My mother was telling me to smile since elementary “to release good brain chemicals”. Reading this the thought crossed my mind that growing up was one big customer service job to keep my parents happy.

The problem with intelligence requirements is two-fold.

First, intelligence is difficult to quantify. I often hear that IQ tests are unreliable or only test for certain areas of what could be called intelligence.

Second, such requirements would instantly become politicized and designed to prevent certain groups from being politically active. This exact thing happened after the US civil war when literacy tests were required and designed specifically to keep black people from being able to vote.

Additionally, I just don’t know that intelligence is the quality that matters most. A selfish smart person is just going to be good at benefitting themself politically at the expense of others. The focus should be on getting more people politically active who will use their political power to benefit others beyond themselves. Of course, that’s probably even more difficult to test for than intelligence.

I don’t know, I think it depends on if you include the origin of soulmates in the definition you use. If you define soulmates as people that were made for each other, then yeah I suppose that creation is out of their hands while defining who they are (and maybe implying that something/someone did the creating). When I think of soulmates I tend to think of persons that are perfectly suited to be together without necessarily needing a cause for it.

It would seem unlikely that every person has a soulmate or that every set of soulmates would meet each other, but it seems possible for such people to become perfect for each other through free will.

Also as a tangent, I misspelled it as ‘soupmate’ in the dictionary at first, and if I had a soulmate we would probably be soupmates too :P

I remember the moment it clicked for me that this was the case. In early 2018 I overheard my roommate listening to a Bitcoin podcast hosted by people I understood to be prominent members of the community. They were trying to justify why it was a good thing Steam no longer accepted Bitcoin to purchase games. I couldn’t see a single upside to a currency, whose purpose is to be exchanged for goods and services, no longer being accepted for a good. I thought about the large amount of crypto the podcasters likely held and how they were probably trying to keep other people in to keep their own crypto worth more. But if the people near the helm were no longer able to admit when something is wrong, then the dream was dead, crypto was dead to me, and I stopped getting more.

My understanding is that AI/LLMs can generate code that works, but often that code is more bloated/convoluted than code written by a decent coder, making it less efficient and more difficult to maintain. I can see that being acceptable for many in situations where hardware/performance/maintainability aren’t a concern like a one-off app or proof of concept. But for something as low level as a kernel I would think that performance and maintainability are the most important things since slowdown in that part of the system ripples up to affect everything a user does anywhere in the operating system.

I understand that a skilled coder can take AI output and clean it up into something at least approaching the quality of their own unassisted code, and I’ve been led to believe that Linus is able to do that for himself. But I fear that other/future maintainers of Linux won’t match that caliber, and it will start to feel that AI bloat. I think I’ve also read of Linus complaining about a torrent of low-quality, AI-based submissions and so I also fear that this will lead to him restricting who can participate in the work, overcompensate, and end up in a situation where Linux becomes less open and more closed.

Fair, I’d call “just running it” a point in its favor, and now I have something to do further research on!

Thank you! I was just looking through the recommended software list linked in the community sidebar yesterday and this wasn’t on there. I was going to try setting up MeshCentral this weekend, how does this compare to that?

They’re sugary and gross and delicious! I get them twice a year when I go on a trip with my other buddy that likes them.

This is giving me a flashback to 10 years ago watching Bojack Horseman flash back 10 years to 2006. That was a good flashback.

First, there’s more to his arguments than not having to remember things. You have to compare written knowledge to oral tradition. If you read something and have questions, the words aren’t going to magically change to something understandable. If you are learning from someone and have questions, you can ask that someone and they can rephrase it in a new way that’s easier to understand. In a similar vein, if you read something written long ago like Shakespeare the language will have changed such that it’s more difficult to understand. If his stories had been passed down by word of mouth the meaning could be kept while the words used to communicate those meanings evolve with the language. Of course writing has many benefits that make it worthwhile, but pretending that the only argument against it is that it stores information on a page instead of your brain is wrong.

Second, people calling a new thing bad in the past has zero relevance to people calling a different new thing bad in the present. Plato/Socrates had no word generating machines in their time, so what do their opinions have to do with a word generating machine?

It’s not always easy to find the exact meme I have in mind, there have been a couple times that I gave up on internet searching for one because it just wasn’t showing up. I also prefer scrolling through a bunch of memes that I’ve already vetted as good rather than the sea of meme trash the internet holds.

Much like seeing one of the new post trucks, it’s a fun game to point at “small” trucks and exclaim “look, normal-size truck!” It’s just sad that they’re getting rare enough to point them out.

I broke this habit once growing when I decided to finish Mario and Luigi Partners in Time after a break. I had just reached the final dungeon, but before diving in I realized I had more money than I knew what to do with.

I went to the store, got like 99 of all the cool looking items, entered the dungeon, and went to town. Every turn was a question of whether to use a power flower, hammer, or what have you. I mowed through all those end game enemies and the final boss didn’t know what hit em. It was glorious.

I wonder if Brandon Sanderson had read this when he was writing the Stormlight Archives. The main society seen in it has a caste system based on eye color.

Oh man, when I was just getting into acid I took a tab one Saturday morning and watched Fellowship of the Ring Extended in the frat living room. Felt like watching a DnD campaign. As it was ending one of the guys and his friend I hadn’t met walked in setting up tables and their PCs. I asked what was going on and he was like “Jaycifer, today is the LAN party, did you forget?”

I had, I played Quake III for the first time that evening. I had never really played a boomer shooter before, but that was one of the most intense multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had. I got my hands on a rocket launcher and I swear I had a sixth sense for knowing where someone was going to be to blow them up. I’m not normally one to trash talk, but I talked so much shit throwing out “get pwned” and “git gud.” It was so awesome!

The way they speak in snake in the Harry Potter movies would be an example.

This sounded like bullshit but I’m open to the idea enough to do a few minutes of digging. The study that the first few search results reference tested rats and found that, according to my understanding at least, intermittent sugar intake can be addictive in a similar manner to opiates, but to a smaller degree than actual opiates. There was no comparison to alcohol.

There was this brief article where the chair of nutrition at Harvard said sugar can mimic some traits of addictiveness but specifically stated it can’t be classified the same as alcohol or nicotine. No actual study done, just a guy who presumably knows what he’s talking about.

So claiming sugar is more addictive than alcohol still sounds like bullshit to me. Habit forming? Yes. Withdrawal symptoms after high regular consumption? Yes. Over consumed (at least in the US)? Hell yes. But more addictive than alcohol? Do you have an actual source to support such a claim?

The funny thing about this comment is that, having read the other comments, I know that you’re extrapolating ridiculous things about a field of study that helps enable modern life from a simple game. But if I hadn’t read them, I would still know that you’re extrapolating ridiculous things about a field of study that enables modern life, but I would also still be wondering what the hell these Tetris looking squares have to do with anything! You failed to even address the question you’re responding to!

Bisexual, heteroromantic.

To get the full effects of DMT it’s best to have it in a powder form (I think) then take a hit from a crack pipe. When I had a functional vape cartridge I had to take 3-5 pulls in rapid succession to get close to the same effects. That’s the point where you start seeing geometric shapes and maybe an extra dimensional being. The one I met the one time I hit from a pipe suggested I lay off the chocolate milk.

Like you suggested, I don’t think it’s very recreational, but it is a very interesting substance.