AernaLingus [any]

@ AernaLingus @hexbear.net

Posts

36
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1102
Joined

4 yr. ago

AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 4d ago

You got this! It's no big deal if you're a bit behind at the start, anyhow—it is a year-long reading group, after all, so you've got plenty of time to catch up. The first few chapters are supposed to be the toughest, so don't let that discourage you—just try to read a bit every day, and you'll get there! I've been doing a half hour here, a half hour there, and I think I should finish chapter one in the next day or two. As soon as I can feel my eyes start to glaze over and notice I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over, I know it's time to take a break and do something else for a bit.

6d ago

Kim Jong-Un - Novo General Megathread for the 8th-14th of January 2025

AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 6d ago

You can seriously learn Hangul in like a few hours, folks, definitely give it a shot! It's an incredibly elegant and logical system for representing sounds; unlike (for example) Japanese kana, which are derived from Chinese characters and thus have no internal logic to their forms (no way to infer that か ka and く ku both start with /k/), Hangul was designed for Korean from the ground up with a linguistic approach, so unaspirated ㄱ /k/ becomes strongly aspirated ㅋ /kʰ/ by adding a stroke, and the form of the character even represents how the tongue is retracted and touching the palate. You can mechanically apply this exact same process to get the alveolars ㄷ/ㅌ (/t/ /tʰ/), and with slightly different strokes the alveolars ㅅ/ㅈ/ㅊ (/s/ /tɕ/ /tɕʰ/; ㅅ represents a tooth) and labials ㅁ/ㅂ/ㅍ (/m/ /p/ /pʰ/; ㅁ represents a mouth). Throw in ㅎ /h/, ㄴ /n/, and ㄹ /l/, plus the doubled consonants ㄸ/ㄲ/ㅆ/ㅉ, and boom, you're done with the consonants!

Even if you never learn the language, it's nice to be able to read menus and signs and stuff. And if you speak Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese, you can start to pick out shared Sinitic vocabulary once you learn the patterns of correspondence:

Korean is much more like Chinese than Japanese in that characters rarely have more than one pronunciation, so the correspondences are more durable.

6d ago

Kim Jong-Un - Novo General Megathread for the 8th-14th of January 2025

AernaLingus [any] @hexbear.net 6d ago

Mega mega THREAD THREAD

7d ago

[GRAPHIC] This is a video of ICE murdering a woman in Minneapolis, directly contradicting the statement by DHS that she was “weaponizing her vehicle”.

https://fair.org/home/nyts-anti-trans-bias-by-the-numbers/

The Times is notorious for spewing anti-trans BS:

As this piece notes:

The third story explained how Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents of trans children for potential "child abuse." Defending its order in court, the state offered a prominent New York Times article by Emily Bazelon (6/15/22; see FAIR.org, 6/23/22) as evidence that gender-affirming care for trans youth is controversial among medical providers. (It is not.)

So yeah, they fucking suck, and that has consequences. If you scroll through FAIR's LGBTQ section, you'll find more detailed analysis of individual pieces the Times has put out.

7d ago

Final Fantasy 9 is more popular overseas than in Japan, says composer Nobuo Uematsu, but the soundtrack is still among his personal favorites. “After all, I'm a medieval otaku” - AUTOMATON WEST

Obligatory ProZD

I would make a more substantive contribution, but the sum total of my Final Fantasy experience is:

Playing a bit of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
Watching a playthrough of most of FFX
Listening to a few of the Piano Collections

"Melodies of Life" slaps, though, and the Piano Collections arrangement is really lovely.

edit: minor spelling mistake fjskslf

7d ago

Das Kapital Reading Group 2026 – Week 1, Jan 4-11 – Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

noooo I'm already behind

not sure I'll manage to finish chapter 1 in time, but hopefully I'll be caught up through chapter 2 by the end of next week's thread. I guess ideally I'd be done with chapter 3 in time for week 3's thread, but that seems like wishful thinking (I do hope to eventually be ready with a comment by the beginning of each week). Also chapter 1 is gonna be the longest slog both because I've heard it's difficult and because I'm reading all the (checks) four separate forewords/prefaces/introductions that are in my edition (I'm using the new Reitter translation). So if I can power through this, I can go the distance!

edit: locked in today and powered through all the prefaces, so I can tackle Chapter 1 tomorrow! Much excite

7d ago

Is NYC’s controversial $9 toll working? The data is in. [yes]

For some reason, after my machine tries to load the first image in the post, it struggles for a bit, then gives up and shows the alt text. Looking at the response, I see:

 json

    
{
    "code": "validate-area",
    "msg": "Too many pixels"
}

Is this a

situation?

