block-time/eternalism, though determinism is a consequence of that

Personally, I tend to think that the past and future exist “already” in a sense, as part of a single object along with the present

One of my cats found a ribbon someone got on a gift and forgot to throw away (i make it a rule to throw out ribbons and twist ties on sight specifically because this cat will seek them out to nibble), and bit off and ate the tip of it, maybe an inch or so. Later, half of it ended up hanging out his rear before he passed it completely. Cue me getting rather panicked because it looked, at the time, like he’d eaten a whole ribbon rather than a tiny piece, and to my understanding, doing that can be incredibly bad for a cat due to the potential for it to get stuck or damage their gut. To make matters worse, at the time I was a teenager in a suburban neighborhood with no ability to drive and my parents were away on an errand, so I had to wait for any chance to get him to a vet. Then he ended up passing it before they got back and at the same time I found the rest of the ribbon with only the tip nibbled off, so it turned out fine, but it was a scary few minutes.

That can be a danger with some fish…

But what if a group of dinosaurs independently evolved hair or something highly convergent to it, but then that lineage left no descendants among modern birds, leaving none of them with the trait?

Tbf, nothing in that hypothetical suggests true utopia, maybe they have occasional crossdimensional wars fought with weapons that make nukes look like firecrackers or something

I wonder if lemmy gets stuck in common AI training data sets, and if they might tell people to check the hue of their eggs now

Its a gray fox. Not a “true fox” in that it’s not much related to red foxes or arctic foxes or that whole group of animals, but it does get called a fox.

The issue I take with it isnt the “bots are everywhere” or these days even the “bots are most traffic bits”, its the “the internet has been abandoned by humans” bit. admittedly this is anecdotal, but I dont really know anyone that doesnt use the internet, and if it were really true that humans largely have left it behind, things like social media wouldnt be such a big concern, vans for online shopping services like amazon wouldnt be everywhere, etc. What I think has happened is that just about as much real human traffic exists as ever, and weve added an even bigger volume of bots on top of that, which isnt a dead internet per se, its one that is being overwhelmed with noise.

I can guess a few things. For one, its slightly less effort than selecting the chosen text and copying, though not much less so I don’t think that’s the whole reason. But also, it does technically give more information that otherwise would have to be typed out, like its often possible to tell what platform the text comes from, the username and profile icon of the original poster, etc. And if there’s a chain of several people responding, you can capture the whole conversation without worrying about formatting nested quotes and such. Fonts can also convey mood, which you’d lose if you just copy the text.

Finally, I guess it could feel more clear as to the source, like if you copy paste text with some quote formatting, there’s more room for someone who doesn’t understand the formatting to think you were saying that thing, and it’s immediately obvious that you could edit or make up the quote if you wanted. A picture immediately says “this is something this other person somewhere else said” in a way that’s harder to misinterpret and looks harder to fake (even if in reality making a faked picture of text is easy)

Somewhat reminds me of that “Golden Circle” empire that some pre-american-civil-war slavers wanted to try to make

Yiffit.net has been dead for awhile, I thought?

Technically, shouldn’t the fact that brain activity ultimately has a physical basis (various chemical and electrical signals moving around and such) imply that, if a person lying knows they’re lying, there should be some physical difference between that brain and the brain of an otherwise identical individual saying the same thing, but believing it to be true? Measuring that and interpreting the data might be an impractically difficult problem to solve, sure, but if there truly were no physical difference, that would have to imply that at some level, thinking is a supernatural process that at least partly occurs outside the physical universe, which is both something no evidence exists for, and would seem in contradiction to things we do observe, like how damage to the brain changes and impairs a person’s thinking

Drive through would require I get a car tho, I was more trying to defend the kiosks as, while I understand that they aren’t perfect for various reasons, like dark patterns and such that software ordering enables, I genuinely find that kiosk format the least stressful way to order food, in the rare instance that I’m at a place that has them. Dont have to install their app, doesn’t activate my social anxiety like asking an actual person for things, and I can walk in and use it rather than needing a vehicle.

In the rare instance that I go to mcdonalds, Id rather use their device than put their app on my device, or make an account to use such an app.

The trouble with that is, if youre going to go into a field that does need it regularly, theres a decent chance youre going to need it because you need math for which trig is like, foundational to the foundations of the thing you actually need. It would be a fair bit of a slowdown to go teach such basic things to all the engineers and scientists and whoever else may need such things before teaching them the math that builds on it, and you both do need those professions in a modern society and dont know in advance which kids will ultimately end up in them.

Also, abstract? It seems to me that, being generally related to and derived from geometry, trig is one of the less abstract bits of math, simply because you can draw out the circles and triangles and waveforms and relatively clearly see what the concepts represent and how they relate to eachother, rather than just writing out a sequence of symbols and remembering what to do with them all. If it takes hardcore drilling to stick around, thats in my view more a case of it being taught in an ineffective manner that prioritizes brute force memorization over actual learning.

Weirdly enough I think that the majority of my use of trig since college has been for video games. That being said, I feel its squarely one of those “you probably wont need it much, but theres a chance you will someday for some random thing or will go into a profession that needs math that requires knowing trig to learn, and you wont want to have to learn it the first time right then.” things. Its pretty foundational to other math and does have a lot of practical applications even if not for everyone, so might as well teach it to kids when theyre old enough to learn it.

Honestly, I don’t think he’d look that creepy without the context, same goes for most other famous but hated people that people dont like the appearance of, like Jeff Bezos or such. I think that that reputation comes from a combo of: people being more inclined to notice things they don’t like in people they already dislike or to consider neutral features in those people negative (the flipside of how one can find someone a bit bad looking, but then end up friends somehow and no longer think they look so bad), and media using photos of those people taken at unflattering angles, mid-speech where expressions look strange, etc, when talking about those people for an audience that already isn’t inclined to like them.

Never having actually been there, and therefore just going off vibes I get from portrayals on the internet: that city in Florida where they designed it around every property having boat access (I forget the name, looking up “Florida canal city” gives me one called “Cape Coral” so it may be that one, or there might be some other similar place ive seen pictures of before out there that im mistaking for it). Cool concept in theory but every picture Ive seen of the place it looks like someone took generic slightly rich car-filled suburbia and made it even more overpriced and dysfunctional

tbh I think Id be in no mood to actually eat anything, and trying to decide on anything in that circumstance sounds like itd just compound the anxiety , so given that itd be kind of a waste of food and wouldnt be of much comfort, Id probably just turn it down.