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I do love weaponized autism.
Sadly phone scams are the 3rd most profitable bussinesses in the world. They aren’t going anywhere unless we give up having a phone or our phone carriers do their fucking job on actual scam prevention
Just romance scams out of SE asia by chinese gangs using forced labor/slaves lured to their compounds are estimated to bring in 40 billion a year. I got on a dating site, and had 3 of said romance scams on me, the pig butchering ones wasting a significant amount of time as they play a long game and don’t give away their game until a week or so into it, they ease you into how they make money on some investment to get you hooked to milk you and show you fake returns on it but you need money to get your money and more and more and then when you are out of money or refuse to give more fuck you, we scammed you.
It’s mostly dudes they have captive they beat, it’s not even a woman you are talking to in these pig butchering scams. And the migrant laborers that get lured there from other countries oftentimes, like India, if they don’t speak english well enough they might sell them to Palm Oil Plantations, which is another level of slavery hell.
And we keep doing business with those countries.
While they do make a lot of money i dont think they are even close he third most profitable businesses in the world.
Third ‘legal’.
Not that the top five should be considered any more legal than a drug dealer.
I literally would if I could. Text and Internet only. I already never answer my phone because of these fucking people.
Right now they are calling my entire family with their scam lies.
Just wait till they call your family with a AI clone of your voice. “You” are in trouble and need cash now!
When I was in graduate school, I used to call the 700 Club’s prayer hotline and talk about my dissertation. To their credit, those people were remarkably patient and would only occasionally attempt to steer the conversation back in the direction of Jesus and his need to have some of my money. “Oh, I don’t have any money. Anyway, it turns out that there’s a perfect correlation between the giving of dowries and engagement in plow-based agriculture.” Completely true but for some reason they didn’t really care.
I do love the idea of educating scammy christians while they’re doing scammy shit.
I want to hear more about relationships in plow-based agriculture.
First you pay the dowry, then you get to plow
You’re thinking of brideprice, which is basically the opposite of dowry.
Have you heard about our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, and his need of your money?
This would be a great way to learn how to debate as well. The phone people wouldn’t know what hit them.
I just yell at them in a bizarre mix of English, Latin, and random archaic Germanic words. I’ve been told I sound like a Icelander with issues when I do that.
Well… Are you?
No I’m of Scots, Irish, English, Norwegian, and High German descent. Sure I may share some common ancestoral kinship with some Icelanders but that’s going back a thousand years minimum.
Disclaimer: drinking alone in Reykjavik at the moment
You might be surprised! There is a non-trivial amount of Scottish ancestry in Iceland. When Iceland was being settled by the Norse, they stopped off adding the way in Shetland, Orkney, and Caithness to gather supplies and… Well… Slaves. But there is a lot of cross over between the two areas. I suppose it depends on where in Scotland your ancestry lies.
I’m a Stewart and my ancestors were primarily focused on merchantry before and after leaving Scotland for New Hampshire so… Highland and lowland I guess. It becomes real fucking blurry outside of our oral history that our cadet branch was created by one of the Stewart Kings for merchantry specifically to prevent a stupid succession squabble. Beyond that fuck if I know.
For people who think they’re winning by fucking with scammers, unless you are tying up hours of their time, you are doing the opposite by engaging with them. And even if you tie up hours, they aren’t really losing.
Obviously, falling for the scam is their ideal outcome, but ANY engagement beyond silence, a generic VM, or a disconnected/fax line marks your number as ‘active’ which can then be sold to other scammers.
So they still get a profit, and your number winds up on more scamming lists.
We are also getting close to the point where it won’t even be an actual human you’re talking to, it’ll just be some AI, making engagement even more useless.
If you get a call from an unknown number and you don’t have call screening, answer and SAY NOTHING! Not hello, not “may I ask whose calling”, mute your phone so they don’t even get background noise. The only numbers they can’t get anything out of are the ones that are brick walls.
Is this what you say to scammers when they call you?
Surely, if they’re selling your numbers to other scammers, other scammers are losing that same amount of money?
Then why do scammers get so angry? This doesn’t even make sense, except for the AI part.
As scummy as it is, it’s still how they make their living. Not at all taking their side, but I get pissed when someone wastes my time at work too. No idea how their pay structure is, but if it’s commission based, yea, more anger for having time wasted make sense
Just because tying them up doesn’t hurt or stop the overall operation, you still wasted that one guys time and probably hurt his metrics 🤷♂️
Still not worth it to me
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I can only info dump when I’m prompted to start talking about something now. I have special interests, but I have no interest in talking about them with people that I can feel aren’t really engaged. And the only people who ever engage eventually do get worn down after a while, or they’re more knowledgeable than me about something and that makes me fall in infatuation with them.
