• 27 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2020

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  • Anthropology books taught me that humanity is more fantastic than all the fantasy races.

    • The Mbuti sang and danced as they walked, to scare away snakes. They had no words for ‘good’, and ‘bad’, so Christian missionaries couldn’t translate their teachings.
    • The Azande believed in a predictable universe, and ascribed all misfortune (including death), to magical bad intentions (translated as ‘witchcraft’, but I’m not sure that’s a great translation)
    • The Piraha language needed you to say how you learnt something inside the verb, so rumours are grammatically impossible. Their language had four modes, including ‘whistling’.

    I’m putting everything in the past tense as my info is about 50 years out of date.








  • People who want near-perfect distribution of power often talk about the serverless model. It’s sounds like it might work for something like e-mail, but I don’t see how it’s possible for something like Lemmy. This comment it cached on every instance with one person who follows it.

    Atm, keeping Lemmy going for a couple of days might require 50 Gigabytes and lots of bandwidth. If you put that on a mobile phone, it’ll be a 50 Gig app, which will drain all your data in minutes.

    But I think chatboards work well with servers, so it doesn’t seem like a problem.




  • Having ‘no single source of truth’ is part of the joy.

    If you’re not happy with /r/cars moderators banning everyone who drives a Skoda, then you’re out of luck. Here in federation land, you can just go to a different lemmy.something/c/cars place.

    Of course you can still follow and interact with all the /c/cars communities from any Lemmy instance (and interact a little from Mastodon).