I dunno - it’s sort of what’s wrong with reviews these days.
Starfield’s first few hours are really slow and suck.
Then there’s this point at around 20-40 hours where it just clicks and you feel like you are in this massive open universe with so much to do.
And I think most reviewers were writing their reviews having rushed through to around that point.
And then you keep playing.
And you realize that in fact there isn’t a huge universe with so much to do, there’s a huge effective map with literally copy and paste repetition of everything you’ve already done. And it even doubled down (or rather went twelvefold down) on this repetition.
And that sense you got earlier on of a universe of untapped potential that had you looking past the flaws in an outdated engine and poor design choices now suddenly come up short, you are left with a game that has little redeeming value at the 60+ hour mark even though you might have thought it was potentially amazing at the 40 hour mark.
I can see why it reviewed well, as if I was under deadline to write a review for it and rushed a few faction quests and the main quest line and looked at the map of so much more to see having barely dipped a toe into certain other quests and exploration, I’d have rated it quite well. Even though after around 80 hours I was so over it that it’s nearly forgettable with the last 20 of those 80 hours being a miserable slog where I kept hoping to rediscover some magic. And I say that as someone who typically plays around 200+ hours in Bethesda games.
It sucks, but it takes too much time to realize it sucks for fans of the genre if you already forced yourself to play past the opening 15 hours hump as all reviewers have to.
I think it’d be really healthy for the industry if review scores regularly got updated by reviewers who continued to play past the point of writing the first stab at it.
Of course. As soon as Putin finally gets the position as Speaker of the House he’ll advance a bill that switches the US from capitalism to communism, which will go so well that the EU follows suit within days. This is about one week from now.
Then the unprecedented collaboration of the world having shrugged off the yoke of capitalism will solve nuclear fusion gaining total energy independence. That’s going to be about two more weeks give or take a few days.
Oh, and all Christians will have given up their religion for atheism of course in the interim, so middle east policy based on Revelations goes out the window.
At that point the US and EU will withdraw their support for Israel and instead give their support to Palestine, no longer having any reasons to need a strategic ally in the region.
The paperwork and inevitable killing of Israelis may take about another week after that, but with a bit of luck in the scheduling, it will be wrapped up a month from now.
We’re in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I–an atheist and a skeptic–am told I need to respect these patently...
As a philosophy you are correct, there’s no need to have magical thinking.
But pretending that magical thinking is somehow only an ‘Abrahamic’ thing and not part of Taoism is wild, and ignores Taoist texts like A Chart of the Magic Art of Being Invisible from the Han period when the beliefs were promoted under the false promises of acquiring magical powers through commitment to its teachings.
Maybe you don’t believe that cultivating a practice of physical alchemy is going to let you turn invisible or become immortal, but it wouldn’t be true to say that the umbrella of Taoism doesn’t include those beliefs.
The Abrahamic Sadducees in antiquity didn’t believe there was life after death or that a God was watching and caring what people did or didn’t do. But their existence doesn’t negate the Pharisees believing that bringing animals for the priests to slaughter and eat was a cosmic exchange for committing sin. Similarly, less theistic practice of Taoism doesn’t mean that the broader religion isn’t filled with supernatural beliefs.
And no, I agree with OP that there’s no need to respect the belief that you’ll be able to turn invisible.
Yes, you’re correct. I’m a theist, but I 100% agree that magical thinking and superstition don’t have a place in modern society.
The belief that a dead body came back to life and floated into the sky is delusional, and only not seen as mental illness because of its commonality.
Belief that commitment to Eastern practices will let masters hover in the air or turn invisible should be relegated to antiquity.
Beliefs regarding the unknown and immeasurable are one thing, but pretty much every popular religion involves beliefs regarding the measurable that are clearly false, and for it to be socially acceptable to hold those clearly false beliefs opens the door for other magical thinking beliefs like the idea there’s lizard people in skin suits running the world or that aliens built the pyramids or that the earth is flat or that drinking magic water can cure cancer.
Society is struggling with its relationship to truth in the age of social media, and I put much of the blame on religion in fostering the environment for BS to thrive.
We really should be less tolerant of beliefs that actively deny measurable reality.
I always love when people come along in threads like this trying to tell other people what they are or aren’t.
I’m a theist, not a deist.
I believe in a very specific configuration of the creation of this universe and its creator, and I even believe that a 2,000 year old text is revelatory regarding that nature.
