My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don’t really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

Did you go to college/what was your experience with college?

I can kinda see both ways. I think both systems aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive - I think the old system works more intuitively for pipes with low volumes of fluid, and the new system works more intuitively for pipes that are full or near full.

I hope that the developers can mix the two systems, so that pipes function with the old system when pipes are empty or near empty, and it switches to the new system when pipes are full or near full

Not an expert, but my understanding is that the multiverse (at least, what we today associate as the multiverse) came about due to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, quantum physicists had an observation - particles were moving as though they were being pushed by an invisible wave, and they would pick a random position based on that wave when observed.

The most prevalent explanation for this behavior is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the particle is the invisible wave, and the wave collapses into a particle when it is measured. But another common interpretation is the many worlds interpretation, which states that the invisible wave is just a statistical probability of where the particle is. And the reason why the particle seems to pick a random point on the wave when observed is actually because the particle creates branching timelines, and we can only observe what happens in our own timelines. Hence, it seems random to us.

I speculate that the idea of multiple parallel timelines, each slightly different, was probably pretty popular with scifi writers, especially since it’s an easy way to portray “what if” scenarios in their stories, and so the concept became popular because of that

Wait what’s the deal with Amanita muscaria? I don’t understand how answering question 13, no matter how wrongly, could ever lead to a conspiracy

I’m not necessarily sure if that can be correct, depending on the definition. If you are defining a disease or disorder as being abnormal, then perhaps it may have a case there. But many diseases and disorders are defined by whether or not a trait disrupts quality of life. A person may be abnormal, but it doesn’t affect how they live. Therefore, no disease. With this definition, many people can be normal

I’m at a complete loss - even with the labels, I can only see a rock. I can’t figure out what part is supposed to look like what body part

Any game that isn’t trying to go for realistic graphics. Some off the top of my head:

• Braid
• Okami
• Outer Wilds
• Ori and the Blind Forest

The question is designed to be as divisive as possible. It categorizes large swathes of people into just 2 groups - man or bear. The man group contains mansplainers, but it also contains regular people who simply view humanity as naturally altruistic. The bear group contains people with concerns about men overpowering women, but also contains people who earnestly believe that most if not all men will try to do it if given the chance.

The problem is that people either are unable to or unwilling to acknowledge that these categories are not monolithic. And in claiming that all people in the man group are incels, you are inadvertently insulting everyone in that group. Likewise, in claiming that all people in the bear group are misandrists, you are inadvertently dismissing everyone in that group.

It is not productive to make claims about people based only on their answer to the question. In fact, it appears to be entirely the intention of the question to divide even rational people by exploiting the general human inability to see subgroups within larger categories

Is the post cut off? I get the impression there’s supposed to be more text here

Researchers here. The scientific method is unbelievably tedious. Way more tedious than you would think. So much so that people are willing to pay researchers to do it for them. A simple yes or no question takes weeks or months to answer if you’re lucky.

But the upside is that we can remove our own biases from the answer as much as possible. If you see an obvious difference between any 2 groups, then there’s little to no point in doing the scientific method. But if the difference is less clear, like borderline visible, then biases start to creep in. Someone who thinks there’s no difference will see the data and think there’s no difference. And someone who thinks there’s a difference will look at the data and think there’s a difference. The scientific method excels in these cases, because it gives us a relatively objective way to determine if there is a difference or not between 2 groups

The complete lack of a period makes your comment really hard to understand

Haven’t played the game, but my understanding, based on reviews, was that the game looked exceptional even at low graphics. I’ve even seen a couple of comments saying that they really should have called the minimum setting as the mid setting, and the low as the high, etc.

Regarding being fancy, I personally think we’re reading a point of diminishing returns with graphics fidelity. GPU manufacturers have to make up increasingly contrived features to convince people to buy their GPU’s. I’m firmly in the boat of thinking raytracing isn’t worth the performance hit. And pathtracing? Wasting electricity. Instead of larger, bulkier GPU’s, I would much rather have generational improvements be measured by factors such as decreasing die size, cost, electrical efficiency, and software features. Anyways, my point is that I don’t really think you’ll be losing much by using high instead of ultra in any recent AAA game

I’m not sure. Anecdotal evidence, but when I was little, we learned how to read analog clocks, and all the “half past whatever” terminology. Actually, I think most of us in my class at that time primarily used analog clocks. Even then, we never used those sorts of phrases. We would just round to the nearest 5 minutes if anyone asked.

