Kuromantis's recent activity

  1. Comment on JibJab - Second Term (2004) in ~music

    Kuromantis
    Link
    A song satirizing Bush's 2004 re-election, which has been seen by many as the closest analogue to how the 2024 election just went down.

    A song satirizing Bush's 2004 re-election, which has been seen by many as the closest analogue to how the 2024 election just went down.

  3. Comment on São Paulo mayoral candidate treated in hospital after getting clobbered with chair in ~society

    Kuromantis
    Link
    He also called him an "arregão", which generally means "coward", but that word in particular reminds me of what the most irritating classmates said in like, 5th grade. This is generally Marçal's...

    RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A candidate in Sao Paulo ’s mayoral race was treated and released Monday from a hospital after one of his five rivals in a televised debate slammed him with a metal chair following references to allegations of sexual misconduct.

    Pablo Marçal, a personal development influencer turned right-wing politician, referred to the allegations against José Luiz Datena, a former TV presenter turned candidate, during the debate Sunday evening and said Datena had wanted to slap him. He added: “You’re not even man enough to do this.”

    He also called him an "arregão", which generally means "coward", but that word in particular reminds me of what the most irritating classmates said in like, 5th grade. This is generally Marçal's whole vibe, being right-wing with the really coarse, blunt and offensive language that made Trump such a lightning rod when he was being regarded as a borderline joke candidate in 2016. He also made gestures implying the main Left-wing candidate of having been a cocaine user and tried exorcising him with a employment record book.

    Datena, who has denied the allegations, then came over toward Marçal’s podium with the chair above his head and slammed it into Marçal’s side as the influencer put up his arms. The moderator of the TV Cultura debate then quickly interrupted and cut to commercials, and the debate resumed later Sunday night without Marçal.

    An inquiry into the alleged misconduct by Datena never resulted in any charges, and it was shelved when the accuser retracted her statements.

    Speaking to reporters after the debate, Datena explained that the episode had been especially painful for him because he believes it prompted his mother-in-law to suffer a series of strokes and pass away.

    Everyone I know IRL basically regarded this as top entertainment, especially as the debate was at ~11 PM and few people actually watched it live and the actual topics of the Debate. Lots of people have sympathized with Datena and it basically reminds me of when Harris almost bleeped a profanity at him in the Presidential Debate just a week ago and lots of Democratic posters were congratulating her for her self-restraint.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 9 in ~society

    Kuromantis
    Link Parent
    That statistic refers to the end of the Cold war and not World War Two. With Both Bush and Trump ending their terms on a major recession they caused or worsened while Clinton, Obama and Biden have...

    Since WWII, Democrats have added 50 million jobs, I believe it is, whereas Republican presidents have added 1 million.

    That statistic refers to the end of the Cold war and not World War Two. With Both Bush and Trump ending their terms on a major recession they caused or worsened while Clinton, Obama and Biden have more or less gotten employment back on track. An MSNBC writer said they checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to make the claim and it checks out.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Large wildfires choke 60% of Brazil and large chunks of neighboring countries in smoke in ~enviro

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    As far as I can tell it's heavily correlated with how conservative people are (as per usual), but unfortunately agribusiness captures a lot of people (and a large share of Brazil's political and...

    As far as I can tell it's heavily correlated with how conservative people are (as per usual), but unfortunately agribusiness captures a lot of people (and a large share of Brazil's political and economic power) fairly hard in decent part because our biggest news outlet is known for the catchphrase "Agro is tech, Agro is pop, Agro is all/everything" so the image of the small farmer is conflated with these industries. (This is also common in many many other places, but meaningfully worse here than in the west because as a developing country actual small farmers are a significant portion of the country's population.) There's also the factor that many or even most adults spend most of their day working or commuting in offices, buses, cars, etc. and people might only notice in passing that the sky above them is literally gray instead of blue while working and driving and browsing the phone in the bus. The last factor working against people caring is that the climate ministers saying these fires are caused intentionally is not common knowledge and people can just assume this summer (spring, but the northern half of the country in particular really doesn't have that type of season) was particularly bad because of El niño or some wholly natural phenomenon, or that Brazil isn't really too responsible for the heating because the bulk of emissions have always come from rich countries. My classmates seem to notice and talk about it sparingly and probably care about climate change at least a little but everyone has something more important to do.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on Large wildfires choke 60% of Brazil and large chunks of neighboring countries in smoke in ~enviro

    Kuromantis
    Link
    For reference, a Brazilian Government source has estimated that over 55 thousand square kilometers of land have burned since this year began, which is comparable two and a half New Jerseys or over...

