l don't undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.

Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?

I can't even do thorn-master Sxan's thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.

Sources:

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/03/the-f-47-fighter-cost-problem-no-one-wants-to-touch/

https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-shahed-drones-gulf-patriot-air-defence-cost-crisis/ (assuming 2 missiles to each drone and the lowest estimate of drone costs)

Men's fashion is dreadfully boring, but one thing we used to have was a profusion and proliferation of different hats we could wear.

I know the m'lady meme and mall ninjas have forever cursed the fedora (as well as the actually, that's a trilby crowd), but those memes postdate the decline of the hat by several decades.

Currently, we only have baseball caps and beanies in common circulation, with impractical-for-sidewalk-use cowboy hats being the only extant outlier.

Does anyone long for the return of the hat and/or have any insight into what caused their decline?

I was just realizing that I pretty much never click a link to a video post on Lemmy. I think my reasoning is that it's too hard to skim a video to see if it's worth my time, whereas an article can be evaluated initially in a few seconds.

Which kind of links do you engage with more often?

Edit: If you are a small YouTube content creator and it looks like nobody wants to click on videos, consider creating a text version of your video which, granted, is a separate skill, but if you have a message to get out and want to reach people....

Degeneracy is a Symptom: On Conspicuous Despair, the Ponzi stage of being alive, and why your grandparents are wrong about you.

tl;dr: Wealth consolidation and oligopolies have stagnated economic growth. This you probably know, but the author amazingly shows that the rise of "social degeneracy" is merely a symptom of this problem. He tracks this phenomenon around the world and throughout history. We either tackle the problem early and directly or--my words, not his--the rivers will flow with blood.

Just wondering if someone had some research on this highly speculative and completely unfalsifiable theory:

• Autism used to be more common, but as human society grew larger and more interdependent, conforming to the emotional needs of others grew increasingly important to survival; in this environment, the truth-speaking traits of autism were actively selected against.

I don't think I've read a single thing about this theory, but I'm making a connection between dogs--evolved to be emotionally dependent on humans and a little dumb--and the people I see being promoted at work, and expanding that dynamic out over a few hundreds of thousand of years.

There's a form of evolution--neoteny--where species basically halt their maturation in earlier and earlier stages. There are physical traits that go along with this, but the evolutionary drivers are sociological.

The most obvious research into this is the domestication of foxes. Friendly pups were bred with friendlier pups, mimicking what might have gone on in early wolf-human interactions (not breeding, necessarily, but rewarding the beggars), and the researchers found their friendly foxes getting floppy ears and maintaining other traits of puppyhood.

There is definitely a theory that the human ape is a result of this process--our extended childhood and our ability to continue learning, for instance, might be the result of neotenal evolution... so if we are the result of neotenal evolution, maybe one of the traits that became more prominent was our emotional dependence on parents being extended to an emotional dependence on leaders, priests, kings, and finally, bosses.

The two mechanisms would be individual and group level. On an individual level, people able to suck up to power would be given access to income, food, land, power, etc. On a group level, groups able to command larger and larger groups of people to work the land and/or die in combat, could conquer smaller groups unable to organize at a large scale (this problem is always ignored by utopians).

I'd say it's still helpful for a group to have autism in the population for several reasons. I was reading an anthropology book positing the development of the canoe as a series of minor improvements taking place over several centuries. And I thought, yeah, it was either that or a single autistic person with a special interest in boating. And sometimes society does need to hear the truth about itself, but for the most part, it gets along quite well on lies.

One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?

Entering our current oil crunch, I think it's obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that's been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.

• Best: The Postman. We're back to walking and riding horses.

• Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is--and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).

• Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency--that would be too out there.

Article from August of this year (not too cancerous once you get through the first two splash screens).

Reddit shares DROPPED despite increase revenue. Why? Objective signs of enshittification:

• declining active user base
• massive increases in revenue.

People are leaving so the ones that remain must be more heavily monetized, which leads to more people leaving--the enshittification death spiral.

Reddit will no longer be reporting logged-in users as a separate metric lol

Background reading for today's Sidney Sweeney controversy.

In a nutshell:

“I just want to feel as light and as free and as unrestricted as possible when I compete,” Cockrell says. “Lately I’ve seen a real difference in the sprint brief having more coverage, and I appreciate that because even though I’ve been running in briefs for years, my dad watches these meets, and they love to do that camera shot from behind the starting blocks. And it’s like, ‘Can we not?’”

How do you improve your listening skills to get to listening to native content with ease, assuming vocabulary and grammar are not the issue?

Here's what I've found does not work:

• Slow/easy language podcasts. Yes, it's important to get started with stuff like that, but it's extremely boring and limited, and it does not get me over the listening hump. The listening hump is all the phonetic and semantic and grammatical changes made to language when it is spoken at speed. By definition, I am NOT exposed to that in slow language podcasts and so listening to an infinite amount of slow podcasts will not teach me.

• Re-listening to work I know. I've found working from transcribed shows that I can understand them all, but it's from a freaky ability to recall the dialogue, not from a newfound ability to DECODE the dialogue. The flip side of that is if there is something I don't understand the first time through, it doesn´t become more intelligible on multiple passthroughs. So I read the transcript and then it becomes yet another thing I remember.

So I'm wondering if there's an entirely different approach. Like, maybe if I tried reading aloud more often, I'd naturally fall into these elisions and ways of speaking, and having produced them naturally myself, I would hear them better? Because right now, my language production is zero. In fact, my language consumption is entirely passive.

Tell me what you did to get over the hump.