So if anyone wants to talk about modding video games and get married, hmu. Modding specifically is my special interest, and the games I mod include:
Elder Scrolls series (primarily Oblivion/ Skyrim but I have played some modded morrowind within the last 5 years)
Fallout series (all of them! Ok, I haven’t played 2 or the offshoots, but… shut up. New Vegas is my favorite :3)
Stardew Valley (I have 2700 hours in stardew :3 burnt out rn tho lowkey)
Dark Souls 1/3, Elden Ring
Baldurs Gate 3
Dragon Age (mostly origins, it continuously went downhill from there for me. I have done a couple modded replays of inquistion tho)
Minecraft
If you were to ask me what I could go on for the longest about? Probably New Vegas? Especially since I recently put in a fresh 200 hours. I finally got into TTW (a mod for new vegas that utilizes your copy of Fallout 3 goty to combine both games into a single experience) and installed it alongside some modernization modlists and HOLY SHIT.
I hadn’t played since 2021, an era that seemed like New Vegas was dying. People had long moved onto Fallout 4, quest mods weren’t coming out at the same frequency, etc
There was a total renaissance right after I left. If you haven’t played new vegas in a while: consider coming back and finding a guide or using a program like wabbajack to mod your game.
I personally followed the Viva New Vegas guide, then after deciding to jump into TTW, I found that the VNV people have a guide for a TTW list called TBoT (The Best of Times). Both of these lists are,'in my experience, more stable than the base game. A lot of important performance and configuration mods came out.
Then, there’s another list called WSG that I followed (wasteland survival guide), which added new content to the game and made it more hardcore.
If you made it this far and you really want to hear more, ask me a question. :3
Sir, this is a Burger King.
Can I get uh… chimken numget?
Go for the chicken fries, my dude!
If you like modding new Vegas, you should totally get into CP2077.
I also want to get into fallout 3. I’m so very tempted to set up ttw but my copy of 3 is on EGS and fnv is on steam.
Yeah man, I know I need to give cyberpunk a try sometime, but there is truly such a back log! On your recc, I’ll definitely move it up in priority tho.
TTW has been so good because Fallout 3 was my first Fallout game and New Vegas is my favorite.
It’s awesome. But yeah, the installation I think is more complex when you have it like that.
Something I noticed after replaying Fallout 3 for the first time in like 10 years, also, was how bad the voice direction in the game was. Like it isn’t always bad but it is obvious that the voice actors weren’t given much to work with at all.
There was a huge mod release the other day called DLC 2. It has so much stuff now.
I’m playing the game for the 4th time.
I took a look! Hell yeah, I will get on it… as soon as I put down No Man’s Sky, which I picked up recently.
Shit. That’s a game I want to play. Once I finish space engineers
They just released a large content update lmao. 10 years after the initial release.
Make sure you know what you’re signing up for, tho. It’s very much a minecraft-style game. There is some story, and it isn’t bad, but it definitely isn’t the focus. It is a fun mystery to kinda discover tho. The game has a lot of mystery/exploration aspects.
Have you dabbled in game design of your own?
I have! Another interest of mine is TTRPG, specifically I am a frequent DM. I love designing custom encounters with unique mechanics to engage my players.
I have also dabbled in coding. I started with HTML and BYOND (I never made anything beyond a 2d tile map of grass, an icon to move around on it, and a “hello world” message).
When I was a teenager, I tried to get into modding New Vegas via the GECK, but it was complicated and tedious looking. I wonder if I could go back now, as an adult, and make something I’m really proud of.
More recently, I got into making a mod for Stardew Valley. Idk what the code language would be called, but it’s an extremely simple text-based system. I was making a mod to add a pop media character to the game because my close friend really likes him. It was going pretty well and honestly the scope creep got big, I was really fleshing the character’s custom story out. Until I realized I had missed something in my testing, and noticed that certain triggers weren’t working, and realized there were character limits for triggers. Which meant that I couldn’t set up events with complex enough decisions to meet the goal I wanted to reach.
So I’ve taken a step back from that for awhile.
