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Emperor

@[email protected]

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

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A friend was in a car crash with his daughter in the passenger seat. I asked him how he was doing when I saw him in the pub and he nearly broke down. No-one had asked before and it had been pretty shocking experience.

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That’s from 2021, what an innocent, less-enshittified time it was. These days the argument would just be pointing at the toxic dumpster fire of regular social media and shouting “how much worse do you want it to get before you leave?”.

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He misunderstood when someone told him that the secret of Kirk’s success was getting his leg over a lot.

How good (or bad) is sunflower oil for cooking?

I’ve seen this question asked on Reddit multiple times, and the comments usually say that sunflower oil is not healthy because it contains high amounts of linoleic acid, HOWEVER, all of them were in the context of the high amounts of Omega-6 in the American diet which doesn’t apply to me… so I would like some answers with...

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I use extra virgin olive oil for marinades and salad dressing (and an olive oil spread instead of butter or margarine) and rapeseed oil (usually just labelled as vegetable oil here in the UK) for frying. The latter has a high smoke point, is lower in saturated fat compared to sunflower oil (also higher in monounsaturated and lower in polyunsaturated fats, a bit like olive oil although that has even better proportions of the two) and has better levels of Omega 3.

Here’s a bit of a review.

And why you might want to avoid sunflower oil:

vegetable fats can change during the cooking process, breaking down into harmful chemicals, including aldehydes.

…

The stability of the oil is important too: some oils, like sunflower oil, are more likely to oxidise when heated – or combine with oxygen in the air – producing harmful compounds in greater quantities. A 2012 study by researchers at Spain’s University of the Basque Country reported that aldehydes can react with our hormones and enzymes.

With the issues with sunflower oil after the invasion of Ukraine the UK’s Food Standards Agency drew up a report about the substitution of other oils, which has plenty of data.

A switch away from sunflower oil should reduce levels of heart disease, following this paper:

Zatonski et al. [25] examined trends of mortality due to coronary heart disease (CHD) and fat consumption in eleven Eastern and Central European countries from 1990 until 2002. They observed that, in countries where sunflower oil remained the primary oil (such as Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria), the rate of CHD remained stable from 1990 onward. Meanwhile, in countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which started to use rapeseed oil, a strong decline in CHD mortality was observed. This finding is confirmed in our study. Although both oils are rich in PUFAs, rapeseed oil contains more α-linoleic acid (ALA, C18:3), an omega-3 fatty acid with atheroprotective properties. Moreover, ALA is partly converted to eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which may protect against CHD and cerebrovascular diseases [26, 27].

Emperor ,
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They are wielding the banhammer like Thor. At least in their own minds.

Emperor ,
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Now, the internet has made it possible to be pulverised by the worst cunts alive

Brand new sentence.

Emperor ,
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Could have just boiled that down to:

!malefashionadvice

Emperor ,
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It’s back now.

Emperor ,
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it’s unlikely that PornHub is going to change you from a liker of vanilla sex to a connoisseur of amputee gangbangs—and certainly not in real life.

Challenge accepted!

Be wary of spiteful Reddit users ( kbin.social )

In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...

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The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to “poison” fediverse spaces … is losing the whole plot.

That’s exactly what They’d say. 🤔

Anyone else out there who actually really loved Discovery's S1 style of Klingons?

I am the kind of person who enjoys “big weird” scifi like Stanisław Lem. Stories about trying to relate to and find common ground with something so alien that the prospect of even understanding is basically hopeless. Star Trek usually doesn’t do stories that, which makes sense as it often uses alien races as allegories or...

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I thought it was all a bit confusing - it was introduced with no explanation, which felt like it was setting up some big reveal that never came.

I like the, as you say, Giger-esque design but felt it was such a departure that they may as well have introduced a new species.

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I searched for instances on Lemmy. There are 4 but they’re unmoderated or appear to be moderated by a bot.

Yeah, it’s seen as one of the important resources worth saving from Reddit, so there are efforts to preserve the information. So !historiansanswered is using a bot to extract it. The majority of lemmit.online is bot-driven and I blocked it as it can really stuff up your feed.

