• 5 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • 13 words per minute isn’t impressive

    Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)

    On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.

    That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.





  • I’ve had a similar experience too. One time I couldn’t find my phone, so I start looking high and low. Not in my bedroom, not in the bathroom, the kitchen… At this point, I’m turning over every stone, looking through cabinets and drawers, running out to my car to see if it’s in there. Come back in and decide that it must’ve fallen under my bed and I just didn’t hear it. Can’t see under there really well, so I pull out the flashlight on my phone. Start looking under there, still not turning up. The panic is really starting to kick in.

    An embarrassing amount of time passes before I realize that I’m holding and using the thing I’m looking for.


  • Yeah, like I dunno, I think a lot of things I do by accident with my ADHD are super cool. But it definitely hurts more than it helps, and I don’t think that’s just because “we live in a society”. This post feels like huffing a suffocating dose of copium.

    • “Oh, sorry, I heard literally every word of what you just said, but my brain encoded nothing.”
    • “My sleep schedule is casually off by like five hours because I lost track of time hyperfocusing on learning about competitive Jenga until 4 AM.”
    • “I know I could have been doing things, but I had this thing I needed to be at in 8 hours, so I just couldn’t focus on them.”
    • “I either lose everything or create an intricate, tedious framework for where I keep everything at all times.”
    • “I struggle immensely to cope with stress in a healthy way and have issues with my temper.”
    • “If I can focus at all, it will be on exactly one thing, either for unhealthily long periods of time to the detriment of everything else or for so briefly that I accomplish nothing before moving on to the next dopamine rush.”
    • “I have a much higher risk of substance abuse because my body is starving for dopamine.”
    • “I have trouble keeping promises I’ve made to other people because they vanish out of my mind.”
    • “I constantly miss small details and need to quintuple check everything I do.”
    • “My priorities are constantly fucked, and I consistently put off everything until the last minute.”
    • “It often feels physically painful for me to focus when it’s not on the first thing my brain decides it wants to do.”

  • Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.

    You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.


  • Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.

    I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.

    To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.





  • Moreover, they note that it’s a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.

    If we’re sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.

    On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting ‘All’ by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there’s a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.


  • However, this particular user has deluded themself into believing this grandiose nonsense that they have a club of users who stalk them to downvote their stuff, when in reality we all come across them naturally because:

    • Lemmy is a pretty small place.
    • They’re a reasonably prolific commenter.
    • Every time they show up somewhere, it’s a woe-is-me victim complex about how they’re being downvoted (immediately drawing attention) or making the absolute shittest political takes imaginable, which again draws attention and downvotes. This could definitely be survivorship bias where I only notice their username on comments that are doing these two things and not on normal ones.

    I personally do not give enough of a shit about this user to waste any precious time or effort stalking them across Lemmy. (Source: I came across this post organically and would almost assuredly be one of the users Monk is talking about.)




  • TL;DW: Fire department specifications in the US mean that the trucks are wildly oversized for no reason, while European and East Asian ones are smaller, more maneuverable, and safer despite serving the exact same purpose and having the exact same gear. These needlessly oversized trucks are a detriment to safe urban design because fire departments lobby local governments to keep streets ridiculously wide because their trucks can’t properly drive through reasonably sized streets. The size of fire trucks could be reduced and more specialized vehicles used for EMS (which makes up the overwhelming majority of fire department responses), and it would have no impact on the readiness of fire departments at worst or, at best, it would make response times quicker.