I did want to design video games as a kid, but it seemed like such a lofty goal that I never even tried pursuing it.
click /S
I could do the various incarnations of the Doctor in Doctor Who. An example info-dump from memory without looking stuff up:
So the first Doctor was played by William Hartnell, and later Richard Hurndall and David Bradley after Hartnell passed away. Second Doctor was Patrick Troughton who (tangent incoming) originally pitched playing the second Doctor in black-face which thankfully got nixed. Third Doctor was Jon Pertwee, Fourth was Tom Baker who is still the longest-running Doctor by episode count, Fifth was Peter Davidson, Sixth was Colin Baker, Seventh was Sylvester McCoy although (tangent 2) he also played the Sixth Doctor for the regeneration because Colin Baker got fired and refused to film his last scene so the Sixth in that scene is just McCoy in a wig. Eight Doctor was Paul McGann who was the longest-running Doctor chronologically even though he’s only been in one full episode (the 1996 TV movie) because the show didn’t come back until 2005. He’s done some cameos in the show since though. Ninth Doctor in canonical order is John Hurt, although he was added in retroactively during the 11th Doctor’s tenure so he’s referred to as the War Doctor instead of the Ninth. Tenth Doctor canonically is Christopher Eccleston, who is referred to as the Ninth Doctor because of the aforementioned retconning. Then it gets complicated. David Tennant is the Eleventh, Twelfth and Sixteenth Doctor because he regenerated into himself and then came back again later on, which we’ll get to in a bit, but he’s referred to as the 10th and 14th Doctor. Thirteenth Doctor is Matt Smith, who’s referred to as the Eleventh. He was also supposed to be the Doctor’s final life because Time Lords are only supposed to have 13 of them, but then he got a new cycle of regenerations because it would be silly to end the show because of some arbitrary plot point from the 1970s. So then Peter Capaldi was the Fourteenth (or First if you want to start counting again from the new cycle, which nobody does) and is called the Twelfth. Fifteenth (or Second) was Jodie Whittaker, who in the show is called the Thirteenth. She then regenerated into David Tennant again (hence him also being the Sixteenth/Fourteenth) for a couple of specials, and then he split into two separate Doctors, the other one being Ncuti Gatwa who is the Seventeenth or maybe co-Sixteenth or maybe Fourth but is referred to as the Fifteenth in the show. He then (SPOILERS if you haven’t caught up to the last episode) regenerated into Billie Piper, who played Rose Tyler previously in the show and also a sort of sentient bomb called The Moment and who might not even be the Doctor at all, we don’t really know yet. There’s also all the Timeless Child stuff which throws off the numbering even further, and Jo Martin who plays the Fugitive Doctor who is possibly some sort of pre-First Doctor Doctor but the show never really explained it. There are also some other pre-First Doctor Doctors shown in flashbacks and things in The Brain of Morbius and The Timeless Child, but who knows if they’re even real or not. There’s also another David Tennant who is a sort of human clone of the Doctor who lives off in some parallel universe, and another Tom Baker who is a character called the Curator who seems to be some far-future retired version of the Doctor who revisits some of his old faces.
I could go on but you get the idea.
click
I’m sure you were very good, but I doubt that you had that good a name memory as a five-year old.
I taught myself how to read as well, so I ain’t the dullest of pens either but somehow I just doubt you could’ve rattled off that many correct names and titles as a five-year old. Although, it might just be projection from my almost 40-year old weed-smoking soon-to-be-some-serious-memory-problem having ass. If so, apologies.
never read the ‘wall of text’. that’s for the bots
Retired moderator on Encyclopedia Titanica here. Whaddaya wanna know?
What draws you to the Titanic?
That’s an interesting question! I think it’s a combination of things. Firstly, the ship sank on an even keel, and took 2 hours 40 minutes to sink. Most shipwrecks of the time listed badly and sank quickly: for example, the Empress of Ireland, which sank in 1914 with a greater loss of passenger life, went down on her side in 18 minutes. The Titanic’s stability and longevity allowed many dramas to play out, and the (relatively) large number of survivors allowed the stories to be told.
Then there’s the Greek tragedy element. If only they had have seen the 'berg 30 seconds sooner or 30 seconds later. If only one less watertight compartment had been breached. If only the ‘Mystery Ship’ (likely the SS Californian) had come to their aid - although in all fairness, it may not have made a huge difference. If only the ice field hadn’t have stretched so far south that year. If only the radio messages warning of ice had been heeded. If only the Californian’s radio operator hadn’t switched off his set and gone to bed, just before the collision. If only Captain Smith had turned ‘the Corner’ half an hour later, to put the ship on a more southerly track. If only … you get the idea.
Then there’s the conspiracy theories and the associated mysteries. Was the Mystery Ship really the Californian? Was the Titanic swapped for RMS Olympic and sank in an insurance scam? (No.) Was a cursed Egyptian Mummy in the hold? (No.) Did she hit the ice along the side of the hull or the keel? Or both? What about the book ‘Futility’ published years earlier that seemed to predict the disaster? Did an Officer really shoot a passenger? (Very doubtful.) Why did Lightoller insist on women and children ONLY in the lifeboats rather than woman and children FIRST? Is the the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám on the wreck and can it be retrieved?