    Brazil grapples with an unprecedented crisis as raging wildfires blanket 60% of its territory in toxic smoke.

    The situation has reached alarming levels. August recorded the highest number of fires in 14 years.

    The Amazon, Pantanal, and Cerrado regions are the epicenters of this disaster. In August, the Amazon saw 38,266 fire hotspots.

    This number is more than double compared to 2023. Meanwhile, the Pantanal experienced a staggering 3,707% increase in wildfires. Brazil’s worst drought in 44 years fuels this surge in fires.

    For reference, a Brazilian Government source has estimated that over 55 thousand square kilometers of land have burned since this year began, which is comparable two and a half New Jerseys or over half of Indiana in the USA or all of Denmark in Europe. Where I live the sky is often gray to the point where it isn't immediately obvious if it is a full-on overcast day or just a really polluted one.

    The crisis extends beyond Brazil’s borders. Smoke reaches neighboring countries like Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

    Black rain has already happened in Uruguay.

    Environmental Minister Marina Silva has declared that the country is “at war” with fire. She suggests criminal actions may be behind the surge.

    The government is investigating the causes of these fires. Many are believed to be human-induced for land clearing and agriculture.

    Basically, not only are these fires caused by Climate Change, they are also caused by agribusiness people setting fire to the forests and vegetation because they're presumably too lazy to even mow it down.

    13 votes

  9. Comment on Brazil's top court threatens to suspend X (formerly Twitter) by Thursday night if Elon Musk does not comply with regulations in ~tech

    Kuromantis
    Link

    BRASILIA/SAO PAULO, Aug 29 (Reuters) - A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Wednesday ordered billionaire Elon Musk to name a legal representative for his messaging platform X in Brazil within 24 hours or face the site's suspension in the country.

    The Supreme Court posted a screenshot of Wednesday's court decision on its X account, tagging Musk's and X's Global Government Affairs accounts.

    Hours after the judge's decision, Musk said on X that Moraes "has repeatedly broken the laws he has sworn to uphold".

    Earlier this month, X announced it would close its operations and fire its staff in Brazil due to what it called "censorship orders" from the judge, Alexandre de Moraes. Its service would remain available for users in Brazil, it said.

    Earlier this year, Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts implicated on investigations of so-called "digital militias" that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.

    14 votes

  11. Comment on Tildes growth in ~tildes

    Kuromantis
    Link
    Well, a good while ago, a user here made a website called Tildes Stats that tracks the number of people making accounts on here, and it seems 30 new people have made accounts here in the last...

    Well, a good while ago, a user here made a website called Tildes Stats that tracks the number of people making accounts on here, and it seems 30 new people have made accounts here in the last month. That's more or less normal for this place. This user had also used the Tildes API at other points to measure that, although there are ~25,000 total accounts here, the regular activity of this site comes from more or less 300-500 active users in total. This is consistent with an internet principle called the 90-9-1 rule, which basically states that the overwhelming amount of users of any social media platform or everything are lurkers. We also used to do census-es of this website at that time, and we came up with 200-300 responses for these census-es. So that basically explains the small town feel, because that's the population of a village posting on a social media/forum-ish website.

    This user did this stuff a few (3-ish I think) years ago, long before Reddit ended third party apps, but in my experience the picture hasn't changed much over those years in terms of raw activity except for the weeks/months after reddit banning third-party apps, when this site became way more active, which was when the last round of subcategories was added, and to some extent it's still more active now than it used to be, but it isn't going to grow fast and everyone else in this comment section has said they want this to be a small community and don't want it to grow fast, which is more or less what people have said about this site's size and growth for the last 4 years I've been aware of people asking about it. (And probably asked about it myself.)

    When I joined this place, I remember some of the more ambitious proposals of this site were this very democratized wiki-esque moderation system where anyone would be able to suggest what a post's tags could be but people who had gradually gotten a lot of trust from people via exemplary comments and what not would eventually basically be able to quasi-moderate Tildes alongside Deimos and what-not, which was basically Deimos's proposed solution to Power-mods and big Subreddits becoming basically unmoderated whenever they grow bigger than this or if whoever is in charge simply goes away for vacation, which to me at the time at least implied Tildes becoming a platform for use on the scale of something like Hacker News or even the Mastodon Fediverse was considered. But ultimately, this place was made to be very opposed to mass-use social media, constantly focused on growth, user data, infinite scroll, hot-takes and intense poasting, and newbies flooding this website and ginning up the latest hot topic to be The Discourse before having learned that this place isn't supposed to be like that has always been a big concern for everyone including Deimos, and this is a concern that is based on the history of many past online communities. So I guess a digital small-town like this tracks with that.