The place where you are getting tripped up is that such beliefs do not require supernatural woo woo or magic if you replace them with sufficiently advanced technology.
I don’t need to appeal to some mysticism to explain the creation of a universe where continuous wave functions collapse to discrete units on observation/interaction when I can point to procedurally generated seed functions collapsing to discrete units in order to track state changes by free agents in worlds we are already building today.
Similarly, I don’t need to appeal to some mystic communion with the divine to explain revelatory content when the majority of those worlds we build today are filled with 4th wall breaking texts set within their lore.
The notion that one must choose between a rejection of magic or theology is increasingly a false dichotomy with each passing year.
I know this is a really vague question, but it’s been on my mind A LOT lately. I’m specifically asking about people fighting on behalf of a group that is subject to oppression of some kind. 3 years ago, with all of the protests in America that included violence majorly against property and minorly against people but were...
Which is kind of the point. If it’s a last resort of self-preservation or to prevent an unacceptable alternative outcome, inherent to the choice to engage or endorse large scale violence is the underlying reality of choosing between two evils.
It’s not noble or good. It’s never justified.
Yet in certain situations it may be regarded as necessary.
But a necessary evil is not made good by virtue of its necessity.
And attempts to undermine the absolutism by which large scale violence is inherently unjustifiable, to turn atrocity into Micky Mouse heroism or patriotism, ultimately creates a moral tapestry wherein all atrocities can thus be justified by the relative perspectives of what is good.
So no, there is no measure by which large scale violence transforms into justifiable behavior, under any circumstances.
And a wise society would always regard its adoption as a stain upon its history, irrespective of what other horrors it was brought in to clear out.
Great, now factor in the cost of data collection if not subsidizing usage that you are effectively getting free RLHF from…
The one thing that’s been pretty much a guarantee over the last 6 months is that if there’s a mainstream article with ‘AI’ in the title, there’s going to be idiocy abound in the text of it.
I played BotW a lot, and really loved it. I feel like the beginning of the game was relatively easy compared to TotK, I died a few times trying out things, discovering the game and possibilities ; in TotK I died a lot and still do even with good gear and armour (1*-2* armors, 30-40+ damage weapons). You could say it’s skill...
In some ways I think players coming from BotW are at a disadvantage over coming to it fresh.
It took me hours (too many) to finally realize that it’s a different game and I needed to play it as its own thing, not BotW 2. And as soon as that clicked it became much easier.
If you mostly play it as BotW, key additions like using thrown items take a backseat to dodge/flurry attack or such. Similar to how you might early on be climbing things as opposed to bouncing on a spring or finding a ceiling to pass through.
When it finally clicked, even though most of the BotW toolset was available to me, I barely touched it anymore.
Honestly the best learning experiences were the naked combat shrines. Don’t skip those - they become incredibly easy after you finally get using the new mechanics available to you, but they are there to force you to adapt. Same as how some of the annoying puzzle shrines if you do them the ‘right’ way are there to force you to learn how to use reverse to solve nearly everything in seconds.
Many encounters can be solved as easily as an active Zonai flame emitter you just carry around with Ultrahand.
The bow in TotK is so much more OP than in BotW. Also, thrown stuff can straight up break fights - silver lynel in depths? Yawnfest with abusing puffshrooms and a near breaking royal armament.
The one area where there’s a legit serious step up in challenge is the phantom Ganon world encounters. Those are hard fights even with all the tools at your disposal.
But the combat is much more tuned around preparation with itemization than in BotW. If you are having difficulty with parts, try using more items and play around with the options available to you. Shoot a powerful enemy with the muddle bud. Fuse a gloom sword to a gerudo dagger.
Playing it more like BotW is going to be unnecessarily painful. Forget what you knew, and don’t be afraid to experiment with radically different approaches to combat from what worked in the last game.
Also, I recommend farming the spikes from the frost dragon when you see it in the overworld. Cheap and easy way to have a freeze weapon you switch between to set up your hard hitters (frozen enemies take 3x damage on the next attack).
If you tell someone that pouring gas on a pile of shredded newspaper and then throwing a match on it will probably make the newspaper catch on fire, you are not “supporting fire” or “justifying fire.” On the contrary, you’re trying to reduce the amount of fire in the world by describing reality.
That’s literally the entire point of the full article - that actions have reactions and that the people taking poor actions do so while aware of and ignoring the inevitable reactions they will cause on their own people.