That’s still what I do nowadays. Of course, there’s phones and computers now that can tell you the time, but if I want a physical clock, I prefer to get an analog one. And I still just round to the nearest 5 minutes.

In my interpretation, those phrases fell out of favor a long time ago

Asking ChatGPT for advice about anything is generally a bad idea, even though it might feel like a good idea at the time. ChatGPT responds with what it thinks you want to hear, just phrased in a way that sounds like actual advice. And especially since ChatGPT only knows as much information as you are willing to tell it, its input data is often biased. It’s like an r/relationshipadvice or r/AITA thread, but on steroids.

You think it’s good advice because it’s what you wanted to do to begin with, and it’s phrased in a way that makes your decision seem like the wise choice. Really, though, sometimes you just need to hear the ugly truth that you’re making a bad choice, and that’s not something that ChatGPT is able to do.

Anyways, I’m not saying that bosses are good at giving advice, but I think ChatGPT is definitely not better at giving advice than bosses are.

The way I interpret it is that “next Sunday” is the same as saying “next week’s Sunday.” Meanwhile, “this sunday” refers to “this week’s Sunday.” So if it’s Friday and I want to meet 5 days from now, I would call it next Wednesday. But if it’s Monday and I want to meet 5 days from now, I call it this Saturday

But also, anyone with even a bit of courtesy would give a full date, along with the day of the week, if they’re the to schedule something

To be clear, the issue that many people have with Threads is not that Meta can’t be trusted with our data. It’s true, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that there is no reason for Threads to try to federate with us unless they are trying to kill the Fediverse.

Meta is a big company, they can attract users on their own and support their own ecosystem. Isn’t it strange that they would try to federate with us? We are much smaller in comparison, and we won’t help their user activity just simply because we are much fewer in number compared to the users on Threads. The only reasonable explanation is that Threads is trying to federate with us because they are pre-emptively trying to kill the Fediverse before it becomes a serious competitor.

This is a very standard practice for tech companies, so much so that it has its own name: EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). If a tech company notices an up-and-coming potential competitor, they will adopt the same technology as the competitor by passing it off as a partnership (embrace).

Then, they’ll slowly start introducing changes to the technology, and they’ll introduce those changes in such a way that it’s intentionally difficult for the competitor to implement something similar (extend). This could be anything like making an extension to the ActivityPub protocol that only works with a Threads account (proprietary extensions) or publishing the change but intentionally obfuscating the documentation for that change, so that the competitor’s implementation is buggy (sabotage). This all occurs behind the scenes, so the users will start to wonder why the competitor seems so buggy and slow. They start to switch to Threads because it’s more stable and fast, not realizing that the whole reason why Threads appears more stable is due to sabotage.

Then, once the competitor has developed a bad enough reputation and once enough users have jumped ship, Threads will defederate. The sudden loss of users and the bad reputation that the competitor picked up during the “partnership” will destroy the competitor so much that they will never fully recover (extinguish).

If a big tech company comes to you with a partnership deal and it’s not apparent what exactly they’re getting from the deal, you can generally be sure that they’re only offering because they want to destroy your brand. I don’t trust Threads.

Even ignoring that Marvel isn’t leftist, I don’t even think leftists think Marvel humor is good. OP’s premise is broken on so many levels

I was recently recommended an internet mystery by YouTube. I didn’t know about it until then (and I’m generally pretty online), so it’s probably not well known.

It’s the song, Like the Wind (or Blind the Wind). Story goes that a kid recorded the song in 1984 from a West German radio station, but he didn’t catch the name of the song nor the band. Eventually, the recording got posted online, and strangely enough, nobody online seems to recognize it. It’s still unknown where this song came from. People call it Like the Wind (or Blind the Wind) because that’s what the first 3 words of the song sound like. Speculation is that it’s probably from an East German indie rock band that got disbanded, but at this time, it’ll probably never be solved

I would be generally concerned. There are scam operations that are almost exactly like what you described. Scams nowadays aren’t quick - some of them take months to set up, and the scammer talks to the victim (often a middle-aged lady) for weeks to months before they start asking for money. It’s unfortunate the world is like this, but sometimes you have to be callous to other people to protect yourself. I don’t know what I would do in that situation.