Showerthoughts 58008 • 2d ago • 98%

It's easy to imagine yourself withstanding torture in order to save a loved one... until you hit your thumb with a hammer or stub your toe IRL

Sorry fam, I can buy you maybe 5 minutes. Make 'em count.

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 1w ago • 98%

Why, in English at least, is the letter W called "double U" and not "double V"?

One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called "double V" in that language. Why did English opt for the "U" instead? You can hear the French pronunciation here if you're unfamiliar with it: https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/ V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be "Double V" and not "Double U". In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet: - ... - U - V - W - X - Y - Z It's obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I'm just curious why we went the way we did! Cheers!

Horror 58008 • 2w ago • 91%

The 2022 original of Speak No Evil is superior to the 2024 US remake (although the remake is also great)

I've now watched both. I didn't know the 2024 version was a remake, or I'd have watched that second, but I actually think that watching them in 'reverse' order is a better experience. If you've already seen both, maybe you can sympathise with that view. Both films are excellent, don't get me wrong. But there are subtle (and some not-so-subtle) differences that really, really make the overall experience very different, including the impressions and understandings you come away with. The newer film is almost insultingly Hollywoodised, as it waterboards you with exposition that the original has no problem risking you not figuring out on your own. Please do yourself a favour and don't read up on either film before watching them. I've been reading reviews of the newer film that completely spoil scenes in the original that were different. It's unreal how cavalier people are with that sort of thing 😒 So, my recommendation is to watch James MacAvoy absolutely demolishing the scenery with his chompers (I mean that in the best possible way), and then grab a cuppa and a blanket and watch the original.

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 1mo ago • 97%

Would it be legal to crowdfund a licensed private detective to investigate a public figure and publish their results publicly?

This started in my head as a plot device in a story, but I was wondering if it'd actually fly in the real world. There are many public figures who almost certainly have closets which are positively creaking to bursting point with skeletons. Politicians, especially. Can you hire a private detective to investigate someone without having a clear goal in mind? Like, just "investigate until the money runs out" kinda thing, in the hopes that eventually something incriminating or reputationally hazardous is found? Is this legal? If so, who should we send the P.I.s after first? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) It would be interesting to see how certain people would behave if they simply heard we were *planning* this. Like, would JD Vance suddenly start burning shit in a barrel in his backyard if he heard about the army of P.I.s we've paid to look into him? We could make that the scheme: go through the motions of crowdfunding an investigation, but the real P.I. will be watching the named individuals and seeing what they do in response to the threat 👀

Ask Lemmy 58008 • 2mo ago • 99%

What old-style forums do you still frequent? Any you'd recommend?

I enjoy the way forums work and how they're laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I'd like to find some more to browse through, it doesn't matter the topic! My wee list: * [TIGSource Forums](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php) - Video game developers big and small post here, there's even [a section](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=27.0) for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool. * [The Metal Archives Forums](https://forum.metal-archives.com/) - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too. * [Cook'd and Bomb'd](https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=forum) - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It's about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (*Brass Eye*, *The Day Today*). EDIT: "Meal" to "metal" 🤦‍

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 2mo ago • 95%

With the amount of microplastics we're carrying around in pretty much every tissue in our bodies, is our weight measurably different as a result?

If it is, I assume it's measured in thousandths of a gram or something, but are we all nevertheless a wee bit heavier than we ought to be?

Showerthoughts 58008 • 2mo ago • 64%

People were quicker to violence in the Wild West days because everyone was struggling with the effects of cumulative CTE brought on by brain-rattling horse-based transport on roadless surfaces

A single mildly bumpy ride won't turn you into an NFL domestic abuser, but over the course of 20+ years? And if you were on horses or in rickety carts from the time you were a squishy infant? Boom, curdled grey matter. No horses = no war, no murder, just pure enlightenment and peace on Earth. Beware the horse 👀

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 4mo ago • 93%

The theory that we live in a simulation involves simulants running their own simulations; wouldn't that require impossibly more resources for the main sim?

