“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • The Flintstones, for what it’s worth, came out in a time before cartoons were seen as “for kids” by default. The Flintstones is basically The Honeymooners but animated and prehistoric, so while Winston would’ve unambiguously known it was marketing to some children, The Flintstones was an adult animated sitcom.

    The Flintstones is retrospectively seen through the lens of “kids’ show” in large part because of things like kids’ merch (e.g. Flintstones vitamins and cereal), rerunning on stations like Cartoon Network, generally a more heavy “animation is for kids” defaultism, and the fact that later adult animated sitcoms like The Simpsons pushed the envelope much farther.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.worldTIL about Wiki.js
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    2 months ago

    I replied to Scrubbles, not to you, OP. If you saw it, I actually edited in “sorry for the brutal honesty, OP” at the end for just a minute because after I’d already submitted that comment, I misread something you said that made me think this was your work-in-progress hobby project (which is really sad that I could’ve thought that to begin with). I did try it here as linked below, and it’s hilariously horrendous. It’s like somebody made a bootleg Docusaurus where the contents of the page are editable and you can do a poor man’s git diff between edits and said “done, we’re wiki software now”. There are so many things wrong with this in the way of being serious, productive wiki software that I don’t even know where to begin. It’s somehow only barely less terrible than Fandom, and Fandom has 20% of the screen dedicated to actual articles and is a cancer eating away at fan wikis (plugging Indie Wiki Buddy).

    Edit: Is there not even a spot at the bottom of the page for the license the contents of the article are released under? Oh my god. Copyleft is the most singularly important aspect of a healthy, thriving wiki, and instead of telling me a license like CC BY-SA 4.0, it’s saying “Powered by Wiki.js”. I can’t. This is not a serious piece of software created by someone who’s touched a wiki in their life.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.worldTIL about Wiki.js
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    2 months ago

    Fandom uses MediaWiki just like Wikimedia projects do, and that also means it uses wikitext rather than markdown. MediaWiki is especially nice because 1) it’s something prolific editors are already familiar with, 2) it has a great WYSIWYG editor called VisualEditor, 3) it’s basically guaranteed to be rock-solid, 4) it has good support and documentation, 5) wikitext is portable to functionally any wiki (apparently except Wiki.js right now, which is genuinely unacceptable for wiki software), and 6) a lot of tools, extensions, and preferences that let you customize your editing experience are made for MediaWiki.

    Looking at Wiki.js as someone with a decade of extensive experience editing and administrating various wikis, it looks very style-over-substance. Assuming the screenshot of their docs is supposed to represent the wiki, it’s basic as all fuck in comparison to what a MediaWiki page is capable of. It’s literally just text, headers, and hyperlinks to other pages. This is something fiddling around with CSS for 20 minutes could produce.

    The sidebar has a bog-standard telescoping ToC, a standard history button (I hope that leads to a full history, anyway), a star rating system*, and a bookmark/share/print icon trio. This is baby’s first wiki. Where are the templates? Captioned images? Tables? Not all pages have to have these things, but Wiki.js gives the reader one (1) image at the top as a first impression, and it’s something totally unremarkable.

    * As someone with 25,000+ edits on Wikipedia where we actually rate articles (other wikis don’t seriously do this), I can tell you this is absolutely fucking useless. We have a rating system on Wikipedia called Stub, Start, C, B, GA, A (basically disused), and FA. This is on the talk page and is nomimally based on various criteria. Almost always, the people using it actually know what they’re doing. Here, though? You’re encouraging substituting an actual talk page discussion (which I don’t even see here) with a useless star rating. Does the star rating reset every time you make an edit in case you resolved past issues? Do the votes get a corresponding message? Will the votes mean literally anything beyond what you could already glean by looking at the page? If I can edit anonymously, can I vote anonymously? It’s just stupid fluff to make up for how utterly redundant this software is to MediaWiki.





  • OP:

    Through the years, archaeologists have found similar results at many other sites in Indonesia, India and China. As the evidence accumulates, it appears that people were able to survive and continue to be productive after Toba blew its stack. This suggests that this eruption might not have been the main cause of the population bottleneck originally suggested in the Toba catastrophe hypothesis.

    While Toba might not help scientists understand what caused ancient human populations to plummet to 10,000 individuals, it does help us understand how humans have adapted to catastrophic events in the past and what that means for our future.

    It’s a good article, and I enjoyed reading it, but did you? I think you should leave this post up, but you could instead retitle it to something like “TIL humanity survived an eruption 74,000 years ago that was 10,000 larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption”. (Also, Toba is in Indonesia in North Sumatra.)



  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCall me...
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    3 months ago

    Funnily enough, that Unidan copypasta is 100% correct. I don’t know why, for as long-winded as it is, though, he doesn’t use more taxonomic names to make it precise: jackdaws are in genus Coloeus, and crows and ravens are in genus Corvus, both under family Corvidae. The apes are the primate superfamily Hominoidea*, which Homo sapiens sits under. There, Unidan; that’s all you had to say.

    * To clarify, not “are in” – are. You are an ape if and only if your species is in this superfamily.


  • For those who might be confused, “daddy longlegs” colloquially refers to two totally separate things. Spiders are of the order Araneae under class Arachnida (they’re arachnids; go figure).

    “Daddy longlegs” often refers to cellar spiders, the family Pholcidae within the spiders. However, “daddy longlegs” also refers to another order of arachnids altogether called Opiliones, also known as harvestmen. So if this doesn’t look like the daddy longlegs you know, that’s why; they’re not a “different type” of the cellar spider you’re familiar with.



  • OP, you say “free, open source, and fully attributed”, but it’s really not fully attributed. I know Google will live, but you need to be more attentive to licensure and credit. Here are some major problems (in no particular order):

    • The weather icon pack is licensed under CC BY 4.0, yet you never mention this license. It’s not sharealike (“SA”), so you can relicense, but it would be nice for users to know that you are, in fact, allowed to do that.
    • You never link to the weather icons page so users can easily find the original icons.
    • You say “inspired by Google’s Weather Icons v4” but then never say what you changed or how. Did you modify them? Build these from scratch using Google’s as a reference? You don’t have to say for the license; this would just be nice. If it can’t be summed up in a sentence or two, then fair enough.
    • In “Credits & Acknowledgments”, you never mention the Google Weather icons – which are the entire reason this repo exists. Given the only requirement of CC BY is proper attribution, something needs to go here.
    • You don’t even link back to the third-party repo where you got them from.
    • Under “License & Legal Notice” and in your LICENSE file, you call the copyright status of the icons “uncertain”. This confuses the hell out of me, because on the icons pack page for Google, it clearly reads at the bottom: Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
      • This to me indicates you did minimal research and didn’t actually care about the license but called it “open-source” anyway and happened to get lucky. It seems like instead of finding the official source, you got them from this repo which is similarly sloppy.
      • One of the lines reads “No official Google documentation has been located that confirms these specific icons are released under an open source license”. OP, for the love of actual god, this would’ve taken less time to find than it took you to type that sentence; below is the second result on DuckDuckGo for “google weather icons pack” after your own repository:

    A screenshot of a DuckDuckGo search result for "google weather icons pack"

    Now you have all your research done for you, and Cunningham’s law is proven right again.