    16 votes

  12. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of July 22 in ~news

    Kuromantis
    Link
    Within 24 hours, Harris has received the endorsements of something around 75% of Democratic legislators from both house and Senate according to an endorsement tracker of her online and the...

    Within 24 hours, Harris has received the endorsements of something around 75% of Democratic legislators from both house and Senate according to an endorsement tracker of her online and the delegates of about a quarter of the convention already, and ActBlue registered nearly 100 million dollars from small-dollar donations to what is now her campaign, the party has readily ralllied around her. Outside the party, Romney and Pence have appreciated his decision and wished him well.

    9 votes

  13. Comment on US President Joe Biden announces that he will not run for re-election in ~news

    Kuromantis
    Link Parent
    Yeah, this has a good chance of being a chaotic moment for America's legal systems. The people I follow defend that, since Biden was not officially nominated and no ballots have been printed...

    Yeah, this has a good chance of being a chaotic moment for America's legal systems. The people I follow defend that, since Biden was not officially nominated and no ballots have been printed everything will be fine, but Republicans will definitely want to force him back on the ballot, and we don't really expect the Supreme Court to not oblige after the immunity ruling if it comes to it. I personally believe that if they can simply disallow Kamala or whoever from the ballot, then they may as well turn the USA to a one-party state.

    10 votes

  14. Comment on US President Joe Biden announces that he will not run for re-election in ~news

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link
    Immediate commentary: UPDATE: Joe Biden has endorsed her as Democratic nominee for president. Over the last few hours, this has been followed by both Clintons, the Congressional Black Caucus, the...

    Immediate commentary:

    - He did not announce that Kamala (or anyone) will already replace him for president, but he did mention her partnership with him on the note.

    UPDATE: Joe Biden has endorsed her as Democratic nominee for president. Over the last few hours, this has been followed by both Clintons, the Congressional Black Caucus, the progressive Caucus and many Democratic senators, congressmembers, speculated Harris veeps and more. Notably, Obama has been inconclusive in his medium statement, saying that he has "extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges."

    SECOND UPDATE: Within 24 hours, Harris has received the endorsements of something around 75% of Democratic legislators from both house and Senate according to an endorsement tracker of her online and the delegates of about a quarter of the convention already, and ActBlue registered nearly 100 million dollars donated to what is now her campaign, the party has readily ralllied around her. Outside the party, Romney and Pence have said they "respected his decision to drop out."

    • I'm surprised Twitter is still so relevant for politicians to post official announcements, despite everything Musk has done to it.

    • I genuinely hope the chaos the Democratic party was in for the past 3 weeks never repeats itself again.

    88 votes

  16. Comment on Maps distort how we see the world in ~science

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The Mercator projection in particular is useful because it has this feature called conformality, meaning that, at medium-small scales, it preserves shapes and angles perfectly and you cannot do...

    The Mercator projection in particular is useful because it has this feature called conformality, meaning that, at medium-small scales, it preserves shapes and angles perfectly and you cannot do that and also preserve area. This is so important for Google Maps because it means that, when you zoom into your city (or *any* city in the world map) right angles look like right angles and cities and states aren't slanted. Someone made a zoomable version of the Goode Homolosine projection and if you zoom into certain cities like Tokyo or Anchorage you will see the map is nearly unusable because everything is so slanted. Because it is a conformal map, Mercator prevents this while also being cylindrical, meaning that the cardinal directions are the same everywhere and that the projection is overall rectangular, meaning that you can simply put a mercator world map next to itself and have it seamlessly transition from one side of the world to another, thus making it very good for navigation.

    That being said, I think people's use of Google maps gives people the impression that Mercator is the only map that people ever use which I think is grossly exaggerated, people use/see Robinson, Equirectangular, Mollweide, Azimuthal (UN-like) and Conic maps just as, if not more often than Mercator, although basically all maps that aren't explicitly equal-area like Mollweide expand areas further from the equator, which turns out to just be the global north and antarctica.

    5 votes

  17. Comment on Maps distort how we see the world in ~science

    Kuromantis
    Link
    2 (other) sites I would recommend for viewing various types of map projections and how/what they distort are map-projections.net for looking at and comparing a lot of different maps and Jason...

