• Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Given that quantum theory and general relativity are incompatible, something has to give.

    Also, general relativity requires dark matter and energy to explain cosmological data, but particle physics has yet to capture the faintest indication of something supposedly 5x more common than visible matter.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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    20 hours ago

    Titles like this make me angry. Sometimes it feels like an insult to my intelligence. Just tell me what it’s about and stop making stuff up.

    I make a point of not clicking on such articles, or really anything with click bait titles if I can avoid it.

    • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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      6 hours ago

      I’ve added words like may, could, might etc to my lemmy filter to get rid of these articles

    • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      You have to remember… those headlines aren’t for you. They’re for the average idiot who isn’t even remotely interested in the scientific mumbo jumbo and allbthat highly technical gobbledygook. They want to be spoonfed a statement they can parrot to a co-worker and move on with their day being a terrible consumer of info.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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        2 hours ago

        I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately, and I wonder if the way these headlines are written is feeding it: creationist articles have been slipping into my science news feed, usually riffing off whatever bullshit alarmist/exaggerated headlines spread through the popsci realm the day before.

        If you don’t know what you’re looking at (and most people don’t), you’ll wind up reading creationist propaganda when you think you’re reading a science article.

      • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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        21 hours ago

        The really reputable outlets will phrase it “'this [Lemmy] is… Journalism”’ claims user of the increasingly popular reddit alternative, in post positing the decline of all other forms of media."

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          19 hours ago

          Are we increasing though? I thought we plateaued or even dipped. e.g. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats even says we dropped sharply, like 51k monthly active users in April compared to 47k now (this ignores the halfyear stats that iirc were affected by some technical changes), and the total users tanked from 1.9 mil to just 1.4 (though we surely don’t have that many lurkers, so a lot of those were surely bots/alts), and even servers went down.

          Everyone that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl gives me a horrible look like why would you tell me about this TruthSocial-like place (except leftist instead of right-wing as that one is) that actively calls for public beheadings of e.g. landlords?

          So we’ve got some… issues that are blocking our future growth, from reaching more mainstream audiences.

          • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml
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            3 hours ago

            But if you look at messages it has raised, so less accounts but more active. And I don’t know the rest but I’m not in a hurry to see Lemmy become as big as Reddit. I can wait a couple of years to grow at a faster rate.

          • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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            14 hours ago

            I’ll be honest, I hope Lemmy doesn’t reach a mainstream audience. It’s nice having a smaller site away from all the bullshit that will inevitably come with mainstream attention. We can say “just defederate! Join another instance” but when we get to a point where giant corpos are running instances that host 95% of users and 99% of content, we’ll be in the same boat as now if we defed, except that Lemmy will then have a mainstream (and thus mostly right of center) image. If this, or a little more, is all we’re ever really going to get on an open source platform that feels open source, I’m okay with that. I like seeing the same usernames around, and feeling like I found the internet equivalent of Stars Hollow, CT

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              13 hours ago

              It’s a double edged sword, that.

              On the one hand, we’re kinda awesome the way we are.:-) Perhaps a bit more content would be good though?

              On the other, there’s like 50 people that generate virtually all the content, and they won’t necessarily be able to keep up that pace forever. If we aren’t sustainable, this project will die off. And I don’t mean like cease working, but rather lose our uniqueness, like what happened to Reddit, which technically remember still exists:-).

              I hear you about “fully mainstream”, but I think we could stand to grow a bit more. What’s going on with mander.xyz and scientists/academics is awesome:-).

              • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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                13 hours ago

                I’m not familiar with what’s going on with that. Care to enlighten me?