Then there’s the historical elements. The Marconi radio set is the only one left in the world - why can’t we be allowed to salvage it? Few photographs were taken of Titanic: most extant photos are of the RMS Olympic, one of her sisters. How many blades are on the central turbine propeller? How does the ship differ in design from her sisters? Why did so few Third Class passengers attempt escape before the lifeboats were launched? What songs did the band actually play? (It probably wasn’t Nearer My God To Thee.) Is the swimming pool still full of water? etc. etc.
Then there’s the people: the last of the Gilded Age billionaires and socialites, thrown together with the Second Class ‘ordinary’ folk and the Third Class immigrants from all of Europe. How did they act and react? Who accepted their fate with dignity and tried to help their fellow passengers? Why did J. Bruce Ismay get into a lifeboat knowing full well how he’d be treated if he survived? Were the crew of Boat #1 actually bribed by the Duff-Gordons not to fish out survivors? And so on.
I’ll stop here before I get carried away.
Edit: typos.
My great grandfather died on the Titannic. He was engine-room crew.
The Engineers were exceptionally heroic that night working to keep the power on, allowing the pumps, lights and radio to function. Their counter-flooding kept the ship on a fairly even keel, allowing the lifeboats to be launched from both sides of the ship. Joseph Bell was the Chief Engineer Officer on the ship, along with 24 engineers, 6 electrical engineers, two boilermakers, a plumber and a clerk. None survived. They have a memorial in Southampton.
My great grandfather’s body was recovered and is buried at the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Novia Scotia. His wife was never told his body had been recovered and my sister was the first member of the family to ever visit his grave.
In my home state there is a very small town that supposedly was going to be the recipient of a large investment that sank on the Titanic. Or possibly it was just the investors? Either way, the town never got the investment and so remained a very small town. I imagine that there must be a number of such stories of what might have been if the Titanic had made it to dock. Do you know of any?
None that come to mind, although I am more of a rivet-counter than a people person. Researchers such as Jim Kalafus or Randy Bigham may have a few such stories. As well as those who never made it to New York, quite a few survivors also decided to return home to Europe rather than settle in the US as planned.
Talking of which, Jim Kalafus is going through a really tough time medically at the moment. If anyone here has a couple of dollars to spare, it would make a huge difference to him.
Edit: links are hard.
Was the Titanic pretty cool?
In all senses, yes. The water temperature was -2°C or 28°F and she was a triumph of design and aesthetics.
click /s
The only good weaponization of science.
Answer the phone like you are a business receptionist.
“Hello, this is Fronz Frunickal with Yogurt O’ Try-it Froyo, how can I serve you?”
It’s funny listening to them silently process what they just heard before hanging up.
what? actual human calling? sounds like something an ai would say.
I am 34 and i have never received robocalls before this year, in which I’ve already gotten a dozen or more calls. I think it has something to do with me living in Denmark. New hot scam just dropped in Denmark.🤪
they destroyed landlines with constant auto-dialing calls. when you pick up they either play a recording or in early days switch to a live scammer in a boiler-room somewhere. i moved my landline to google voice and silence is golden. get emailed transcripts of talking or it’s a few seconds of silence. brave new world
I saw a video saying that it was just a matter of tele companies just verifying and blocking callers, but that they had no incentive to do so.🤷 Google voice sounds so awesome. A shame it seems like it’s only available in the US
it was complicated moving the number since they only accept mobile numbers. had to move to a burner AT&T phone, then to google voice. been 20 years so far. nothing but spam there now. you can pick from available numbers. maybe VPN would work. expect google will just end the service one day. https://voice.google.com/
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One of the 5 animals believed to have the capacity for sentience? I think you mean consciousness?
The entire mammal kingdom is widely considered sentient. As are many other groups like fish and insects.
Even with consciousness it’s stretching it is very conservative to estimate just 5 species.
Afaik the terms are sentience vs sapience, which get constantly confused by everyone including me.
My brain came to a full stop here. One of those “have I ever seen these two in the same room” moments.
For anyone else like me: Sentience is the ability to feel and perceive things. Sentient is the adjective form.
Sapience is the ability to think and acquire wisdom, and the capacity for intelligence. Sapient is the adjective form.
Sentient is often misused for any living creature that thinks, when sapient would be the correct word.
Modern humans are classified as homo sapiens.
I think the confusion is summed up by a quote by a park ranger talking about the design of trash cans in National Parks: (paraphrased) There’s a lot of overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.
So if I understand, both are sentient. But they vary widely on sapience.