It seems likely that a similar human-moderated community hasn’t been started because it is such a big deal and would require not just a critical mass of people (especially historians) but also a strong mod team (with solid mod tools) to keep the signal to noise ratio up or, I’d imagine, it could get messy, quickly.

That said, a bit of messiness isn’t necessarily a big deal while you are building a community and,.in this case, it wouldn’t be dangerous compared to communities focused on health or legal questions. So if there isn’t an equivalent on here, get it started and we’ll see how it goes.

Emperor ,
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It has a lot more features compared to Mastodon - I made the switch and am happy with it so far.

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Lemmy currently doesn’t allow you to follow individuals. As kbin does, it is probably a feature we will see in the future.

For now you’d need a Mastodon, kbin or Calckey account (I recommend the last one).

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Another, more complicated, possibility would be to include a user editable wiki with each community

This would be my preference. Given some of the big tasks that still need to be done (advanced moderation tools, for example) adding a wiki is relatively trivial - you can piggyback off the existing user authentication and markdown regular expressions which are all the diffcult bits. I wrote my own wiki 10+ years ago and it was pretty straightforward.

Emperor ,
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Yes, the technical aspects are straightforward, the conceptual ones might need a bit of chewing over.

The way I see it, each community would have their own wiki but an instance could also have its own wiki for FAQs and the like which would then also act as the top level, linking to all the different wikis so it would appear as one cohesive wiki. Admins could edit any page, moderators could only edit their own wikis. You could either have a system to allow users to submit a draft edit or you could do that in a post in the community. Unlike, say, Wikipedia, there probably wouldn’t need to be large numbers of edits to a page in quick succession, so community members could thrash out a proposed update or addition in the discussion.

So, for example, I started a Home Video community and so I might want one page for a list of boutique Blu-ray releasers and another for a guide to buying a multiregional Blu-ray player. Over on Reddit I created a list of third party suppliers of STLs for the game Star Wars Legion that was well-received (which reminds me I must copy that over) which could be worth a page. Those pages would tend to be relatively static - only getting an update if a new Blu-ray publisher or STL maker popped up.

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And the name? Lemmywiks.

My job here is done.

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which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start.

I think we’d need to do that anyway as a stop-gap measure because you could start that right now. If there’s a will for it, a wiki could be thrown together quickly but there’d need to be testing and the developers of Lemmy would want to be assured it won’t break anything or leave a security vulnerability.

If correctly formatted, the content could then just be scooped up and used to populate a wiki when it arrives.

Other problems I see happening

A lot of those are federation issues in general - for example, the wiki would be clearly part of another instances community, so a post about Biden being a lizard in a humansuit and a wiki entry on the same topic would be essentially the same.

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Presumably, PixelFed or PeerTube but see my list here and some of the things I link to. You might need to do some digging to find the right fit for you.

Fediverse dating app? ( kbin.social )

This is just a thought I had that I wanted to bounce off people who know more about ActivityPub/the fediverse— would it be feasible (and would it make sense) to build an open-source, ActivityPub-compatible dating app as an alternative to Tinder/Bumble/etc.? And if so, what could that look like? Obviously the small userbase...

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If it would make sense. …

It kinda does make sense. You have specialist dating services:

  • Kinky
  • Uniform dating
  • Pensioners
  • At least one newspaper had a dating service for people who were politically similar
  • Sugar daddies

And on and on.

So each of those could be an instance so people with similar… needs are grouped together but it’s federated, so you could be on a Democrat dating instance but also throw your hook into the pool of pensioners or Californians, etc, etc.

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Exactly - each instance can have its own niche and set it’s own guidelines. As they aren’t walled gardens of you are on a furry dating instance but want to throw your hook in with one catering to fans of anime, then that’d be OK too.

It has a lot of intriguing potential.

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Indeed - Lemmy integrates well with Matrix and there’s no reason that can’t be done here as the main issue would be the security of the messages exchanged.

The other bonus is open and clear matching algorithms. It’s in the interest of commercial dating apps to keep the majority of their users always hopefully but never quite there (or they’d run out of business, so, ironically, they’re business model relies on not being successful) and I suspect they use some shifty practices in the matching algorithms.

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