Fake: avoiding genetic diseases with gene editing is possible, increasing human intelligence by genetics alone is called eugenics and its 100% bullshit

Gay: Sam Altman is gay (this also makes him a fucking blood-traitor because he supports homophobic politicians; then again, just by being a billionaire he’s a disgrace to all of humanity regardless of sexuality.)

I knew a kid who would do datura. Surprisingly normal dude for someone who would occasionally decide to microdose hell itself lol

If you already tried proton and it hasn’t worked for the games you want to play, you have my sympathies. However, if that’s not the case, I highly recommend trying it out.

I’ve been running Arch on my main PC for two years and, so far, Steam’s Proton has worked with every game I’ve tried it on.

If you need to install the game using a windows installer like a repack, wine seems to work for that. Then, as long as you can find the game’s exe, you can add it to steam and choose to have it run via proton. And after that it launches just like every other game would.

Even NVIDIAs raytracing has worked for me which is kind of an impressive feat considering how much of a pain NVIDIA graphics can be on Linux sometimes.

I live in the Rockies. The mountains around me have been completely bare of snow for almost the entire winter. Like the peaks are just bare gray stone where the snow used to be year round.

I keep hearing people saying how sad it was they couldn’t ski this year because there was never snow… we basically haven’t had any winter/cold-weather at all, and they’re upset about skiing… I’m pretty sure there are more serious things to worry about.

Abbott: “So say you’re 40 and you like a girl that’s 10. Well you’re really too old for her because you’re 4x her age. So let’s say you wait 5years. Now you’re 45 and she’s 15, so you’re only 3x as old as her, but that’s still a bit much, so you wait another 15years and now you’re 60 and she’s 30. Only half your age now.

How long do you have to wait till you’re both the same age?”

Costello: “Well 4 then 3 then 2… at this rate she’d better be willing to wait for me too.”

Abbott: “what do you mean?”

Costello: “Going like this, eventually she’ll be older than me and she better wait for me to catch up.”

Abbott: “Why would she wait for you?”

Costello: “WELL I WAITED FOR HER!”

Yes, the smoke flavor can’t permeate all of you evenly if part of you is blocked by (or inside) another body.

If you must have sex while smoking, change positions often to minimize this

My English teacher back in highschool was very picky about using “they” like most people do. I can hear him say “you have to use FORMAL LANGUAGE” in my head still lol

If it’s an unknown person we were told to use “he or she” instead of “they” and “his or her” instead of “their” despite the fact that no one fucking talks that way when referring to an unknown individual.

Like even saying “everyone should bring their laptop to class” would be marked wrong because “everyone” is singular so the “correct” version is “everyone should bring his or her laptop to class” which imo is way more confusing

However, he was also fine with us using masculine singular pronouns when the gender of a person wasn’t known, which I guess is kind of the case in like Spanish and some other Latin languages but still, just really weird rules

Funnily enough, all my engineering professors seem to encourage the use of genAI for anything as long as it’s “not doing the learning for you”

What’s funny is that there’s basically no practical use for GenAI in engineering in the first place. Images like technical drawings need to be precise and code written for FDM/FEA etc. needs to be validated by some kind of mathematical model you derived yourself.

They say “it’s a useful new tool” and when I ask “what is it useful for” they typically have no answer besides “writing grant proposals” lol

There are lots of useful applications for machine learning in engineering, but very few if any practical applications for genAI.

Sorry I couldn’t parse that first sentence could you rephrase?

Also, I actually have been on Weibo but it really seemed too like… pop culture obsessed? Not my thing, plus my Mandarin sucked even back then when I was still actively learning it

I have also seen c/manufacturingconsent.

Anyway, I’m guessing you brought up Weibo as a “people can talk bad about the government there so clearly they don’t censor anti China speech” but that’s really not an argument.

