Sunsofold @ Sunsofold @lemmings.world

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That's the difference shareholders make.

US slowly working its way to a Japan style monetary system where the fractional unit ceases to be used as the buying power of the main unit dwindles.

Did you know Japan had a coin called 'sen' which was 1/100 of a yen? They aren't made anymore. They'd be near useless if they were because a cup of ramen is ~¥200, or 20000 sen. Although, it would be pretty funny in a show to see some ancient Japanese guy paying for his lunch with his sen collection while some uptight salaryman loses his mind in line behind him.

Pretty sure that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about how the entire comic is drawn almost entirely in black (rgb(_0,0,_{0)) and white. (rgb(}255,_255,255)) There's no ambient light level or distance effect because it's a drawing, and you can't see anything in the way the guy is drawn that would suggest any particular ethnic background.

Cat: Why are you teasing me by putting this food where I can smell it but not eat it?

We were already wired for it, but we didn't have access to the thing's we have now. It takes a lot of wealth to ride the hedonic treadmill, but our societies have reached a baseline wealth where it has become much more achievable to ride it almost all the time.

Less racist in the modern sense, more profoundly stupid and racist in the archaic sense.

Civilized coutry is a redundant phrase if taken literally. A country is a territory and the associated state. You can't have a state (political structure) without being 'civilized.' (participating in some kind of civic process) They are using civilized in a manner akin to how people used 'white' many years ago, referring to acceptability rather than color. e.g. The oft noted 'Irish and jews weren't white.' In that context it seems more of a sign of lack of critical thinking than colorism or essentialism.

I once did comic sans for a while because I am not highly typographically sensitive and wanted to mess about, but I usually like a mono serif typeface for the terminal, most recently Noto.

Pragmatically, I am, not because I chose to play the game, but because I didn't play well enough to win.

With the benefit of perspective, no one's. There is no author. The game, the loss, all of it, and even the world it took place in are meaningless. It's all just part of the universe playing with itself.

Not really.

'Mood disorders' are highly heritable. Poor economic circumstances are highly heritable. Unhappy people who have children rarely cite them as the cure to their unhappiness. It's very likely that, if an unhappy person had kids, they'd be unhappy too. Not a given, but more likely than not.

Sounds like you want a project.

You could try making a game. Python has pygame. Godot is a bit of a steeper learning step but has a lot of capabilities. I've messed around with each for fun.

Web dev can also be fun, and a very different style of coding. I've made things for a loved one who wanted some things for a site they run. Each thing they asked for took me no more than a day but saved them having to hire someone. I also made a little one-file site that I could share with some people as an RPG reference.

There are also coding games, as in games where you write code as part of the gameplay. These can help in that they give you a goal. Known names include computercraft mod for minecraft, screeps as both mmo and arena battle, Shenzhen I/O and other Zachtronics and zach-like games, The Farmer Was Replaced, etc.

And of course, you can always just think of something. I've written a few scripts to do simple edits to files, like 'open each file in the folder this is run in and change blahblah to bloobloo and increment the version number' or batch renaming files. Did one to find duplicate files and list them for organization/deletion.

I have other things I've started but never finished, but I enjoyed working on them, and they weren't my job, so no worries.

The truth has value in decision making, while comforting lies have value in stress reduction. Choosing 'truth' over 'comfort' is a long-termist strategy. Being satisfied by a simple answer will make you feel better now, increasing survivability in the short term, but finding a better model of the world to operate by, a.k.a. learning, lets you make better decisions for the rest of your life.

Well, first, you gotta join the military.

In a computer, checking a memory address would be closer to what we would call 'conscious' actions in a person. It is performed actively by software. In a brain, we still don't really have a full understanding of how memory is stored, but we at least know it isn't part of our experience that we have explicitly defined storage locations that we address. If it were, we'd have a name for it. Computers and brains are metaphorically similar but structurally and functionally quite different.

Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation's border. It's pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don't mean anything to the universe.

Ultimately, asking for a simple guide to privacy is like asking for a simple guide to safety. It's a broad category, and different people have different needs. Certain parts are simple (privacy: avoid interaction with big tech, safety: don't leave a fire unattended) but many elements are either unnecessary (windows privacy-supporting software for someone who only uses an iphone, flotation devices in the Sahara) or necessarily complex. (data hygiene procedures, having the correct type of fire extinguisher) There is no prebuilt 'Privacy Guide for Darkguyman's situation.'

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, but with anxiety given to a cat...

The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been.

The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don't know.

The trick is, snake oil salesmen exist because there are customers. You might be smart enough to spot them coming, but many, many, many people are not. Being dismissive of scamming as an issue because you can spot them is like being dismissive of drownings because you know how to swim. It ignores the harm to your world done by having others around you destroyed, sometimes because they are cocky and hubristic, sometimes just because they were caught in a weak moment, just a bit too tired to notice the difference between rn and m in an email address.

If I knew how to grant my wish, it'd be less of a wish and more of a quest. Sadly, I don't think there's a way to give patience to the world.

Oh man, that first sentence, already...

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”