The theory, which I probably misunderstand because I have a similar level of education to a macaque, states that because a simulated world would eventually develop to the point where it creates its own simulations, it's then just a matter of probability that we are in a simulation. That is, if there's one real world, and a zillion simulated ones, it's *more likely* that we're in a simulated world. That's probably an oversimplification, but it's the gist I got from listening to people talk about the theory. But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself, the processing required to create a mirror sim-within-a-sim would need at least twice that much power/resources, no? How could the infinitely recursive simulations even begin to be set up unless more and more hardware is constantly being added by the real meat people to its initial simulation? It would be like that cartoon (or was it a silent movie?) of a guy laying down train track struts while sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train. Except in this case the train would be moving at close to the speed of light. Doesn't this fact alone disprove the entire hypothesis? If I set up a 1:1 simulation of our universe, then just sit back and watch, any attempts by my simulant people to create something that would exhaust all of my hardware would just... not work? Blue screen? Crash the system? Crunching the numbers of a 1:1 sim within a 1:1 sim would not be physically possible for a processor that can just about handle the first simulation. The simulation's own simulated processors would still need to have their processing done by Meat World, you're essentially just passing the CPU-buck backwards like it's a rugby ball until it lands in the lap of the real world. And this is just if the simulated people create ONE simulation. If 10 people in that one world decide to set up similar simulations simultaneously, the hardware for the entire sim reality would be toast overnight. What am I not getting about this? Cheers!

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 4mo ago • 97%

Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing?

Wouldn't it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for "this is my phrase" rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase? There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website's search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality: 1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats. 2. They're just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don't think it's worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically. Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip? Cheers! EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I'm mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don't seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 4mo ago • 98%

When a magazine goes out of print and/or out of business, do the original 'master files' for each issue still exist somewhere?

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.) Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something. It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to *not* keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done! So: 1. Do they retain the files forever? 2. If so, why might they *not* be shared 20 or 30 years later? Cheers!

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 4mo ago • 95%

What's the rule for which 'national identity adjective' suffix to use?

[-ish] Ireland, Scotland = Ir***ish***, Scott***ish*** [-an] Morocco, Germany = Morocc***an***, Germ***an*** [-ese] Portugal, China = Portugu***ese***, Chin***ese*** What rule is at play here? 🤔 Cheers!

Creepy Wikipedia 58008 • 5mo ago • 95%

Katherine Knight: An Australian woman who, in 2000, murdered, skinned, dismembered and cooked her husband, and attempted to feed him to his adult sons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Knight She was the first woman in Australia to be given a life sentence without any possibility of parole. (Edited to add the link. I did add it originally, but I guess it doesn't post it if you also write in the body of the post? 🤷‍)

Creepy Wikipedia 58008 • 5mo ago • 94%

Natalia Grace: Inspired by the plot of the 2009 horror film Orphan, Natalia's adoptive parents legally changed her real age so she would become an "adult", at which point they promptly abandoned her

Natalia was born in Ukraine in 2003, and was diagnosed with a rare form of dwarfism. More or less immediately, she was given up for adoption. Adopted by a couple in the US, they facetiously but legally changed her birth year to 1989 with a view to skirting child abandonment laws. Her real age - the age she actually was when they adopted her - was confirmed by DNA testing, as well as contemporaneous documentation in Ukraine. After seeing Orphan, a horror film in which an adopted child is actually a crazy adult with a rare genetic condition that makes her look like a kid, they hatched the idea of fudging the documentation like in the movie - except in reverse. In the film, the character changes her documentation to make herself seem younger than she is. With Natalia, they needed her to be an adult. They moved her into her own apartment (an 8 or 9-year-old at this point), then quietly snuck off to Canada along with their biological children. And the evil cunts got away with it. They lied about her, saying she was threatening to kill everyone and was a sociopath (again, taking their cues from the horror film). A fucking 8-year-old dwarf was gonna kill them all, they said. Truly repugnant people.

No Stupid Questions 58008 • 5mo ago • 97%

Can a judge sue a defendant for slander/libel?

If a judge is called 'corrupt' by a defendant outside court in front of the media, or if something more unambiguously libelous is said, can the judge sue the defendant?