China is pretty open about its regulation of the media. I mean you’ve likely read the terms and conditions for some of their media platforms so you already know it’s against their policies to promote ideas contrary to the vision/interests of the CCP or create dissent or however they phrase it. I’m sure small comments slip through here and there because their impact is small and censorship takes effort, but major posts against the government are not staying up very long. (If you can find long standing / popular dissenting post on Weibo to prove me wrong I’ll change my mind on this)

As for bringing up manufacturing consent and “what the west is trying to do” guess what buddy, if lots of people/organizations are doing a fucked up thing, it’s still a fucked up thing.

To be fair, I think trying to ensure your citizens hear good news is actually a pretty good idea, but I’m not a big fan of censoring news in order to make that happen.

Want to make the good news I see outnumber the bad 10:1? Fine, but leave the bad news in there. And I definitely don’t think organizations should censor their failures/problems. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake shows you’re trying to improve; hiding your mistakes makes you seem much less trustworthy in general.

Not everywhere else, China bans speech that shows the party or the country in a negative light lol

“The culprits: Shameless poachers, hunting humans without a permit.”

I never would’ve thought this was a thing. To be fair, I don’t get the “smell is a major factor in food taste” at all. I can taste things just as well with my nose plugged as I can without. (Possibly because allergies meant childhood me could rarely ever smell much at all)

Anyway this is fascinating, and I wonder if animals with even stronger senses of smell are fine with bland food because they get nose blind faster so basically all food is bland. Or, do they rely primarily on smell to the point that taste from the tongue just doesn’t really influence full taste as much as smell?

One of the reasons my panic attacks never last long is that I feel like I’m dying and once I think “hey wait why am I freaking out? I don’t care if I die and if I do I’d rather not die feeling so stressed” usually my body calms down very fast.

Same thing with a time when I almost drowned. I realized I’d rather just let go, so I stopped flailing about and let myself start sinking. Then it’s like “okay this is taking longer than expected to die, I could probably push myself up to take a breath or maybe even swim to shallow water before I die”

Accepting death is a great way to calm yourself down in stressful situations and calming yourself down is helpful in most stressful situations lol

I am not sure why you think I’d count a computer as a living thing by default, given my reply and the fact a computer or machine is whatever we give it the capability to.

Why does it matter that we “give” them their capabilities and functions? Living things act the way they do because the universe shaped them that way, and since humans are part of the universe, the same is true of computers. To give life priority because it wasn’t “made” is an arbitrary subjective choice.

As for the reason they are comparable to living things, they can respond to stimuli, which is the main necessity of your definition of pain. If you try to define life in another way, you’ll be biasing data by only including things which fit the pattern you’re describing.

The scientific definitions of “living” usually require growth, reproduction, and the ability to sustain itself, which means your statement that all living things seek to sustain themselves is vacuously true.

By saying all living things seek to avoid pain and hurt, you’re saying all things that seek to sustain themselves seek to sustain themselves. You drew a line around things that had a quality and then said that because all these which have this quality have this quality, somehow it means that quality is objectively important.

That’s the point I was trying to make.

Using universal patterns as a basis for morality is also problematic because entropy is far more common and far more universal than living/self-preservation. All things decay. Everything “wants” to be in the lowest energy state. Order always tends to disorder.

So if prevalence of a thing/pattern is basis for morality, accelerating entropy (destruction, disorder, chaos, etc.) is the most moral action.

You might actually have a better chance at justifying that the preservation of life is important by using scarcity since, as far as we currently know, we’re the only planet with life in the entire universe.

So the question is not “one vs millions” but “millions vs billions”. And therefore destroying millions of viruses/bacteria to keep an organism of billions of cells alive is the lesser evil.

Fair point.

Do you know the game Stellaris?

I’ve heard of it but haven’t played, but that does sound interesting, so maybe I will.

Anyway, I would like to note that for what it’s worth I do agree with you on the idea that pain is probably a good basis for ethics. I just don’t think one can claim that it is objectively/universally right.

If you’ve taken antibiotics, you chose to cause harm to millions of living things for the pleasure of not feeling sick, maybe as simple a pleasure as just not coughing or not having itchy feet, who knows.

