thebestaquaman @ thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

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11

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583

Joined

2 yr. ago

There is 100% a strong culture for minding your own business and not bothering anyone here. By that I mean that approaching someone without having a good reason to do so is very much frowned upon. That doesn't mean we're anti-social or complete strangers to small-talk, but there are some rather subtle social cues governing when it's appropriate to approach someone, and if you just mind your own business and don't give any indication that you want to chat, there's a high probability that no one will approach you or talk to you.

I didn't mean to come off as disagreeing with you, I think we generally agree. My point was that I think there can be such a thing as a "perfect relationship", as long as we have a realistic idea of what that entails. I definitely agree that the idea of a "perfect relationship" that a lot of media tries to sell us is completely unrealistic though.

Your english is great btw :)

Hey.... are you 100% sure she isn't playing both of us? I was with her all of last week, but she's on a business trip this week, that doesn't happen to match up with when you've been with her I hope?

_jk

I second you on the point about a "perfect partner". However I still think a relationship can be "perfect", because a relationship is much more than just the two people involved.

As long as we accept that no realistic relationship is completely without conflict, I would say that a "perfect relationship" involves being able to work through the issues that inevitably show up. It's something you build together, not something you just have.

My impression is that the current "dating economy" breaks this perception a bit, to the point where a lot of people end up looking for the "perfect partner" that they automatically form the "perfect relationship" with, and aren't willing to do much hard work to build that relationship. I don't think that kind of "perfect relationship" (without any work) exists.

Wrong is a bit hard for me, maybe because "every happy couple is the same, while every unhappy one is unhappy in their own unique way" (para-quote from Tolstoy I think).

To me, I know what I have is right because I honestly feel like every joy we share is doubled, while every problem we share is halved. It's a cliche, but I honestly mean it. When I'm happy with her, it makes me twice as happy just to see that she is happy. I honestly feel like the greatest joy in the world to me is to see her be happy. Likewise, if something is wrong, I want to help her in a way I've never experienced with anyone else, and can feel in my whole body that we're in this together.

This doesn't mean that we never get mad at each other, but when we do, we've always ended up remembering that, at the end of the day, we're the most important thing in the world to each other. Whatever issues we've had, we're in it together to solve them.

To round off with Tolstoy: I guess "wrong" would be if any of the above didn't apply for whatever reason, that reason being unique in every case.

I want to fill in on the fact that any journal can end up publishing garbage science if someone is able to dupe the reviewers. This means that no matter what journal you're reading, you need to read science critically. Sensational claims require sensational evidence, and ideally any work should be 100% reproducible based on the information given in the article.

Depending on the field, you can also often get a good indicator by investigating the authors of the article (checking out the last author first is a good tip). This mostly applies to very recent research where looking at citations is a poor indicator of quality, but where research is often dominated by a few reputable research groups around the world.

For older research, looking at how often the article has been cited, by whom, and why, can give you a very good indicator of the quality of the research. Solid research is often built upon later, while garbage is often refuted and then abandoned.

Of course, none of the above is infallible, but if you read critically to ensure the research makes sense, find that it originates from a reputable group, and see that others have based newer research on it, it's probably trustworthy. After a while you start building up an impression of the most important names and journals in the field, but that requires reading quite a few articles and noticing which names and journals repeatedly show up.

I honestly enjoy it when this happens. It's so satisfying getting to pull obscenely large wads of lint out of the port

I think you're missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.

Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.

Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.

By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.

Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It's banal, but I can't help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can't fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.

This brings up the second point: We don't need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It's enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).

I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the "chaotic but deterministic" theory.

I would absolutely be happy to have a feature where an LLM could read previous issues, the docpage, and the FAQ/wiki, then you could query it regarding your issue to (a) see if it is a legitimate issue, (b) check that the issue you submit contains the info you need, and c) help you link in previous issues/PR's referring to relevant stuff.

Never in hell do I want an LLM to be generating issues by itself.

I wouldn't be too worried if you have ordinary cardiovascular health. If your heart has to put in non-trivial work to get the blood up from your legs, I would recommend more exercise.

So it's not that her family won a court case or anything? The government just decided to give them compensation?

There's a paywall on the article, but how the fuck is the woman who attempted to breach a door against armed security and got shot for it entitled to compensation???

Exactly: I have friends that got a drivers license in th US, and the education/test is honestly a joke compared to what they require here, and it clearly shows in the number of driving-related deaths.

I would say that the "bad part of town" usually has overlap with the poorer part of town, regardless of what skin colour people have there. Of course, especially in the US, there's significant overlap between economic status and skin colour. I just hate how the typical American view on "race" is projected onto other countries.

Americans typically have this hang-up on "race" that you really don't find anywhere else. A lot of places you have talk about "ethnicity" or similar, but the American fascination with categorising people by their skin colour and then using that to make generalisations is pretty unique.

Drinking age is 18 in most of the world (with 16 also applying some places). Additionally, my impression is that it's not as big a deal for 16-17 year olds to get ahold of alcohol in other places.

Where I'm from, the drinking age is 18, but it's not uncommon or a big deal for people to get some beer or drinks for their 17th birthday party.

You might want to check the details here: I know that in some European countries, you'll have trouble renting a car at all with an American license unless you pass a driving test in a European country first to get certified. In fact, in several countries I don't think an American license is valid at all until you pass a test. It's probably worth checking out the details for Romania.

For that exact reason some countries (my country included) don't accept an American license unless you do a test here first.

Though IIRC, that applies for both manuals and automatics, because American drivers education isn't really trusted here.

I could definitely run Linux on the machine, no doubt it would work even better then. In fact I have an old Ubuntu partition on it that I haven't booted in years, but which worked fine when I last used it.

However, the only purpose that machine serves at the moment is being an x86 Mac with a toolchain for compiling whatever, so that I can quickly compile distributables whenever I need to distribute something for x86 mac and don't want to spend time setting up a full pipeline for cross compiling (once or maybe twice a year).

I have an old MacBook (2012) that runs macOS 10.13 (High Sierra, released in 2017) on 4GB RAM. I use it a couple times a year if I need to compile something for Mac x86 and don't want to spend time setting up cross-compiling from my newer (M1) machine.

That MacBook is literally 13 years old, and the only upgrade I've given it is a new SSD back around 2018. It runs just fine.

Rip on the walled garden all you like, but if you want an OS with the stability and simplicity of a commercial OS, together with unix compatibility and a shell that lets you do whatever you want... macOS is your best bet. Using it literally feels like using a commercially polished and widely supported version of Linux.