    2 (other) sites I would recommend for viewing various types of map projections and how/what they distort are map-projections.net for looking at and comparing a lot of different maps and Jason Davies' Map Projection Transitions for interactivity. For viewing Mercator and Area+Length distortion, I think map-projection's Mercator vs Mollweide and Mercator vs Sinusoidal are the best way to see the extent of Mercator's distortion in these aspects, and also to see what the world even looks like when you make a map that translates land area to map area precisely. I think the most striking comparisons are by looking at the map comparisons where the projections are scaled to be equally wide, the Mercator projection is roughly square, while most equivalent map projections are around twice as tall as they are wide while also being widest at the equator and tapering off towards the poles, meaning that, when the equator is kept at constant scale, the mercator map is overall much bigger than the equal-area maps despite being very similar to them near the equator, with all that extra area going to more poleward locations and the countries located there.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Kerbal Space Program 2 development history in ~games

    Kuromantis
    (edited )
    Link
    The big takeaway I got from this is basically: Take Two gave Star Theory a budget of 2 years and 10 million dollars to make KSP 2 and Star Theory agreed with this offer assuming they were just...

    The big takeaway I got from this is basically:

    1. Take Two gave Star Theory a budget of 2 years and 10 million dollars to make KSP 2 and Star Theory agreed with this offer assuming they were just going to re-do KSP with less technical debt, better graphics and some more features, which is the kind of project Take-Two already had in mind and based this budget off of anyway

    2. Nate Simpson (the guy in Star Theory studios who heard this and decided to take charge of the project) was a true fan of KSP (which really contrasts with the popular portrayal of him as basically the bad guy) and instead proposed an enormous reimagining of KSP with colonies, interstellar, multiplayer and all the features we saw in trailers over the years and convinced Star Theory that pursuing this grandiose vision was worth it

    3. Take Two refused to change the budget to match the scale of Nate's dream and thus forced everyone who worked in the project to act like they were still developing an improved version of KSP 1 to the point of forcing everyone to reuse much of KSP 1's source code (while also forcing them to stay away from everyone who made said code)

    And basically the effect was that the developers (many of whom just came to work on a project they couldn't know anything about) couldn't meet all these contradictory demands (and Nate Simpson is an artist at heart and all the physics and math and whatnot that goes into a space game just wasn't really what he wanted to expand upon in the game unlike graphics and lore and visuals) and made a mess of a game.

    One thing I fond worth noting I that lots of people said they didn't want KSP 2 to just be a glamorized version of KSP which would be basically equivalent to KSP with some graphics and they were happy with Nate's expanded vision of the new game because it meant KSP 2 would be meaningfully larger then KSP 1. This basically makes it clear that KSP 2 was supposed to be exactly the type of cash grab they were afraid of and Take 2 did everything it could to keep KSP 2 in line with that original plan but Nate insisted on his dream and the worst of both worlds came true.

    13 votes

  19. Comment on New moons of Uranus and Neptune announced in ~space

    Kuromantis
    Link
    This new faint neptunian moon in particular claims the new spot of most distant moon with the longest orbital period from it's planet in the whole solar system, beating Neso to this accolade.

    Washington, D.C.— The Solar System has some new lunar members—the first new moon of Uranus discovered in more than 20 years, and likely the smallest, as well as two new moons of Neptune, one of which is the faintest moon ever discovered by ground-based telescopes. The discoveries were announced today by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

    The new Uranian member brings the ice giant planet’s total moon count to 28. At only 8 kilometers, it is probably the smallest of Uranus’ moons. It takes 680 days to orbit the planet. Provisionally named S/2023 U1, the new moon will eventually be named after a character from a Shakespeare play, in keeping with the naming conventions for outer Uranian satellites.

    The brighter Neptune moon now has a provisional designation S/2002 N5, is about 23 kilometers in size, and takes almost 9 years to orbit the ice giant. The fainter Neptune moon has a provisional designation S/2021 N1 and is about 14 kilometers with an orbit of almost 27 years. They will both receive permanent names based on the 50 Nereid sea goddesses in Greek mythology.

    This new faint neptunian moon in particular claims the new spot of most distant moon with the longest orbital period from it's planet in the whole solar system, beating Neso to this accolade.

    Discovering all three of the new moons required taking dozens of five-minute exposures over three- or four-hour periods on a series of nights. These exposures were shifted by the apparent motion of each respective planet and added together to create one very deep image. Using this time intensive observing technique on some of the largest telescopes in the world allowed the survey images to go deeper than any previous observations near Uranus and Neptune.

    10 votes