Point is, the living things you killed will never be revived. You caused extraordinary amounts of serious and lasting harm all for your personal pleasure.

You must be absolutely wracked with guilt over this massive evil you and so many others have and are still committing

(Edit: just reread this and realized this first sentence comes off much harsher than I intended it, sorry. I legitimately meant it’s a fun fact you might not be aware of and I just thought “fun fact, you’re wrong” was a humorous way to start an explanation.)

Fun fact, you’re wrong. Many living things don’t experience pain and act entirely like robots responding to their environment reflexively whether by their chemical or even neurological structure.

While microbes are the common example, Jellyfish are a better one since they are complex organisms. They respond to their environment because changes in their environment directly cause reflexive actions. There’s no thought or awareness of pain, just chemical switches going off when the right inputs occur.

They’re just machines that avoid destruction because the ones that didn’t got destroyed. If responding to one’s environment is all that matters, then computers are just as “living” as jellyfish but don’t inherently act towards self preservation or feel pain, so you’re wrong, plenty of things that can respond to their environment don’t give a shit about it or act towards self preservation.

If you try to qualify “only reproducing things count” or “organic life” you’re the one drawing those arbitrary boundaries so this isn’t an objective basis for morality.

And, even if pain were a solid basis, we run into problems with which pain matters more? Would you walk away from Omelas? Would you kill an innocent man yourself to save five others?

And what about cancer or viruses? Something tells me you think a person who feels pain is more important than the millions of viruses or bacteria giving them an infection/disease, but that’s not objective. Why does the life of one outweigh the life of many in this circumstance?

And if you really don’t want anything to feel pain, the guaranteed solution to this problem is to kill every living thing. No more living things will feel pain ever again. Something tells me you wouldn’t think that good though…

Morality (and any justification for it) is always subjective

Hey now chupacabras are much farther south and they’re actually aliens don’t you know /s

Anyway you telling me there’re no creepy stories from some cryptid or other where you live? What a shame. What stories do you tell on camping trips?

Also if you’re Canadian like your instance suggests, the First Nations people have their own it-goes-on-four-legs, and I’m wiling to bet the stories of wendigo are just as creepy as those for skinwalkers.

I don’t really believe the stories and you don’t have to either, but don’t go saying it’s “Americans” as if you don’t belong to that same continent with similar myths and legends. The native people of “turtle island” didn’t have the same borders we do today and neither did their stories and mythos

Can’t tell if you’re referring to the weed or the peyote, but I suppose both would likely do the trick lol

Gila Monsters definitely give some Australia vibes. They are kinda cute chonky reptiles even if they are venomous

Rattlesnakes are another fun venomous reptile, though they’re much more common and more likely to bite you than Gila Monsters. It’s always a bit of a scare when you’re hiking and suddenly hear a rattlesnake start warning you but you can’t even tell where it is. Like pick a lane buddy, either camouflage/hide yourself or try to tell me where you are so I can avoid accidentally stepping on you, don’t try to do both at the same time lol

Of course in the reptile cases, the animals rarely bite unless you’re actively antagonizing them, but still a bit scary to have

We’ve also got scorpions everywhere out west. If you ever come out to the Rocky Mountains or the deserts around them, bring a black light flash light out at night. You’ll be able to find a ton of the fluorescent green critters crawling around in the sagebrush. They only get about 3cm long, but they are “the most venomous scorpion in North America” haha I’ve never been stung and Ive caught several before, but the venom can cause full limb paralysis, can feel like “lightning” even a while after the initial sting, and there are a reported deaths from it

And we’ve actually got a ton of different stinging/biting wasps and bees and creepy vibrant colored things like mud daubers. Oh and those Velvet Ants which are nicknamed “cowkillers” because they’re bite is painful enough to kill a cow (it isn’t really of course)

Definitely not as much diversity as Australia, and most things here will leave you alone if you leave them alone, but there are plenty of things that will, at the very least, ruin your day if you’re not careful

It’s a joke post mate; I don’t believe in magic or skinwalkers. It’s just fun to hear the stories