                And I totally get what you mean. More content would be great. I specifically miss my philosophical and spiritual communities from Reddit. I love learning about mythos and different religions, especially the more esoteric stuff, as well as political philosophy. That content just isn’t here in the same way (or sometimes, at all). It would be amazing to have that here. But I’d also rather go without certain things if it means not feeling like I’m being sold a story. Reddit felt like it wasn’t social media in the same way as Twitter and Facebook, but the moment I left it for Lemmy it was this scales-from-my-eyes kind of moment. It was crazy how toxic reddit was for me, and going back a few times, and looking at my old profile, I do not like the person I was there. Always on the defense, always on edge, always prepared to argue a point because I knew some asshole was going to attack me for no reason, and make me defend myself. It’s like it activates the caveman part of the brain and put me in fight or flight. I’d love for Lemmy to get big enough to have awesome content, but not so big as to devolve into that. But I’m not smart enough to know what that balance is, or if it’s even an issue of size, or just culture.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  13 hours ago

                  Just that they are actively recruiting people from STEM.

                  Most of what made Reddit great was not Huffman’s software but the people that were worth chatting with. Most of those people did not come here, hence the huge lack of niche subjects here by comparison.

                  Though indeed, even before the whole fuck spez fiasco Reddit was becoming enshittified, as it encouraged people to talk rather than listen - e.g. to make a new post rather than be able to find an existing one. And yes, it also encouraged us to become pedantic assholes, making every one of us defensive - me too.

                  A fantastic article somewhat related btw: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb, highlighting that social media becomes what the vision of the developers makes it to be. From the size and position and coloration of the buttons - and which ones, like are downvotes even turned on? - and every little thing, Reddit was doomed to become what it was purely bc of its choice to encourage its own profits at the expense of all else.

                  A favorite example of mine is that since ads go in-between posts but not comments, Reddit encouraged “more posts”, far more so than “more comments”, and not at all searching for existing posts, e.g. they only allowed 2 pinned posts, not 5 or 10 or 20 or something, just 2. So in places like r/Android they would have weekly mega threads where people could ask things e.g. “what phone should I buy?”, but rather than help connect people to those mega threads specifically offered for that, the developers forced mods to do the work to try to stem the absolute tsunami of posts all saying “which phone should I buy?” - almost invariably with no other details, each just a child (of whatever mental age) wanting personalized recommendations attention, but thereby halting the ability of people to discuss things related to Android phones, bc how could you get a word mixed in among all that noise?

                  Even nonprofit social media is still damaging to us, but to a radically lesser degree it would seem, compared to a for-profit one attempting to predate upon e.g. our anxieties.

            • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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              7 hours ago

              I’ve mentioned lemmy irl, too. Various times actually. Obviously no one knows it. But they usually don’t even know of mastodon or the fediverse either. And even reddit is just a name they’ve heard before. Everyone I know irl is on Instagram though.

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              14 hours ago

              Never once have they known about it already:-).

              The horrified looks come on our subsequent visit, and then they refuse to talk about it again. I suppose it’s our dirty secret… that we use Lemmy btw.:-P

              • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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                13 hours ago

                I’ve only met maybe five people in real life that even know what Reddit is. Like yeah that’s that super nerdy site right?

                I’ve never even tried to mention Lemmy.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  12 hours ago

                  But… we could always use new memes!?

                  Maybe something like this:

                  img

                  with the caption "I use Arch btw"😁

  • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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    21 hours ago

    In fairness sometimes small tiny differences like that do turn out to be significant. But measurement error usually wins out most of the time

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Then there’s things like:
      “Passing through the magnetic field, exactly half the electrons went UP, and exactly half the electrons went DOWN”, and classical physics went OUT through the quantum window.

    • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I enjoyed reading that. I’m no chemist or physicist, but that sounds like it could be a cool real world thing. Care to shatter my ignorance?

      • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        From what I understand its a Nickel alloy that has good magnetic properties which can replace rare earth alloys for magnets that renewable technology is heavily reliant on. At face value yes this would be pretty big, but in terms of actual real world practicality on replacing rare earth magnets I really couldn’t tell you. Most science articles tend to oversell scientific breakthroughs in my experience, science is slow and incremental, if it’s a real breakthrough the technology tends to catch fire fairly quickly before any articles are written on it

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Cosmic metal?

      Is that some kind of refined variation of unobtanium?

      (Without reading more… I’m just going to assume they mean meteoric iron? Though the title does read like a prompt for a b-tier sci-fi that ends with Kirk trying to put his dick into something he absolutely shouldn’t put his dick into.)