Giver of skulls

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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • There are different translations for this very reason. Very few people can read the original Hebrew and Greek originals, let alone understand the classical poetic customs.

    It’s not exactly written to be read easily, either, large parts of it were written using text complicated even for the native speakers back in the time.

    There are plenty of mistakes in the translation, the funniest one being the translation mentioning unicorns, and some of them try to hide the sea monsters from the old testament and use flowery language to talk around the vile things described on the old stories.


  • I do like the concept of a “politics-free” sporting event, but then those events need to actually be free of politics. That makes things like partially unrecognised countries (Palestine, Taiwan, South Ossetia, Sealand) very difficult, though, so you’d end up with tons of micronations and disputed areas in the line-up, which immediately becomes politics again.

    However, I don’t think the IOC is as neutral as they claim. Belarus being excluded for “invading during the Olympic ceasefire” or whatever they claimed was just a political move.

    If you’re trying to be free of politics, you’ll have to stay free of politics every time. It’s all or nothing.

    In that regard, I sort of respect the IOC for disciplining athletes that refused to compete with Israeli/Russian athletes. I can’t fault the athletes themselves, but at least the organisation seems to stick to its guns most of the time.

    Honestly, I think I’d prefer it if there were no flags involved at all.


  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldOlympics
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    I agree with the sentiment. Israel should not be permitted to be part of the Olympics, their athletes should only be allowed to compete under the neutral flag, like the Russian and Belarussian athletes. Or, alternatively, if the IOC decides to go “no politics at the Olympics”, Russia and Belarus should be permitted to compete again.

    But going the extra mile to throw in a cartoonish evil smile and adding a random “USA” emblem? That’s kind of cringe. It’s detrimental to the message it’s trying to convey, unless I misunderstood the message, in which case it’s just dumb.

    Edit: forgot that Russia also got banned for a doping scandal. That’s separate from the war, of course.


  • It kind of depends on how much of your body is densely packed fat or muscle, but in a still pool I’ve never managed to float in a way that didn’t at least let me float with my mouth above the water.

    I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go into the deep end of a pool without at least basic swimming skills, but if you can manage to remain calm, you can keep yourself from drowning pretty well, at least until help arrives.

    If you can swim and want to try this out, please try not to look like a drowning person, or you’ll end up being dragged out of the water by a lifeguard (or at least get called out). The human body has an instinctive drowning response that doesn’t look at all like drowning people in the movies, and keeping your head just above the water can easily make you look like a drowning victim if you’ve got your arms side to side.


  • While it seems rather obvious that inhaling carcinogenic fumes is bad for your health, I’ve never really found a study that shows harm by second hand smoke as serious as the harm of smoking itself, to be honest. I don’t think the damage second hand smoking does to the general population’s health is quite as bad as direct smoking is.

    Second hand smoking is bad, but it’s orders of magnitude less dangerous than sucking the carcinogens straight out of a burning cigarette according to the papers I’ve scanned through. It’ll increase the healthcare cost a few percent, but it’s not as significant across the entire population as you’d think looking at the individual risks.

    If we can end smoking, we’ll end secondhand smoking for free. Plus, places and people just smell nicer in general.





  • Using modern technology, you can write a C Windows application that runs on Wine that runs on Linux that runs on QEMU running on WASM inside a web browser running on macOS that runs on a virtual machine controlled by a Linux hypervisor. Even the individual instructions sent to the CPU are decoded by a layer of software that rewrites and reorders them inside the CPU. The CPU that may very well contain a smaller Pentium CPU running Minix to maintain operation of the rest of the CPU.

    Software lunacy has made low/high-level programming languages obsolete. Everything can be distilled into Javascript runtimes, nothing is a real programming language anymore.


  • Tobacco execs generally don’t like the 400% tax.

    I know the tobacco industry has pushed the “smokers make the government money” narrative for decades, but since a few years it’s actually true. Mostly because the healthcare system is collapsing under high demand and retiring boomers and gen X will leave the country with a disproportionate amount of people needing care versus people working to provide/pay for care. Important surgeries can already take years to be scheduled and that’s only going to get worse the coming years.

    This isn’t the “thank the tax payer for paying for themselves”, it’s yet another symptom of decades of terrible decisions and putting off necessary reforms to deal with the demographic changes.

