to 2025. LEDs make this trivial - because they allow you to reliably produce light in narrow wavelengths. For example, a mix of 620nm (red) and 530nm (green) lights would be completely different from 570nm (yellow) light, even if for trichromats they’re the same type of yellow.

    To a tetrachromat, television and photography would fail to reproduce colours correctly.

    I think a good equivalent would be a TV without one of the colour channels… say, if the TV is missing the green channel it shows purple, green and grey all the same. For tetrachromats all TVs would be like this, since they’d be missing the fourth colour channel.


    Further genetic info: humans encode colour vision into the chromosomes 7 (blue opsin) and X (red and green opsins). At least in theory you could have a mutation in one of those three genes, that makes the associated cone cells absorb light in a different wavelength; and, if the person has both the mutant and ancestral alleles of the gene, at the same time, they would be tetrachromat.

    In practice this means that tetrachromacy among men is possible, but you’re far more likely to find it among women.