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Cake day: February 2nd, 2026

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  • There’s also a thing where most of the practitioners, including very high level ones, don’t have a clue how it works. They know what works for them, that’s about it. All of it is all intent and the wand and words and other trappings are intended to help channel it but are commonly mistaken as the tools doing the job. They would know this in universe if any of them were even passably interested in the scientific method instead of being arrogant rich bastard assholes that I fully detested by the end of the source material.

    A fantastic real life corollary was Jacob Aldolphus “Jelly” Bryce, a prominent, arrogant, and primarily lucky FBI agent who had survived a number of shootouts. His method of ‘shoot your pistol from the hip like a madman’ became official government training for many years until someone did a study and rightly pointed out that the technique only really works if you’re naturally coordinated in exactly this way, which Jelly was. For everyone else it was awful training that lost quite a few lives until actual science could show that bringing the pistol up in line with your eye didn’t take measurably longer and allowed you to hit your target much more effectively.



  • tankfox@bookwyr.metoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Another life
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    8 days ago

    When I was a kid I was horrified by the idea of oblivion; just one day your body is too worn out to ever let you wake up again and you just don’t, no dreams, no fate, no long tunnel of light. Not even sitting around waiting for something, but going back to the place I was for all the thousands of years before I was born; not being at all.

    I swear, the older I get the more and more attractive that idea sounds, and the horror is the idea of ever having to do this again.


  • Think about it this way; general anesthesia does not shut off the brain or put you to ‘sleep’, it disrupts the signals that the brain uses to let the various parts of the brain communicate with one another.

    When the doctor is cutting you open, brain scans have shown that the part of the brain that receives pain lights up like a Christmas tree. You ‘feel’ every slice of the knife, but since that signal cannot make it over to the part that says ‘ouch’ or the part that says ‘I said ouch and I feel pain and there is a knife I will remember this as a life changing trauma’ it simply stays in that spot being bright and alive until surgery is over.

    The AI has a the part that can say ‘ouch’ but that’s it, so even if you connect a pain signal generator up to a part that can say ‘ouch’ it doesn’t turn into trauma until you have that third piece which rationalizes the pain together with an understanding of the pain and a recording of the pain as a memory with context.

    Consciousness as we understand and value it involves a lot of parts working together, but those parts can also exist in complete isolation from one another as well. It’s better to think of current AI as a fancy book; you cannot hurt a book by reading it, even if the book is about terrible things. The pain only exists within your empathy.













  • My preferred method is to take a strong fan and put it inside a cardboard box with a hole cut just big enough for the fan to eject air from the box and make a vacuum. Then you simply need one filter big enough to cover the top of the box, not four filters, it still works great!

    Squirrel cage style fans are typically going to be more effective at making a pressure differential too just because of the shape. A good strong floor fan, the kind for drying out puddles, is absolutely fantastic for this.

    Beyond that a good N95 mask will do wonders for making life more bearable while out in public! They really do manage to scrub out a lot of the particulates if you get a good fit and they come in cool colors these days.