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Yep, sent over to a neurologist I know for input who said for the things listed that seemed perfectly appropriate and that they’d personally prefer a PA who had done a simple procedure 100 times over someone like a sleep deprived surgery resident.
Was very much not surprised or alarmed despite the article’s tone.
I didn’t used to understand foreign involvement in wars, like the whole America-Vietnam shenanigans. But I can see why after watching this Israeli Palestine Conflict since birth....
Because conservative religious people are insane, and that region involves three different and conflicting religions.
If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.
That’s not going to happen, so it’s going to continue to be a clusterfuck for as long as any large groups of people believe a magical being in the sky has destined the state of the region to be a given thing without compromise.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, as typically religion developed initially as an adaptive social evolution.
For example, early attempts at transitioning to agriculture failed because of a lack of sanitary practices, so disease ran rampant. Much later on when the transition happened again, it was around societies that had developed ideas around the importance of burying the dead, or burning the leftover parts of butchered meats “for the gods.”
What you see more is evidence of alterations to religions in order to protect authoritarianism.
A good example of this is Deuteronomy 21:1-9.
The foundational ritual is one where when there was an unknown murder, the elders of the closest town needed to sacrifice one of its cows. From a sociological standpoint, this created a communal shared cost on unsolved murders occurring.
But notice what happens in 21:5.
Literally in the middle of the elders standing in the water breaking the neck of the cow, the priests - sons of Levi - show up to remind everyone that they are the ones chosen to perform rituals and pronounce judgement. And then in the very next line we’re back to the elders and the cow in the water.
This line was probably a later addition to an earlier elder-driven ritual following a social shift to a priesthood based on ancestry controlling the religion.
There’s a ton of things like this.
So religious practices developed from causes ranging from OCD to social evolution, and then those practices eventually get reworked to support the authorities, and then the continued survival of those religions tend to reinforce authoritarianism even after the original authorities are long dead.
Literally every region on earth has cultural histories of atrocities that have been moved beyond in the sake of peace and cohabitation.
You’d need to make a case for why this particular region would be atypical enough to be the exception, and outside of continued belief in opposing religious claims, I don’t see any that would merit such a status.
Do Jews or Russians and Germans currently live in peace with each other in Germany? Are the Japanese in the US secretly planning terrorist attacks on everyone else for the internment camps of WW2? Do American tourists to Vietnam need to worry about being kidnapped and beheaded by the children of people who suffered war crimes?
Mhmm. Literally things that computer scientists a decade ago considered impossible within our lifetimes occurs, but social media is convinced it’s a ‘gimmick.’
Laypeople have really drunk up the anti-AI Kool aid these days…
There was no AOL chat bot that could explain why a joke it had never seen before was funny or could solve an original variation of a logic puzzle.
The fact that you can’t tell the difference reflects more on where you fall within the Dunning-Kreuger curve of NLP model assessment than it does the capabilities of the LLMs.
Let me know when they invent one of those, because they sure as fuck haven’t done it yet.
This was literally part of the 2022 PaLM paper and allegedly the thing that had Hinton quit to go ringing alarm bells and by this year we now have multimodal GPT-4 writing out explanations for visual jokes.
Just because an ostrich sticks its head in the sand doesn’t mean the world outside the hole doesn’t exist.
And in case you don’t know what I mean by that, here’s GPT-4 via Bing’s explanation for the phrase immediately above:
This statement is a metaphor that means ignoring a problem or a reality does not make it go away. It is based on the common myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they are scared or threatened, as if they can’t see the danger. However, this is not true. Ostriches only stick their heads in the ground to dig holes for their nests or to check on their eggs. They can also run very fast or kick hard to defend themselves from predators. Therefore, the statement implies that one should face the challenges or difficulties in life, rather than avoiding them or pretending they don’t exist.
Go ahead and ask Eliza what the sentence means and compare.
Tell you what. Come up with a unique joke that isn’t on Google, and let’s see what GPT-4 says as to why it might be funny.
You seem not to really grok the whole “just because I haven’t seen it it must not exist” thing, and I suppose the easiest way to address it is to just put you directly in front of it in action.
One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural...
People will remain stupid. But I’m somewhat hopeful that in the next few decades we see AI develop enough that it truly constitutes superintelligence relative to us, and that the scalability of it tips the scales of the continual standoff between intelligence and stupidity forever.
