Ultimately, however, leftism is an intellectual position. It’s typically held by people who are either well-read, or at minimum understanding of the concept of fairness for all people (which requires abstract thinking and a good theory of mind). Very few people believe in leftism due to stupidity. That’s why it’s in Republicans’ best interest to keep people stupid.

Increasing intelligence of the general population would be a basal necessity for changing the economic system.

I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe

In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent

Strictly speaking, sure, but for all intents and purposes, you can still have practical free will in a deterministic universe. If a system is chaotic enough (which a human brain is almost certainly going to be), it may be theoretically possible to predict what a person is going to do, but it will always be practically impossible to actually do so.

We never say that the weather is perfectly predictable, yet it’s clearly driven by purely deterministic mechanisms

Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model

There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.

Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort

As someone who used to be in a (casual) orchestra, I can tell you that the musicians can interpret the conductor because they’ve rehearsed it extensively beforehand. The conductor is really just there is remind the musicians to do the things that they’ve practiced beforehand.

As for the baton’s movements, that’s meant to indicate the speed that the music is played at. Nobody can keep perfect rhythm, and in a large orchestra, the echoes and travel speed of sound becomes especially disorienting. It will start to sound like you are playing off-time from the rest of the orchestra. In those cases, everyone has to ignore the sound of their music and only use the conductor to figure out where in the song they are, and they just have to trust that it’ll sound correct to the audience

Hot cheetos tastes like cardboard to me. I’ve started preferring regular cheetos over hot cheetos because at least it has flavor. That should probably answer your question.

I don’t dump hot sauce on everything, that’s like asking if someone with a sweet tooth dumps sugar onto everything. Also, there are different types of hot sauce that have different levels of spice. You don’t need to drown food in hot sauce, you just need to buy a spicier hot sauce and continue adding the same amount of hot sauce.

Interesting thing to note, your sense of taste and your physiological response to spice are two different things. There are (many) times where I eat something “spicy,” and I’ll sweat. But I don’t taste the spice.

If there’s something you can buy, it’s both less hassle and higher quality to just buy it rather than to try to print it yourself. A 3d printer really shines when there’s something that you want that you can’t buy. Custom parts, repaor parts, things of that nature. Unfortunately, that also means that the things that you print aren’t likely to be something that you can plan for ahead of time

Fighting against AI slop is fine, but that’s not what’s happened here. The devs tested using gen AI for a brief time with the intention to make placeholders. They stopped using gen AI after they found problems with the outputs. They therefore continued to use humans to make the rest of the placeholders. They then replaced all the placeholders with finalized versions, which are entirely human made.

The issue is not that Expedition 33 has gen AI, the issue was that they used gen AI for a brief time in the game’s development

Basically everything is more powerful than the steam deck. The steam deck wasn’t really designed to be powerful, moreso it’s meant to be the “reference model” for handhelds: cheapest, weakest, yet also most mainstream. My understanding is that the Z2 should be substantially more powerful than the steam deck, and though it should also use more battery than the steam deck, it also has a larger battery capacity to make up for that increased power draw. Price, on the other hand… Well, nothing can even get close to the sort of price that a steam deck offers

Oh, I’ve got such a good one. In high school, I was in Science Olympiad (basically a science club). I was always kind of a wishy-washy member, never really a serious or particularly reliable member. But one day, the club needed designs for a new shirt, and they decided to ask the members for some designs that the members would then vote on. I decided to submit a satire shirt.

I obviously can’t share the full design for privacy reasons, but I went ahead and made it jingoistic/military themed. Fighter jets flying overhead, tanks rolling through. To make sure that people knew I was being totally serious about this clearly relevant shirt, I put a stick figure holding a science-looking flask in the corner of the shirt. And then to make sure that everyone knew that we were smart, I put the equation: “3+3=6.” All text in comic sans, of course.

Anyways, no one got the joke. My design got 1 pity vote. I don’t think anyone even believed me when I said that it was a joke, which out of everything was kind of the saddest part for me.

Do you have anything that you’re passionate about? It seems unusual that you would think there’s nothing to talk about. If not, I would consider finding a nice passion. I wouldn’t consider video games to be a passion, unless that’s something that you actively choose to do over other options

Nine sols. A metroidvania with parry-based combat and insanely good plot.

Perhaps euthanasia is cruel, but the alternative must also be considered.

My cat died from some sort of cancer. We noticed blue welts growing from her face years ago, but the vet said that they were harmless, some sort of allergic reaction. They got bigger over time, and more started to appear. Tests were done, but the vets still said that it was nothing to worry about.

Over time, her personality changed. She was never really extraverted, but she still liked attention. Over time, she started hiding from people. She only came out to eat, then went back to hide again. We never saw her walking around like she did in the past.

The night when she died, she pulled herself to visit the bedroom, then crawled back out into the living room and curled up onto the sofa and waited to die there. We knew something was wrong when we woke up the next day because she left a trail of blood that led us to her. At that point, it was already too late.

In hindsight, it was clear - she was in constant pain for years. It was why she was hiding from people, why she seemed to start avoiding attention, why she stopped doing anything that she enjoyed. That night, she knew she was going to die, and she paid everyone a final visit before resigning herself to die on the sofa. It was an undignified, likely painful and slow death, that was preceded by years of debilitating pain. If she were given the choice, would she have chosen euthanasia? I’m not sure, but it feels clear to me that she knew she was going to die and was suffering for years.

My understanding is that there was a scene where a young girl rides a naked man/woman around. Apparently it has since been changed to make the child older, but… I can perfectly understand why anyone would be hesitant to accept such a game based on that description alone. Even if it’s not intended to be sexual, the developers were certainly pushing the line

This, apparently:

And this is the second oldest:

Gives a strangely similar vibe to seeing the slide reels. Pretty cool!

I liked Control but Alan Wake was a sludge. Its age really shows. That being said, it wasn’t necessarily bad enough that I couldn’t tank through the game, but if Control were in lower A tier, Alan Wake would be upper C tier

A lock-and-key mechanism. Modeled and 3D printed a proof-of-concept, too. Was proud of it until I found out someone invented it 100 years ago

Your job is a job - you’re not really supposed to like it. The inherent problem about making a living is that at some point sooner or later, no matter what job you choose, you are going to have to do things that you don’t want to do. In a hobby, you can just choose not to do any of the tedious things. In a job, that’s what you’re paid to do, that’s what you have to do. Hence the advice: don’t make your hobby into a job.

Now, I’m not saying that you should always be miserable in a job. There’s degrees to this. You can be soul-rending miserable, or just meh, or maybe even something resembling happy. If you genuinely are passionate about your job, that’s kind of a lucky catch and shouldn’t be treated as an expectation for a job.

The way I think about it is that the money that you receive from a job is a compensation for the tedium of that job. You will need to consider this question: the money that you get paid in your current job, do you believe that to be a fair trade for the effort that you put in to that job? If the answer is yes, then I would recommend keeping your hobbies as hobbies, and using your job to pay for those passions.