Systems Engineer and Configuration
Management Analyst.

Postgrad degree is in computer science/cybersecurity, but my undergraduate is in archaeology. Someday, maybe, I’ll merge the two fields professionally!

I love true science fiction, as well as all things aviation, outer space, and NASA-related.

Also, Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip of all time! Check it out ;)

  • 36 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m not sure why that’s a conceptual hurdle. Electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light spectrum, is one of the primary methods in which we gather data about and interpret the universe. To say that the matter is “dark” is to say that it’s not detectable on the electromagnetic spectrum to us as we know it.

    It’s not an uncommon turn of phrase, it’s the same reasoning for the colloquial term “going dark” regarding radio communication silence.

    To say that it’s “invisible” or “clear” would imply the existence of some property causing it to be so. This would also imply the presence of interpretable data in order to term it as such, when in truth none exists. You could perhaps say “unknown” but then that’s truly arbitrary, “dark” at least implies the opposite of “light”, i.e. detectable and serves a conjectural purpose in that sense.









  • This is also how it works in Connecticut. While it may not be perfect, I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. It has the effect of a being a progressive social policy this way in that it is available for those who don’t already have it. Someday it like it to be carte blanche to everyone, but states doing this way is a solid start.


  • @marass

    You could also say that women who are not married by 30 have other priorities and marriage isn’t one of them. There seems to be a saturation point for each generation after which the uptick slows to a trickle. You could make the argument that fewer women in each successive generation are making marriage a “must” in life.

    I would bet you this data would be inverted for women with a college degree by given age, i.e. younger generations are achieving higher levels of education by 30, but it likely levels off gradually as well since not everyone attends college.





  • This is a fair question that is worth discussing. The short answer, is because that generally requires money and resources long-term that are not already available or allocated during the course of the dig.

    Covering exposed features is the only way to “protect” them from the elements, and from the public. Furthermore, it also leaves open the possibility of uncovering them in the future for additional research or examination. This is actually a common practice in archaeology, much more than people realize.

    Which bring us to the fact that the purpose of archaeology as a science, is not to protect every uncovered feature or even every discovered artefact, but to use these materials and their placement in situ to gain knowledge and insight into the human past. As such, the material objects are often of little value unless entirely unique, no museum or archive has endless storage for every object recovered. In fact, artefacts discovered on digs that cannot be added to some collection and are of a known factor, are usually discarded en masse and reburied.

    It’s possible that what you’re suggesting could happen in the future, but that would require planning, funding, and time for it to happen. Without covering up the site now to protect it the way it has been found, there wouldn’t be time for any future planning or funding to even allow that decision.
















  • Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)

    I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.

    And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?

    Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the top of my head lol.

    Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?

    I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.

    Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.


  • I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.

    The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.



  • Whats wrong with Dutch posts?

    I actually like seeing the posts in other languages. Imagine what using traditional social media like Reddit was like for other countries? Why are English speakers suddenly unable to cope when the tables are turned? (In general, not saying that’s you!)

    Personally, I’d love some kind of built-in translation options. Tag the different language but allow an auto-translate user setting so everything can be switched to one’s native language.

    I love the idea of interacting with the parts of the world, or speakers, that don’t participate in English.



  • On your first line, agreed 100%.

    I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.

    I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.

    And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).