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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

    It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

    Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

    Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

    This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

    This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.



  • Activists (try to) do that as well. But it’s much harder to get close to a rich person or their property, than it is to do something in public spaces. They, too, have to see what they can do with their limited resources.

    Next, the media coverage is very unequal, as well as reader’s interest. You are much more likely to click on an article covering a potentially outrageous action, than you are to read about something which does not bother anyone. Although you can rest assured, these things are tried and done frequently.

    So naturally, to the uninvolved reader, it may seem as if activists don’t do anything but stupid stunts. And naturally, each outsider seems to think they have a much better grasp of strategy and what actions might make sense than the people who are actually involved in these things.

    Of course, a particular action can still be silly. I just want to draw attention to biases at play, in general.

    And if you really have a much better idea how to do something about the climate crisis, then go ahead and shine as an example. Not only would you author an actually impactful action (which in itself should be reason enough), you could also show all these rookie activists how to get things done. If your example is convincing, you should see less media coverage about inferior actions.





  • making the shops pay more to use the payment service, so that the shops then increase the prices, so that you pay the same as before

    Just nitpicking because I enjoy these thoughts:

    When the shop increases prices, it has to do it for all the customers, including the ones without credit card. So a part of the cost is offloaded to other types of customers. While credit card customers should see a slight increase in price, it should not be as much as they saved previously. So still a net win for them, at the cost of others.

    As others pointed out, the real scheme is probably entirely different.







  • The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

    That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.


  • An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

    I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

    It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.


  • One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

    Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

    Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

    The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

    I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.



  • I like that it comes in a can, not a plastic bottle simply because it gets colder faster and stays colder longer.

    If it feels colder in your hand, it means the opposite of what you assume: It absorbs heat from your hand faster, so the stays colder shorter.

    Imagine instead you hold a perfectly insulated container. You could not feel wether the inside is hot or cold, or else the insulation would be faulty.

    So if you really want to have a drink that stays colder longer, grab something which does not give away how cold it is, quite literally.




  • You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

    This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.