    Also, in general, “at least they don’t cost us money” isn’t a good defence in general for maintaining a system getting people addicted to huffing cancerous fumes. Even if taxes brought in double the money it costs to care for a cancered up smoker, we should still strive for a smoke-free society. That includes huffing other cancerous fumes, such as vapes and weed smoke.


  • Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.

    People need help getting off their addiction to give them a better life. Money isn’t really an issue. Turns out raising taxes for addicts, you can make a lot of money as a government!

    I’m 100% for abolishing smoking. I particularly like the cut-off point approach, just stop people who turn 18 after a certain point from buying tabacco. This will slowly weed out the smoking habit, and in a couple of decades smoking will be seen as something old people and maybe foreigners do.




  • We’re on (a community on ML) right now, and the incident OP is talking about took place on ML.

    In my experience ML is the biggest server where I notice the political influence on moderation. There are a few bigger servers in terms of accounts and posts, but I rarely notice the influences outside of overtly political communities.

    Maybe servers like .world just aligns better with my own political biases, who knows. I just find myself disagreeing with moderator choices on ML more often, like in the choice of moderation OP mentioned in the opening post.

    It’s your server and I’m grateful you’re taking the time and effort to help moderate it, especially as it’s done next to all of the work you do on the Lemmy project itself. However, I feel like communities that occasionally attract entertaining shitposts just aren’t suitable for servers with values this strong.



  • Politically oriented moderation is why I think it’s a shame so many popular communities are on .ml. It’s not like other Lemmy servers don’t have that problem (i.e. Beehaw community moderators being anti-Israel enough that they end up posting fake news).

    I don’t mind servers being moderated to match the team’s political ideals, the freedom to set up servers is one of the main advantages of a federated community after all, but when it comes to communities unrelated to news or world politics, it can be annoying.

    I think it’s the result of Lemmy being too small to gain all the benefits of federated social media, as there aren’t enough moderators and admins willing to take on the task.


  • The Windows ordeal was definitely a fuck-up of their testing pipeline, and no doubt has something to do with the mass layoffs earlier this year. I’m sure they’ll be sued into oblivion (though I wonder what making this company go bankrupt or extracting the money out of it through lawsuits will do to all the businesses that currently have it deployed).

    The channel file wasn’t entirely zeroes, not for every customer at least. The code pages that were mapped as callbacks were empty or garbled, but not the entire file (see this thread, for instance).

    However, society shouldn’t crumble because of something like this. It shows how fragile our critical infrastructure really is. I don’t care about airlines and such, but 911 shouldn’t go down because of CrowdStrike or even because of Windows. Even airlines should’ve been able to fly some planes, it’s not like Boeings run Windows.


  • The automatic update part was akin to virus definitions and triggered a bug in code released long before that. Not auto-updating your antivirus software would put a pretty high tax on the IT team as those updates can get released multiple times a day (and during weekends). I agree on not auto updating text editors and such, but there are types of software that need updates quickly and often.

    Supply chain attacks can always work, but this shows how ill-prepared companies are for their systems failing on a scale like this. The fix itself is maybe a minute or two per device if you use Microsoft’s dedicated repair tool, maybe even less if you use that thing with PXE boot, but we’re still weeks away from fixing the damage everywhere.



  • based on the costs of lenacapavir’s ingredients and manufacturing, and allowing for 30% profit

    But that’s not how medicine development works, though. Drug companies will sink hundreds of millions or even billions into drugs, risking throwing it all away when it turns out the drug doesn’t work. They need return on investment at the very least. They’re still running trials the comic five or six years and need to go through the regulatory process after that, so I wouldn’t expect this stuff to become available before competing drugs will be.

    Of course, the cost to the people themselves should be minimal to make the drug accessible, but expecting every major drug to be sold at manufacturing cost is a great way to stop companies from developing new drugs.

    From what I can tell, the source article states that the drug could be produced eventually for $40 or $100 per dose by a generic drug company assuming the trials work out and sufficient demand is maintained.

    Another type of PrEP medication is already slated for generic production in 2027, while this seems to be scheduled to become available as a generic drug in 2028 at at the earliest, with 2026 being the earliest expected year for regulatory approval of this drug.

    It’s pretty great that we practically solved AIDS now, but it’ll be years before the stuff tested in trials will be available at scale, let alone in countries that can barely afford the medication.