Were you able to find car parking in Harvard Yard?

TLDR: My optimistic view of what human culture could be like is summed up pretty well by the Orion’s Arm project.

I am familiar with the Orion’s Arm universe, a hard sci-fi transhumanist worldbuilding project… shall I recommend you take a trip through the Wormhole Nexus to the Sephirotic Empires where you’re ruled by benevolent S6 transapient dictators (supercharged AGI)? Because you’ll see a fuck ton of entities playing around like retirees. You’ll see “aliens” which actually are just extremely genetically modified humans. In fact, here (https://orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b177d3ef3b1) is their “Culture and Society” page, which sums up a lot of my optimistic OA-based beliefs in a human culture.

Oh, and most Terragens (humans + any life that can trace its origin back to Earth) live in orbit. Story goes that we made an AI system that decided we humans were bad for the environment and then told us to get the fuck off Earth (Great Expulsion).

https://orionsarm.com

My (hopeless) attempt at explaining some of the terms:

• Wormhole nexus - OA’s primary method of “faster than light” travel. You never go faster than light, but rather some transapient figured out how to fold spacetime and now you have a hole where you can throw your ships in and have them on the other side.
• Transapient - Post-singularity entites that are orders of magnitude smarter than us. An ant can’t fully understand a human. It is incapable of understanding what Lemmy is, what a job is, what the Fediverse is. Just as an ant can’t fully understand us, humans can’t fully understand transapients. Oh and transapients come in 6 levels. We’re all S0 on the scale. S6 are pretty much gods.

So… if I have the money to fly down to Fort Scott do I get to ramble on for 3 hours about how their city council has been such a great source of white noise, generating additional white noise for me in the process that I can use once I return to Manila?

Well, Spokane enforces a 2 minute limit. What city do you recommend I listen to if I want to hear longer open forum stories?

EDIT: Oh wait, I replied from the inbox, nevermind. Fort Scott, Kansas is definitely the place.

So “background ambience” would be a better term to describe the city council meetings?

Interesting. It looks quite dull from the thumbnails indeed. At the moment my current source of city council white noise is Spokane, Washington - the stories that people tell during open forum are entertaining and I sometimes hate how an amazing story gets cut off by the 2-minute limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise#Work_environment

Just background noise to listen to, because sometimes you just don’t like silence.

Yeah, but the city council meeting I’m listening to is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (Filipino here), so I couldn’t do anything even if I wanted to. And given the geographical distance, the impact on my day-to-day life is… zero.

But still, the stories I hear during the meetings are entertaining and they really do help me understand America just that little bit more. Curiosity for the win!

When I set dark mode in an app, the top of the window would remain light, in XFCE. But in early January 2024, I realized it was because XFCE had a theme setting in both Appearance and Window Manager, and they were conflicting with each other. I ignored it for quite a while but now I’m happy with my full dark mode computer

Didn’t we use copies of that book to alleviate the toilet paper shortages back in the day?

Research. Many people I’m interested in still use Twitter. And I hate how Nitter instances globally have started to become rate limited or outright obliterated by Twitter API weirdness/

I use Image Max URL so when I open an image in a new tab that I want to inspect in greater detail, it redirects me automatically to the highest resolution version for my viewing pleasure.

They should offer a JSON download of the thing so it can spread far and wide and we all won’t have to go on the website…

Does the interstate that takes 15 minutes actually take 15 minutes? If that interstate is crazy congested, the state highway might actually be faster. Or maybe this is some rural part of America, I don’t know.

YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.

A combination of both. I write paper entires sometimes, but most days I type them up in a local MediaWiki installation.

shit i think i need to update the regex again

Not writing “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, or “Ms.” in documents. Waste of ink, typing time, and reading time.

Do we really want normies on our site? Will they really act as bait for the megacorps to come and ruin our federation?

Good riddance to Meta’s bullshit. Stop them before they get to the first E in EEE.

Here’s a sign to put up at the border between Lemmy.ml and Threads, which will surely have a 100-meter wall built on it with 50 kV electric fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, snipers, and whatever to keep those Meta corporate fuckers out.