...oh damn, that's actually a huge image, 8192 × 5464. Maybe it's running into some hardcoded limits that were set after that incident.

Anyway, hell yeah! Not unexpected, but it's good to see such clear results. Also,

There’s also the question of drivers who, looking to dodge the toll, might reroute through Queens or other neighborhoods outside the zone. The MTA has anticipated that and earmarked $100 million to offset potential air quality impacts in those neighborhoods: funding school air filters near highways and swapping out diesel equipment for electric.

Not the way I expected to get cleaner air to protect kids and teachers from forced exposure to

(and other airborne diseases), but I'll take it! That's not to downplay the severe impact of air pollution on health—there's good data on this, and unsurprisingly it disproportionately affects communities of color. Hopefully this can be leveraged to expand the program across the entire city; I'm sure if any researcher takes the opportunity to document this natural experiment, they'll find improvements in absenteeism and academic achievement—and health, obviously, but evidently that's not much of a motivator for people considering that they've been shoving kids into these petri dishes with reckless abandon.

1w ago

[CW SIDEBAR VIDEOS ARE DISTRESSING] Coconut crab takes popcorn from my hand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod#Exoskeleton

Technically hemolymph, not blood, but more or less (except they also have muscles):

Although all arthropods use muscles attached to the inside of the exoskeleton to flex their limbs, some still use hydraulic pressure to extend them, a system inherited from their pre-arthropod ancestors; for example, all spiders extend their legs hydraulically and can generate pressures up to eight times their resting level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnid_locomotion#Hydraulics

In most arachnids, hydraulic compression acts as the primary means of extension in several of their hinged leg joints, namely the femur–patella joint and tibia–metatarsus joints or second and third leg joints respectively. Instead of blood, hemolymph is used to move nutrients around inside of the arachnid, and has the secondary function of acting as a hydraulic fluid. When compressed by the body of the arachnid, the hemolymph applies compressive force through channels in the limbs that cause them to extend. This motion is then balanced by flexor muscle to retract the leg joints as needed. Due to hydraulics being used for extension, the flexor muscle is able to be significantly larger than would otherwise be possible without impacting size or weight. Measurable core body volume change can occur during periods of higher compression to the legs, as the sinuses of the body contract to achieve pressurization in specific legs. Aside from the normal gait of the arachnid, in some variants, extremely high pressures are used as a means of jumping, propelling rear legs and allowing for much greater and more sudden motion.

1w ago

:trump-ahegao:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-donald-trump-reacts-as-he-speaks-during-the-house-news-photo/2254306906

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-donald-trump-reacts-as-he-speaks-during-the-house-news-photo/2254306455

1w ago

["Bolsonaro is sick again" news] He was taken to hospital for tests after fall, head injury. [Full text inside]

1w ago

What are we, a bunch of Asians?

Holy shit, the comments on the first one are truly godawful...it's all just, "Trump is doing imperialism incompetently—we need a competent imperialist!" Here's one of my "favorites":

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,"--Stephen Miller
Well, this kind of thinking is exactly similar to how the major communist ideologues of the 20th century viewed the world. Almost 100 years ago in 1927, Mao Zedong himself said "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Mao and Miller, saying essentially the same thing 99 years apart. Not sure if Miller is aware of the irony here.

1w ago

How the Copilot hallucinated Christmas

Emphasis mine:

I’m inclined to think [the use of fictional company Relecloud] here points to all these advertised Copilot actions being simulated, but a Microsoft rep insists that’s not the case. Nicci Trovinger, general manager of Windows marketing, tells The Verge, “All Copilot responses are actual responses Copilot gave to the scenarios shown and questions asked at a point in time. Responses were shortened for brevity to fit the length of the creative spot, in line with standard advertising practices.”

"A point in time" could mean literally anything. You could have edited 100 hours of prompting down to 30 seconds and that would still technically be true. Holy fucking shit I hate advertisers :bill-hicks-marketing:

1w ago

Danny Bongos has left the FBI. What next? Back to podcasting? Or a bigger gig?