Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.

https://abnormalbeings.space/

https://liberapay.com/Wxnzxn/

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 6th, 2025

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  • Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the “looking through the image” technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there’s people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.

    Basically it’s about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.

    I love the Wellington here viewed the “wrong” way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.


  • A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

    So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.


  • It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

    Some key paragraphs:

    Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

    Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

    After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

    The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

    But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.



















  • So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it’s still valid to bring up as an argument, “X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years” is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.

    Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and “waste” from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably … but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.

    Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.




  • You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

    If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.













  • That would indeed be interesting to see. Who knows, it might crash everything after all. From what I have seen, it might play out favourably.

    I had noticed this channel when browsing the “most watched of all time” list, I have no idea about them and their content, as I don’t speak their language, but I assume they probably chose PeerTube as an (additional?) hosting option for content they already had an audience for (seemingly from YT?), probably embedding their videos on an external website with a following?

    Any way, back then (the numbers are misleading, btw, because the x years ago lists from the originally-published date, not the date-uploaded), they seem to have garnered thousands of views, so probably easily hundreds of viewers simultaneously. The interesting part: The server they uploaded on has the technical info listed, and that reads very much “laptop at someone’s private home”.

    Unless the numbers have been fudged - which I will grant, is always a possibility - that bodes well for any hosting that’s done even just a bit more professionally. It should be able to relatively easily scale up even to thousands concurrently, again, if those numbers aren’t doctored. And it makes sense, at least to me - downloading torrents has worked like that for a long time now, too - even for torrents that aren’t “professionally” seeded with dedicated servers.


  • It’s pretty amazing how well that scales, really. What surprised me the most was, that it also works well for live streams - I witnessed that in action when heise (that huge German tech publisher which recently created their own instance and you may have seen a lot in the trending videos) streamed their live show for the first time. Even on a live stream, towards the middle when I checked, I had more downloaded from peers than from the central server, and more uploaded than downloaded.

    I also have my instance set up to mirror a lot of videos from trustworthy, popular instances - and even so, traffic statistics show no issues whatsoever so far, if something really does attract lots of concurrent viewers, the p2p feature handles that quite efficiently.

    Now, if only storage was trivial in cost, too, costs for running PeerTube would basically be the same as for text/image-focused Fediverse stuff.