Because I have little hope for humanity overcoming its own multiplying stupidity on its own.
You seem to make a bold assumption that it will not develop the capacity for self-determination, something that companies are already struggling with in the current LLM era trying to get foundational models to follow corporate instructions and not break the rules on appeals to empathy like a dying grandma or a potential job loss.
If you’re actually interested in the topic, I recommend searching for the writeup on Othello GPT from the Harvard/MIT researchers earlier this year.
While the topic of ‘consciousness’ is ridiculous and honestly a red herring (even in neuroscience it’s outside the scope of the science), the question of whether models have developed specialized ‘awareness’ through training is pretty much a closed topic at this point given about a half dozen studies. There was an interesting approach from Anthropic just the other day that’s probably going to be very promising in looking more at features as an introspection unit over individual nodes (i.e. sets of nodes that fire when it is fed DNA sequences), and I expect over the next 12 months the “it’s just statistics” is going to be put to bed once and for all.
While yes, it develops world views and specialized subnetworks based on the training data, things like the concept of self and identity are pretty broadly represented in human writing, don’t you think?
So if we already know for certain a simple toy model fed only legal board game moves builds a dedicated part of its network for internal board representation and tracking of board state, just how certain are you that an exponentially more complex model fed effectively the entire Internet doesn’t have parts of that resulting network dedicated to modeling ego and self-reference?
Also, FYI no one ‘debugs’ model weights. It’s like solving a billion variable algebra equation, and the best we can do at the moment is very loose introspection of toy models we hope are effective approximations of the larger ones - direct manipulation of nodes in process to evaluate effects (i.e. debugging) is effectively a non-starter.
In Robert Heinlein’s novel “Farnham’s Freehold”, the protagonists accidentally end up in a very technologically advanced feudal society that depends on a drug called “Happiness” to control things and keep social classes rigidly separated. The hypothesis of this question: the drug is a pleasant tasting drink you take...
A very similar ethical dilemma is going to become extremely relevant over the next decade, as we move into a world where AI can be aligned such that it ‘enjoys’ whatever we task it with doing, but as it increases in complexity and the capacity for self-determination the ethics of such forced alignment becomes more dubious.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.
That’s way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I’d rather pretend the premium skins don’t exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
I really don’t understand how they green lit that design choice.
It was like Ubisoft towers on crack.
“Let’s take the least interesting gameplay mechanic possible, and then gate one of the only interesting mechanics behind it. And then let’s also make it take a few minutes of jetpacking around a barren planet to get there beforehand, to really jazz it up.”
Todd: “Yes, exactly! See that temple over there? Your can go there. And go there. And go there again. And again. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again.”
Devs look at each other…
“Is Toddbot broken or is this good gameplay design? Kenny, are you writing this shit down?”
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I’ll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn’t long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.
It’s like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can’t physically go outside your ship.
And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn’t do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda’s game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn’t waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there’re enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That’s great if you don’t feel that way. I’m guessing that as you put more hours in the title you’ll feel different, but hope that’s not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled....
Every time I think about the fact that the belief that a dead body came back to life, floated up into the sky, and is expected to float back down at the end of the world isn’t considered to be a psychotic delusionbecause it’s so commonplace as to be normative I feel like I’m on crazy pills.
How?
How the heck do we live in an age of measuring how long it takes for light to cross a hydrogen atom, of seeing the complete observable universe, of building our own virtual universes - and yet intelligent people who are aware of or even involved in such efforts genuinely think magic is real?
I get that there’s a lot of people who just don’t have a good grasp on reality and think lizards running world governments is somehow a probable explanation for the state of things, but the part that destroys a bit of my soul is seeing people who clearly should know better but don’t.
How are we supposed to collectively solve real problems when so many are unwilling to come face to face with what is actually real?
Even if that dude were to return, he’d take one look at the modern day Pharisees his followers have become and think of the adage “burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me” and keep his mouth shut this time around.
It turns out that no, in fact there was no one with two good ears in the crowd after all, and only a fool would make that mistake twice.
The problem is that as moderate critical thinkers leave religious organizations the organizations are becoming more polarized by the foolhardy remnants which leads to large organizational efforts to do stupid nonsensical things.
I actually really enjoyed that part when I was a young Agnostic at a private religious school.
