kulahan

Are any still-worshipped gods actually still just "really powerful dudes"? I doubt this would have any effect on religions outside of, like, ancient Greece and Egypt... but I'm not up to date on all the non-Abrahamic ones I guess.

If they're concerned about fertility rate and labor force only, then they haven't put even a modicum of thought into this, as nuclear families have significantly better outcomes than single parents. It affects everything from employment outcomes to criminal rates and more.

So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?

Maybe. It's still nice to know that people have considerations beyond safety and efficiency, though. Maybe we still build our high-rises, but maybe we reflect as much light down as possible, and put more rooftop viewing areas up.

I’m lucky enough to live in a region with light so intense I can pretty much ONLY grow cacti and succulents. My bear paw is a literal bush now, and my ponytail palm is nearing beginner bonsai levels. On the flip side, tomatoes can’t easily handle the intensity of the sun here…

Still, I’ve had a $50 set of plants die because I uh… poured water on it. Took me a long time to figure out what happened there.

Along a similar vein, a mycology forum would likely be of incredible help even to scientists!

A science-oriented cooking forum could be great, so long as it stays closer to Alton brown-tier science, imo!

But at the end of the day, people don’t often seek these out. That’s kind of the magic of reddit. You go for basketball and news updates, and you end up in a forum dedicated to hating on Uncle Joe from Willy Wonka. Nobody would ever seek that tiny forum out, but it can survive by embedding with more useful forums.

Nope! Not being accusatory, I’m just a very bad writer lol.

I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!

When searching for a job, it almost feels irresponsible not to use the site, but boy is it one poor execution. Why are jobs like the fourth tab? Why is there a feed populated entirely by people I don’t know and have never connected with in any way? Are people really just sitting there hiring strangers based off of cool comments? I literally hate like 10,000 things about this site. I rank it similarly to Discord in terms of quality:popularity ratio.

Thanks for the corrections! I only heard the story once quite a while ago :)

No, you see, I CAN wish for tall, high-density housing AND to be able to see the sky. It’s a wish! That’s the whole deal!

>From which equation?

I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.

I’m not implying that Lucas gets to decide which cut is best, just that it’s his right to decide what “Star Wars” actually refers to.

What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.

Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.

IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.

I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.

It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.

Wishing you could see the stars does not mean you’ve forgotten anything. I can wish a day was warmer and cooler. Two opposing things can be wished for, because they’re wishes.

Never considered this, but what a clear example of how drifting language can cause us to lose information, even if it’s written down somewhere.

Well we can’t exactly hang those people out to dry after failing them in our educational system. I refuse to believe that many Americans are simply incapable of reading beyond that level. I believe it is a failure of our culture.

Better remove humans from the equation, then.

Cost, accuracy for the user, trustworthiness for the administrators, public perception, unknown future trajectory…

Fun fact: Charles Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi) got started buying and selling postage stamps via arbitrage. It was legal until he started doing some shenanigans regarding over-promised ROIs and needed to use new investor money to pay older investors.

He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.

I agree with this, but that’s not what I’m arguing.

Buying a pizza does not give you any rights to force the owner to maintain that recipe you purchased a slice of.

No it doesn't. Accounts are value-less to the average user. You just make a new one. I've got probably two dozen accounts on Reddit, most of which I've forgotten over the years.

This opinion rubs me the wrong way. I don't think you meant it like this, but it really feels like when someone creates something, they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.

In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.

Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.

After that day, I think the argument changes.

The major draw of Reddit is that it's a "forum" that covers every topic. These are cool, but I want a forum for succulents, and for SEA cooking, and for Eve Online, and for Hiking, and for...

This is great info. I've wanted to grow some for years, but I live in CO, and won't be moving to a region where these are viable for a few years yet, so I've got plenty of time to plan. I had no idea there even were cultivars for this fruit, but I was aware they like to start in shade, then explode once started.

In the Southwest, there are many environments where a tall, shady plant grows quickly, sets the stage for plants that need only initial shade, and then the fast-grower eventually loses out on the plot once the slower-growers have a chance to establish themselves. Once those slow growers are in place, a new generation of smaller, shade-loving plants will often follow, filling in the area that the fast-growers left.

I wonder if there are analogues you're meant to plant first, to get the pawpaw going.

I appreciate you breaking it down for me. I wasn't aware (though it makes perfect sense now that I'm reading it) that the capture of a foreign cell and the fusion of its DNA into the host are separate jumps, but that makes sense. I think that's where, for me at least, the confusion came in.

Why is this getting downvoted? Is it not a reasonable question? I was wondering the same thing. Both sound like jokes to me. If the LLM is trained on text, including internet comments, how is this outlandish? It seems very likely to my uneducated self that “two Ds in your mom and one in Uranus!” is a joke.

A cheap one.

Isn’t this about the origin of complex life?

Agreed. I grew up living for the weekends. I’d wake up, crush some cereal while watching cartoons, and then I’d run out the door to find my friends. I’d usually be home by dark. Or I’d call and tell my mom I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and I’d be back in the morning. She might literally not see me for 30+ hours even when I was in elementary school.

We’d spend our time playing spies and hiding in the bushes watching neighbors do whatever, or looking for crawfish in the creek, or just breaking sticks on trees in the woods lol.

Danes being willing to leave their kids unattended outside, as good as it may be in practice, is a horrifying idea to people in the US at least, and is liable to get Child Protection Services called on you. Different culture.

So… it’s not really high-tech, it’s just a screen? I guess I need to see what the actual offering is.

Maybe they could shave $3-5000 off the cost by not giving it a "high-tech interior", going completely against the design philosophy of the car in the first place.