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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023





  • you probably already know this, but for anyone else:

    The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.

    In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.

    so it’s a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.

    highly recommend all of the other books!

    they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!

    what’s best about the series is, as you’ve already explained, the “hard-fantasy/sci-fi” approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.

    best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn’t really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)

    also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it’s december?



  • 9bananas@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    2 months ago

    eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse…

    they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum…of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible “last message first” sorting, and terrible UI that doesn’t do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at…

    so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it’s not an exception…


  • 9bananas@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    2 months ago

    you shouldn’t use it because it’s a black hole for information.

    anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.

    when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.

    communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.

    think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.

    so many communities have already just… disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.

    that’s why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.

    it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.

    it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can’t show you the contents, so you don’t even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they’ve already been answered, and on and on the list goes.

    discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!

    there’s a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!

    so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don’t talk to each other, or don’t even realize they exist at all!

    and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque “search” and “discover” algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.

    it’s top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.

    discord is the bane of online social groups!

    and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there’s no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!


  • all of the words you listed that use a soft g are loanwords from other languages (pretty sure they’re all french) soooo…yeah. no wonder those have different pronunciation.

    when you look at anglo-saxon words the difference becomes clear:

    • gift
    • graveyard
    • ground
    • gay

    all hard g’s.

    mixing up languages is the common denominator here.

    the G in GIF stands for graphical, neither english nor french in origin, hence the confusion about pronunciation.

    alternatively; English is a terrible mess, and the only “correct” pronunciation is reached through general consensus. if the majority pronounces something a certain way, that’s how it should be pronounced.



  • the TSA is not “not perfect”; they’re a joke.

    it’s pure theater. they have basically no ability to detect actual weapons at all, hence why it’s a common problem when passengers arrive abroad only to find out they accidentally carried loose ammunition across borders.

    there’s a huge difference between “not quite perfect” and “completely and utterly useless waste of time, money, and resources”, the latter of which describes the TSA.

    IF they actually did anything useful at all, then fine, you have a point. but they don’t, which is why people are disagreeing with you.

    because in principle you’re right, that security is required and should be taken seriously…but the TSA isn’t actually providing security. they’re providing the appearance of security.


  • this is not true.

    it entirely depends on the specific application.

    there is no OS-level, standardized, dynamic allocation of RAM (definitely not on windows, i assume it’s the same for OSX).

    this is because most programming languages handle RAM allocation within the individual program, so the OS can’t allocate RAM however it wants.

    the OS could put processes to “sleep”, but that’s basically just the previously mentioned swap memory and leads to HD degradation and poor performance/hiccups, which is why it’s not used much…

    so, no.

    RAM is usually NOT dynamically allocated by the OS.

    it CAN be dynamically allocated by individual programs, IF they are written in a way that supports dynamic allocation of RAM, which some languages do well, others not so much…

    it’s certainly not universally true.

    also, what you describe when saying:

    Any modern OS will allocate RAM as necessary. If another application needs, it will allocate some to it.

    …is literally swap. that’s exactly what the previous user said.

    and swap is not the same as “allocating RAM when a program needs it”, instead it’s the OS going “oh shit! I’m out of RAM and need more NOW, or I’m going to crash! better be safe and steal some memory from disk!”

    what happens is:

    the OS runs out of RAM and needs more, so it marks a portion of the next best HD as swap-RAM and starts using that instead.

    HDs are not built for this use case, so whichever processes use the swap space become slooooooow and responsiveness suffers greatly.

    on top of that, memory of any kind is built for a certain amount of read/write operations. this is also considered the “lifespan” of a memory component.

    RAM is built for a LOT of (very fast) R/W operations.

    hard drives are NOT built for that.

    RAM has at least an order of magnitude more R/W ops going on than a hard drive, so when a computer uses swap excessively, instead of as very last resort as intended, it leads to a vastly shortened lifespan of the disk.

    for an example of a VERY stupid, VERY poor implementation of this behavior, look up the apple M1’s rapid SSD degradation.

    short summary:

    apple only put 8GB of RAM into the first gen M1’s, which made the OS use swap memory almost continuously, which wore out the hard drive MUCH faster than expected.

    …and since the HD is soldered onto the Mainboard, that completely bricks the device in about half a year/year, depending on usage.

    TL;DR: you’re categorically and objectively wrong about this. sorry :/

    hope you found this explanation helpful tho!