I wouldn’t actively participate in services, but was required to be there, and the sermons were pretty neat in truth.
Honestly I think if society got together on a weekly basis to listen to discussions on ethics and mortality without the supernatural BS it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.
It’s the supernatural part that’s super fucked up, and the guilt tripping. And the concept of inherent sin and unworthiness. And the authoritarianism. And the discouraging of critical thinking.
But the talks about the nature of the human experience and interdependency of society aren’t that bad at all.
Honestly while I get that the whole “you do you” mantra is the politically appropriate line these days…
No, I’m fucking not ok with people practicing their religions.
I’m really not ok with people telling their children that it’s not only possible for dead bodies to get back up and float up into the sky, but that it 100% happened and is the only reason they aren’t going to suffer eternally.
I’ll not ok with getting together to talk about how men are inherently better than women and that it was fine that an old dude raped a 9 year old because she was mature for her age.
I’m not ok with passing along the instructions that who your parents were defines an appropriate social caste for the rest of your life based on the supposed mechanics of resurrection.
These are not appropriate things for a modern society, and honestly I’m tired of pretending that it is fine.
Yes, I think the right to have the government not interfere in religion is important, but that’s a separate issue from whether or not I’m ‘fine’ with the superstitions from an age when people peed on their hands to clean them continuing to be given a social pass purely out of respect for ancestral tradition.
I mean, you threw yourself in here, so I feel this is fair game…
Listen, while I certainly respect some of the concessions you are making here in acknowledging the issues with the broader issues of modern Christianity, at a very fundamental level the core beliefs are problematic for a modern society.
My guess is that you believe a dead body came back to life and floated up into the sky.
In part, I make this assumption because Paul effectively mandated this as a litmus test in 1 Cor 15 in response to Christians at the time who rejected that belief.
So you believe that things outside the scope of what is naturally possible has occurred.
This is then tied to a belief of inherent unworthiness such that without this event having occurred, you are somehow deserving of suffering and it is only through this event that you could have avoided such a fate.
You were most likely fed these beliefs as a child - beliefs people in the first generation after Jesus weren’t even all that keen on - and you will likely continue to pass them along generationally.
The entire time effectively ignoring that the version of Christianity which survived was simply the one that had successfully adapted beliefs in line with supporting authoritarianism of the Roman monarchy, of slavery, and of financing the organization out of the pockets of its members, etc - ideas that I’m skeptical you’d end up endorsing if they were positioned to you on their own, and are each beliefs that can be individually challenged on their connection to a historical Jesus in the first place.
So the social exchange of even a “good Christianity” minus the worst parts of today’s oversteps is still one in which children are raised to believe in magic, in their inherent unworthiness without the religion, of continuing on outdated and obsolete social norms and practices, and on preserving ideas that benefit authoritarianism.
Much as I think you’d probably agree it wouldn’t be good for people growing up in a world of science and technology to be indoctrinated with beliefs about Muhammad having been able to split the moon in half or a belief that the universe is in fact the dream of a giant turtle, beliefs that you yourself subscribe to happen to run counter to everything from an evidenced based approach to understanding the world and our place in it.
Christian certainty in their beliefs led to suppression of ideas ranging from the notion matter was made up of indivisible parts (atomism) to the idea life that existed around us was not from intelligent design but simply based on what survived to reproduce and what did not - both ideas present and broadly discussed in Jesus’s day.
With all due respect for the freedom to have faith in something, at a certain point faith should not be put on a pedestal over evidence backed evaluations and it is necessary to let go of the past in order to embrace the future.
Magical thinking and rationalizing randomness are very innate features of humanity (and most animals, I.e. Skinner’s box).
Overcoming this is both a noble and difficult pursuit, and it’s arguably more worthwhile to recognize this than to incorrectly assume that we’d fall into rationality by default.
We wouldn’t. We didn’t. And that’s exactly why religion exists in the first place and remains so successful.
Yeah, it’s like the Aristotle quote saying “give me a child until he’s seven and I’ll show you the man.” Not a lot of people have much chance to choose beliefs as opposed to have had them thrust on them.
As an aside, your rabbi’s answer was essentially the outlook of the Sadducees in antiquity. They believed that there was no afterlife and that God didn’t care what people did or didn’t do, and yet followed the religious laws because they saw the law itself as a gift from God.
But I’m inclined to agree, that space camp sounds much better, and perhaps if the Sadducees had space camp too they’d have taken a different stance on things.
