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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • that’s the important caveat:

    it does NOT work on everyone, but that’s irrelevant.

    if it works on even 1% of people, but has zero effect on everyone else, companies would still use it everywhere anyways.

    a 1% difference over even just a couple thousand customers adds up over time.

    so, no, it doesn’t work on everyone, and it doesn’t have to.

    it just has to work on some people, and not deter any more people than it works on.

    if anyone wonders when it does and does not work: like most of these psych-tricks the effect mostly disappears when you point it out to people or otherwise make them actively think about what they’re buying.

    same for the change-the-layout-of-the-store-all-the-time thing: doesn’t work on all people, doesn’t have to.











  • the ejecta themselves would definitely pose a danger, but air supply running out would probably kill you before they impact the moon.

    the distance between earth and moon is already significant, the angle shown in the picture is pointing away from the moon, most of the mass would stay in the same place due to gravity pulling everything back together, the orbital path the debris has to take in order to impact is gonna take multiple orbits for most of the debris, and only a fraction will impact on the site pictured.

    still dangerous, but not as immediately as one would think.

    the only significant projectiles would be a small portion of the debris just off-center from the exit crater (the sort of “cork” shooting out):

    • some of that mass would be going the right way
    • some of it will be going the right speed to arrive in time before air runs out
    • and some of that is gonna rain down roughly in the area the picture was taken at

    so it would only be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that even has a chance of coming down onto the astronaut pictured, but that’s still gonna be enough to be dangerous.

    it’s also gonna take a couple days to arrive most likely; the debris is not gonna come straight at the moon, because by the time it makes it there, the moon would have moved and it would miss.

    a vanishingly small fraction will move fast enough to impact on a (mostly) direct trajectory. those impactors will still take at least a couple hours, even at close to relativistic speeds, and it’ll consist almost entirely of dust and tiny micro meteorites. the fast movers have to be tiny, because anything larger would be torn apart by the acceleration.

    (…actually I’m not sure any material apart from more exotic states of matter like nuclear pasta (which doesn’t exist on earth. yes, that’s an actual technical term) could even theoretically be accelerated to a significant fraction of c in the presumably less than a few seconds pictured above without being torn apart at the atomic level…and dense material experiences greater gravitational pull, so it would have a harder time reaching the moon…)

    in order to impact, the vast majority of the debris would need to move on parabolic trajectories, and most of those will take multiple orbits in order to impact.

    during those orbits, most debris will be pulled back onto earth, or in orbit around earth, since it’s gravitational pull is so much greater than the moons. add another fraction to the ones above ;)

    we’re still missing a bunch of considerations, but I’m gonna stop here.

    point is: as pictured above (apart from the impactor being impossibly dense) the danger to someone on the moon is mostly manageable and secondary to the danger of supplies running out.



  • eh…given the distance and the weird orbits it’s gonna take for the debris to actually hit…a few days probably?

    couple of days for the bombardment to hit the surface, and then it’s a game of statistics how long it takes for a direct hit or secondary ejecta to hit your landing site/base.

    probably a better idea to take all the fun pills all at once than to wait for that…

    actually, you can probably simulate this rather well in universe sandbox! ;)



  • you probably already know this, but for anyone else:

    The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.

    In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.

    so it’s a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.

    highly recommend all of the other books!

    they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!

    what’s best about the series is, as you’ve already explained, the “hard-fantasy/sci-fi” approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.

    best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn’t really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)

    also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it’s december?





  • 9bananas@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    2 months ago

    eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse…

    they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum…of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible “last message first” sorting, and terrible UI that doesn’t do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at…

    so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it’s not an exception…


  • 9bananas@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldTeach the children.
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    2 months ago

    you shouldn’t use it because it’s a black hole for information.

    anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.

    when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.

    communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.

    think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.

    so many communities have already just… disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.

    that’s why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.

    it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.

    it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can’t show you the contents, so you don’t even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they’ve already been answered, and on and on the list goes.

    discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!

    there’s a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!

    so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don’t talk to each other, or don’t even realize they exist at all!

    and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque “search” and “discover” algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.

    it’s top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.

    discord is the bane of online social groups!

    and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there’s no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!