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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If it comes up the basement drain, then the obstruction is further down, and so you can’t really flush it from the drain and out. You need to find the sewer service well further out and flush it from there and in.

    It’s likely a broken pipe taking in sand or branches, so flushing it won’t be a permanent fix. A plumber can probably fix it from outside too, so it doesn’t have to be very expensive.

    You don’t need to waste your money on snakes and that kind of stuff. If a regular hose on full blast can’t loosen the obstruction from outside, then you need a plumber anyway.




  • You’re right. OPs second question is more specifically about vision, while I answered more broadly.

    Anyway, comparing it to data from a camera is not really possible.

    Analoge vs. digital and so, but also in the way that we experience it.

    The minds interpretation of vision is developed after birth. It takes several weeks before an infant can recognise anything and use the eyes for any purpose. Infants are probably blissfully experiencing meaningless raw sensory inputs before that. All the pattern recognition that is used to focus on things are learned features and so also dependent on actually learning them.

    I can’t find the source for this story, but allegedly there was this missionary in Africa who came across a tribe who lived in the jungle and was used to being surrounded by dense forest their entire life. He took some of them to the savannah and showed them the open view. They then tried to grab the animals that were grassing miles away. They didn’t develop a sense of perspective for things in longer distance, because they’d never experienced it.

    I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes a point. Some people are better at spotting things in motion or telling colours apart etc. than others. It matters how we use vision. Even in the moment. If I ask you to count all the red things in a room, you’ll see more red things that you were generally aware of. So the focus is not just the 6° angle or whatever. It’s what your brain is recognising for the pattern at mind.

    So the idea of quantifying vision to megapixels and framerate is kind of useless in understanding both vision and the brain. It’s connected.

    Same with sound. Some people have proved being able to use echo localisation similar to bats. You could test their vision blindfolded and they’d still make their way through a labyrinth or whatever.

    Testing senses is difficult because the brain tends to compensate in that way. It’d need to be a very precise testing method to make any kind of quantisation for a particular sense.


  • They definitely do show sympathy, sadness, fear and joy, which are unrelated to being rewarded with food and trained behaviour.

    I don’t see why they shouldn’t have a full range of emotions. It seems simpler and more natural than developing a transactional response only.

    The bigger question is what emotions even are. If it’s a chemical or biological reaction then it’d be weird if other mammals didn’t have about the same emotions as humans.

    It’s difficult to see how an animal feels unless you know it well. I can mostly see how my own dog is doing, but I have no idea what mood a random dog on the street is in.





  • I don’t think it’s the brain but rather our consciousness that is limited. Our sensory inputs are always on and processed by the brain, but our consciousness is very picky and also slow.

    People can sometimes recall true memories that they weren’t aware of, or react to things they didn’t think of and such.

    Consciousness is also somehow lagging behind the actual decision making, but always presents itself as the cause of action.

    Sort of like Windows telling you that you removed a USB stick 2 seconds after you did it and was well aware of it happening. Consciousness is like that, except it takes responsibility for it too…

    When it encounters something that it didn’t predict, it’ll tell you that “yeah this happened and this is why you did that”. Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.

    This is a good thing mostly, because it allows you to react faster than having to consider your options consciousnessly. You do not need to or have time to make a conscious decision to dodge a dodgeball, but you’ll still think you did.



  • It’s generally a lot less pretentious, which might appear as a lack of “intelligent” comments. Most Lemmy users just don’t spend hours trying to write page long comments on obscure topics that nobody else here cares about.

    Also, in the more specific communities, lots of things are taken for granted. Places with more users will more often have the “todays 10000” user, who just discovered something that is new to them and then decides to write about it in detail. Lemmy is more polite that way: Not reposting noob stuff on a daily basis for karma or whatever point system brings it up constantly on other sites.









  • I don’t ever use the start menu for anything. I can’t be bothered to look through that mess.

    Instead I press the windows key and type the first few letters of whatever I need, unless it’s already stickied to the bar. It’s fewer key presses than clicking through the start menu. I suppose that still counts as opening the start menu, even if I don’t use the actual menu structure.

    I also use the windows + arrow keys to toss windows around the multiple screens. It has a lot of other purposes, like creating extra desktops etc, which I admittedly never use.

    It’s a useful button for sure, but it does get a little overwhelming when combined with shift ctrl or alt . I can’t possibly remember all the uses, but I have the most commonly used on muscle memory.