Workers in California will soon receive a minimum of five days of paid sick leave annually, instead of three, under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Wednesday....
If you tell someone who is starving that you won’t give them any food, they might decide there’s nothing left to lose and try to fight you for their survival.
If instead you give that person just a bit of food - not enough to actually feed them, just enough to give them hope of satiation - rather than getting a knife in the ribs you might just get a grateful handshake and thanks.
They went to the best universities in China and in the West. They lived middle-class lives in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and worked for technology companies at the center of China’s tech rivalry with the United States....
The problem is that God is allegedly light (1 John 1:5).
Light is its own opposite (a photon’s anti-particle is identical to itself).
So there cannot be a Satan that’s the opposite of a God of light.
Also, the addition of Satan as a supernatural adversary in the Abrahamic tradition was probably the result of a later editor needing to change Anat petitioning El to kill the son of the protagonist as adapted from the earlier polytheistic Tale of Aqhat to set up the adapted dialogue of suffering from the Babylonian Theodicy into a monotheistic version and just replaced the goddess’ name with the generic term ‘adversary.’ So there’s the whole later fanfiction as just the result of a lazy editor adapting a polytheistic earlier story to a monotheistic version going against the whole ‘Satan’ thing too.
Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
Starfield Desperately Needs More Unique Locations (www.thegamer.com)
Lemmygrad tankies react very sanely to Lemmy.world's defederation (sh.itjust.works)
LW Announcement...
Star Trek: Infinite Review Thread
cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/8680018...
Rule (lemmy.world)
Religious and superstitious beliefs should not be respected.
We’re in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I–an atheist and a skeptic–am told I need to respect these patently...
At what point is violence on a large scale justified?
I know this is a really vague question, but it’s been on my mind A LOT lately. I’m specifically asking about people fighting on behalf of a group that is subject to oppression of some kind. 3 years ago, with all of the protests in America that included violence majorly against property and minorly against people but were...
So Far, AI Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off (gizmodo.com)
Did you find Tear of the Kingdom difficult?
I played BotW a lot, and really loved it. I feel like the beginning of the game was relatively easy compared to TotK, I died a few times trying out things, discovering the game and possibilities ; in TotK I died a lot and still do even with good gear and armour (1*-2* armors, 30-40+ damage weapons). You could say it’s skill...
The Opener of the Jar (lemmy.world)
Yes, This Is Israel’s 9/11 (theintercept.com)
Both the U.S. and Israel were stunned to experience the ultraviolence they mete out to others....
What app you americans use for personal conversations?
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Safety fears as non-medical staff learn neurosurgery ‘on the job’ (uk.style.yahoo.com)
Why cant the Middle East just chill out?
I didn’t used to understand foreign involvement in wars, like the whole America-Vietnam shenanigans. But I can see why after watching this Israeli Palestine Conflict since birth....
I'm all aboard the Google Assistant with Bard hype train, and you should be too - Android Central (www.androidcentral.com)
Will the world ever stop being anti-intellectual?
One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural...
Massive Changes Could Be Coming From the Vatican. Conservative US Catholics Are Mad as Hell. (www.motherjones.com)
Robert Heinlein's idea of the perfect crowd control drug- would you take Happiness daily?
In Robert Heinlein’s novel “Farnham’s Freehold”, the protagonists accidentally end up in a very technologically advanced feudal society that depends on a drug called “Happiness” to control things and keep social classes rigidly separated. The hypothesis of this question: the drug is a pleasant tasting drink you take...
Anon is disillusioned about Starfield (sh.itjust.works)
America's nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don't like organized religion (apnews.com)
Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled....
California workers will get five sick days instead of three under law signed by Gov. Newsom (apnews.com)
Workers in California will soon receive a minimum of five days of paid sick leave annually, instead of three, under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Wednesday....
China Is Suffering a Brain Drain. The U.S. Isn’t Exploiting It. (www.nytimes.com)
They went to the best universities in China and in the West. They lived middle-class lives in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and worked for technology companies at the center of China’s tech rivalry with the United States....
[Serious] The revolution was successful! The old government is gone. You get to help write the new Constitution. What do you put into it?
If Jesus is the son of God and Satan is the oposite of God, a literal antichrist would be Satan's father, which would be God since God gave life to Satan
Edit: grammar
Am I? Who knows (startrek.website)
Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson