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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I bought a pair of WHCH720N headphones (Sony’s naming conventions are insane) about a year ago and I love them. They’re pretty basic, but incredibly light—the lightest over ear headphones I’ve ever had and one of the cheapest but still high quality Sony models I’ve found. Sony headphones are usually way too pricey imo, when brands like SoundCore are typically like a quarter of the price with pretty much equal sound quality. But I landed on these are the best compromise between price, comfort, and sound quality. (SoundCore’s are my second choice, but they’re so heavy.)

    It’s tough to find the right headphones that tick all the boxes without being like $500.






  • Bringing AI into redistricting would be a nightmare. AI is not objective, it’s trained on biased datasets and that bias is reinforced by the bias of whomever created it or wants to shape it to their will.

    We already know how to do nonpartisan redistricting, and many states (including CA) already have a nonpartisan committee in charge of it. But since elections are managed by state and local governments, and explicitly not the federal government, it would take something like a constitutional amendment to make it required nationwide. That’s also why states like CA will temporarily use different maps this cycle (if all goes well tomorrow), because CA being fair and TX cheating doesn’t help the nation as a whole reflect its actual population. Might as well force the fairness by cheating like them. It’s a shitty stopgap, but they’ve left us no choice.



  • I can’t say for sure that we’re not, but to me it just comes across as an outlandish concept. Much of our natural world, while often bizarre and strange, can be explained through observation and empirical reasoning. When a concept like universal simulations comes around I usually just land on pragmatism and practicalities: for the theory to be true, so many things that are beyond our comprehension would also have to be true to allow it, and since the simplest explanations are usually true, the simple explanation here is that our reality is what it appears to be (with all the cosmological caveats that kind of thinking entails).


  • I personally don’t believe we’re living in a simulation, though it’s a fascinating thought experiment and I can’t say for certain that we’re not. This article is frankly way too definitive about questions that I don’t think we’re equipped to answer yet, without actually explaining itself.

    The simulation hypothesis was long considered untestable, relegated to philosophy and even science fiction, rather than science. This research brings it firmly into the domain of mathematics and physics, and provides a definitive answer.

    I haven’t read the full paper, but the article about it says the theory is now testable, but doesn’t explain how they tested it to get their “definitive answer.” They also don’t address the fact that their research is based on their current understanding of reality. Usually assertions like this will include something like “as technology progresses, it’s likely that more questions will arise and we’ll have better tools to attempt to answer them.” But nope, it’s just a hubristic “here’s the definitive truth.”

    Also, the generated images are infuriating. Either hire an artist, use public domain media, or just lean on the science and leave out the images. Not everything needs meaningless pictures.



  • Oh geez this hits hard. Very few words on my iPhone show up exactly how I type them. Sometimes, out of frustration, I’ll type a word, see what incorrect letter it thinks I pressed, go back and deliberately type out the word one letter at a time, and it usually still picks the wrong letter or autocorrects to the wrong word. I swear the original iPhone keyboard was better in 2009 than my iPhone 16 Pro in 2025. I hate typing on my iPhone.

    The words in the above paragraph that I had to manually edit or type more than once: show, frustration, incorrect, usually, swear, keyboard, in.





  • I sent in my ballot over the weekend. All my fellow Californians please vote, it takes 30 seconds and a quick walk to the nearest mailbox. And please vote Yes, most of the No campaign is disingenuous and based on misinformation.

    Yes = temporarily switching to a map that favors Democrats, as a counterweight to Republicans already doing the same thing in other states. It’s temporary, the nonpartisan redistricting committee isn’t going anywhere.

    No = closing your eyes, plugging your ears, and pretending like everything is normal and that we aren’t in an existential crisis.



  • Of course we need mass protest, it’s critical for building solidarity and sending messages to those in currently power, but by itself it doesn’t solve the problems. Sites like the one mentioned in the article are kind of a bandaid, sure, but when real peoples’ lives are on the line, and a bandaid donated by the community could save their life, why would you dismiss it out of hand like that? Seems pretty crass to me. Bigger systemic solutions are way better, obviously, but when the current power structure is incapable of providing those solutions, local communities need to come up with their own.

    An effective political movement needs protest to expose the problems and bring people on board, and then the movement needs to be get involved in local and national politics by running for office or working to elect people who share the values of those protesting, to convert that solidarity into political power. More than 7 million people turned out to protest last time. What, specifically, would be different about your full massive protest? How would you organize it differently to be more effective than the no kings protests? And would your new mass protest solve the practical problems the orgs in the article are working to solve on the ground right now?


  • BertramDitore@lemmy.ziptoCoffee@lemmy.worldSpices in Coffee
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    12 days ago

    In many parts of the Middle East and North Africa, coffee often has cardamom either mixed in with the beans or added during brewing. If you like cinnamon in your coffee, you’ll probably like cardamom. But start with a tiny bit, a little goes a long way. The brewing process is also different than methods you may be used to, but is pretty easy to learn. Look up Arabic coffee or qahwa for instructions.


  • Nope, you’ve described it the way I understand it. That’s the only way to get the draft back, which almost never works for me. I’m pretty much never able to find the original post, especially after an app crash. So when I come back to the app and see that recovery message, I’m pissed because it tells me the text is saved but it really isn’t if I can’t find it.

    I posted about this a month ago, hopefully the devs will catch on that we really need a drafts folder or something.