Sentience is recognizing the trash can is there. Sapience is being able to figure out how to open the lid to access the trash and keeping the wisdom to open the next one easily. Sentience is feeling either frustrated or happy based on the level of success.
Unless I messed it up.
To quote Wikipedia:
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes.
So it just distinguishes animals of some neural complexity from primitive organisms. E.g. iirc jellyfish might not feel pain, and single-celled organisms most probably don’t.
Regarding sapience, many animals show some degree of intelligence, but we’re yet to see them reflecting on their own nature and experience. This I guess is what meant by sapience in the context of man vs other animals.
“Sentience has broader and narrower senses. In a broad sense, it refers to any capacity for conscious experience. […] In a narrower sense, it refers to the capacity to have valenced experiences: experiences that feel bad or feel good to the subject, such as experiences of pain and pleasure”.
Taken from https://academic.oup.com/book/57949/chapter/475703402
Also, here is an article about the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness that strongly supports the claim that sentience is a trait shared by most, if not all, of the animal kingdom.
https://www.animal-ethics.org/10th-anniversary-of-the-cambridge-declaration-on-consciousness/
one of the 5 animals believed to have the capacity for sentience
I’m taking a guess and saying Dogs, dolphins, an great apes… No idea that the last one could be.
Am I on the right track?
What, why dogs? They are dumber than cats, just good at understanding humans.
You forgot corvids.
Close! They are chimps, elephants, dolphins, octopus, and crows
First of all parrots are smarter than the lot, orcas, some dogs like border collies too, it’s a lot bigger than you are giving it credit for.
I’d put Octopuses way higher on the list than a dog.
Dogs aren’t more intelligent than cats or cows.
My list would be great apes, octopuses, dolphins, corvids, elephantsOctopuses are right next to God on the list.
Border collies have made the list of the smartest animals before. There are different types of intelligence too, national geographic had dolphins, orcas, ravens/crows, parrots, border collies/dogs, chimpanzees. I feel like I’m forgetting one too.
Orca, corvid, octopus, apes, elephant?
I’d guess parrots or crows over dogs.
Ravens
capacity for sentience
Aren’t most animals sentient? Wiktionary says that it means “Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling”. Even simple animals like flies are capable of “sensation”, and most complex animals experience all three. I would say “sapient” (“possessing intelligence or a high degree of self-awareness”) in this context.
You’re the scientist, what is the scientifically correct/used/accepted meaning of “sentient”? Or has it been found that most animals do not, or at least do not consciously in the way humans do, sense, think, or feel? Correct me if any of what I’m saying is wrong.
Of course animals are sentient. The arrogance of people to think we are the only animal capable of sentience, or intelligence of any kind. We have evolved to be better at some things than other animals, but they are all smarter than we are in ways. Dogs know more about smells than we do, remember a smell for life. They have a better sense of direction, as many wild animals do, and are better at remembering landscapes and vast wild areas.
You get into cold blooded animals and it changes somewhat, but all warm blooded animals are capable of more than we give them credit for. Cold blooded probably too but in a different way.
A drop of water falls in an endless, still lake. The ripple spreads out, leaving a circular wave spreading out endlessly. Tiny disturbances create their own ripples; one side travelling with the main ripple, causing wonderful interactions in the wavefront; but the main ripple grows faster than these disturbances spread across it.
The beings of the ripple look across the main ripple, seeing the disturbances as their interactions propagate across the main ripple. Looking back far enough to the earliest disturbances, one thing becomes clear; the entire ripple comes from one drop, and most of the ripple is moving away faster than a disturbance can propagate.
An expanding universe where every point of the universe started from the middle is pretty easy to conceptualize with the right analogy.
The disturbances propagate at the same speed as the ripple, unless it’s some crazy nonlinear ripple.
It’s the weak point of the analogy, surface gravity waves like you’d get in a shallow lake do have nonlinear behaviour though.
Maybe a more accurate description would be to describe the wavespeed of the medium having tiny variations that cause extremely small, close range kinks where the wavefront crosses past itself, relating speed through time vs speed through space as the radial and tangential propagation of the wavefront. But that’s a less clean analogy, and the lake ripple is still good for describing how an entire universe can appear to be in the middle no matter where you look, despite originating from (suspectedly) a singular point.
Somehow I missed the “up by” the first time around, and was confused about who would be so bored to hang themselves.
Having to bad english for this what the hell that post says ?
When person who wrote that post was a child, they liked talking about “chambered nautiluses” (which are basically, ocean snails). Also, their mom used to get scam calls. Their mom made their child (which is the person who wrote the post) talk to the scammers about these nautiluses so that their time was wasted.
Ohhhokay got it thanks
