I think you’d immediately collapse into a wadded-up ball of super-dense matter.

The Pauli exclusion principle keeps particles like electrons from occupying the same physical space, which is what makes them take up volume and gives atoms and molecules their size. If they were free to move in an extra spatial dimension, they could pack much closer together, and their volume would collapse.

Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.

I think people’s familiarity with the r/askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But for here, even a general-knowledge reply can encourage clarifying comments from more-informed people who may otherwise doubt their qualifications.

State-scale institutions are always conglomerations of adaptive subsystems (or quickly become so, if they’re not completely dysfunctional). This institutional ecosystem selects for subsystems that use state institutions to perpetuate themselves—and its these systems, not the individuals within them, that increasingly evolve to exploit the state’s authoritarian powers.

It may be OK if your only goal is to avoid conversations.

It’s a reflection of the state’s earlier aspirations—the justification it used to overthrow the preceding authoritarian state.

The problem is, the more drastic the social and political changes are that the new regime is trying to enact—and the more entrenched the preceding regime was—the more tempting it is to lean on authoritarian vanguardist methods to cut through the pushback. But once they start down that path, the means inevitably become the ends and everything winds up back where it started.

A lot of people are making comments like “to boost Lemmy’s popularity/value”, but I wonder if making a lot of posts with relatively few comments is counterproductive?

Like, if I see a community where the top 20 posts have no comments, I’m reluctant to post or comment there because it doesn’t seem to have an engaged community. A community where the top posts all have long comment threads seems more inviting, even if the top posts go back two weeks instead of two hours.

You keep treating this like some kind of game… do you know something the rest of us don’t?

Hmm… the only cited sources in that article for a specific (effective) population size are also over 20 years old—the more recent sources just say it was likely a “small” number.

This article has a lot more detail on the various migration theories, but refrains from any specific size estimates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas

That article’s over 20 years old—I’m not up on the latest findings, but I know there’s been major work since then on both the peopling of the Americas and on the importance of genetic diversity.

The current consensus is that the minimum viable population for most species is between 500 to 1,000 individuals.

The problem isn’t inbreeding depression (you only need about 50 individuals to avoid that)—it’s lack of diversity to adapt to a changing environment. Pathogens would evolve that would wipe out the entire species because they’re too genetically homogeneous.

I think legislators purposefully write laws in such a way that their ill effects can plausibly be blamed on lawyers (and that lawyers can spare their friends from the ill effects).

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them:
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

If vampires gets warrants, do they still need to ask permission?

several sound-responsive structures could be built into a single flexible device, with each one reacting to a different sound frequency. “This would allow specific parts of the device to move, bend or vibrate, potentially leading to aerodynamic robotic devices that can change shape in response to sound,” he says.

I’m picturing Yondu’s whistle-powered dart.

And Iron Man built his in a cave! With a box of scraps!

Conversation logs between the lab and Luna show that the agent had created an attendance policy but later lost track of it, allowing the employee’s lateness to continue for months.

Sounds like Luna should look into firing itself.

It’s just a list of their customers.

Raspberry PIs.