Yeah +1 on “it started slow but got better”. Not amazing or anything, but good enough that I wished there was more when I got to the last ep. But I do remember thinking it was bad early on and just kept watching out of boredom more than anything else.

It’s been on this path since at least hubble. Though it might have accelerated.

The universe spontaneously popped into exitence in the current state it’s in when you’re reading this, the only things that exist are what’s in your line of sight, all the memories are made up, and it’ll shortly pop back out of existence only to return a few billion years or femtoseconds later with a new line of sight and memories, along with something to let you know what’s really happening but with enough plausible deniability that you’ll laugh and try to move on before popping back out of existence.

This is your eternal punishment for something you can’t even remember, or can’t verify even if you do remember.

How would you even know this? you might wonder with a hint of uncertain dread, but the truth is I don’t know anything because I don’t even exist. It’s all you: punisher, punishee, neutral observer, entertained by this meaningless repetition that bored you out of your mind lol.

Or shall we let this one play out a bit longer?

“Luckily there was a loophole in those rules that I (omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient) made.”

If that doesn’t scream, “made up by the clerics trying to avoid contradicting each other and bringing the whole house of lying cards down as they went”, just keep sending money to your church. Because if a god needs anything, it’s obviously worldly riches and unquestioning loyalty. We need these churches to impress everyone with the power of our god, but he’s sleepy after making it all and throwing tantrums bigger than we can imagine because people were acting like the way he made them capable of acting, like cartoon villains in some cases, like a whole city whose first reaction to seeing an angel was “Let’s all rape it!” So that’s why you need to send your money without any questions!

I’m convinced the superstition is a misunderstanding over time of things that were, on their own, bad luck. Salt used to be expensive, so spilling some was bad luck because you would have rather kept it all for use instead of wasting it.

Mirrors would have also been expensive, especially when they needed to be transported before the time of smooth suspensions. The whole 7 years thing could be from it taking around 7 years for one particular broken mirror to be replaced.

Or the ones that invite accidents, like walking under a ladder (which usually implies someone is working at the top and might drop something, so odds of death are a bit higher under ladders). Or opening an umbrella indoors, where things are more crowded and you might injure someone or break something.

Though the black cat one is probably just racism.

Anyways, I bet that’s where they started and then humans being kinda (or very, depending on the circumstances) stupid and liking jumping on bandwagons they don’t always understand to fit in, left us with some people thinking those things cause ghosts to haunt you or whatever dumb shit superstitious people think happens.

Though I do think it is a bit wasteful to just dump salt out on the ground.

There was a series on Netflix that used this. It was alright though probably got cancelled. Can’t remember the name of it.

He was getting paid peanuts for designing and building an essential system for the running of the park all on his own, working for a guy that constantly bragged about sparing no expense.

IIRC the only interaction between Hammond and Nerdy went something like “you should have negotiated a better contract! Stfu gbtw”, which can pretty much sum up the whole wealth divide between the owners who gain most of the benefit and the workers who actually do the things under capitalism. Except if they aren’t getting the better of everyone on average, they just shut the whole thing down or find others that they do get the better of.

Yeah, the showing off is what I was getting at. The first experiment seemed more like an experiment and an accident but the demonstrations with the screwdriver seemed more like someone doing pull-ups over a fatal drop just to show how badass they are and accidentally landing on other people on the bottom when he slipped.

Thanks for the in depth response though, this gives more context to this than I’ve had before.

And just guessing on the other two attitudes before looking anything up (haha maybe wanting to challenge my intuition like this instead of just looking it up is one), one is probably related to laziness (eg assuming something is fine and doesn’t need to be checked when going through the pre flight checklist). And maybe the other is being too trusting or not assertive enough (eg colleague says something is OK, you don’t fully believe them but don’t challenge them on it). Am I close?

What was the point of these approaching criticality experiments anyways?

Has it ever been proven in any of the shows that the transporter didn’t kill everyone that used it and just made such prefect copies that no one realized?

Like it created an extra copy of Riker and there was the tragedy of Tuvix. Though I’d say the former is evidence that it is new copies but the latter might be evidence against it, since they each had memories of their time merged when they separated. Actually, that whole incident kinda brings into question what’s going on for a transporter to accidentally merge two people and not in a “horrible teleportation into a wall accident” way and then somehow de-merge them.

So… Did you guys eventually get the kinky glassware you ordered and did they make you return the chemistry glassware they accidentally sent?

To be fait, a lot of sci fi does involve very advanced computing, like HAL in 2001.

It is that simple but it isn’t easy. It’s like finding enlightenment from Buddhist parables. They don’t all click the same for everyone. Once they click, it can seem obvious, but before that, they can seem meaningless, trite, or misleading.

From my pov, the image is accurate but not the clearest. It can only get you part of the way and only if it resonates with you. It doesn’t surprise me that it generates cynicism similar to the “gee thanks, I’m cured” responses to mental health advice.

My interpretation of the message in the meme isn’t so much a “present vs future thinking” as it is a “you don’t need to search for happiness because your brain determines your mood, not outside factors.” I’m not saying you should just ignore your issues (which would make things more difficult over time), but that you can be happy despite them. Happiness isn’t a goal, it’s a state of mind.

As for the millionaire example, that they wouldn’t be living paycheck to paycheck is the whole point. It was intended to frame happiness/unhappiness in a different context that was easy to understand (he lost money he had spent a lot of time getting) but was still left in a position that most would be happy to find themselves in, but instead he’s probably miserable about it.

My line of thought for this is that stressing about whether you’ll have enough money to cover rent won’t make it any easier to cover rent. Happiness is more about mindset than circumstances. It is easier said than done, for sure, but if one needed to have 0 problems to be happy, there wouldn’t be many happy people.

Consider a millionaire who checks the markets one day only to realize their portfolio has dropped by 30% wiping out all of their gains for the past two years and leaving them with only 3 million. They’d probably not be very happy with that, despite still being in a position that many would trade everything to be in.

I’d even go so far as saying that fraud is pretty rampant in all levels of society.

Monkey’s paw curls. Now abortions are legal and forced.

Yeah, they are morally dubious at best. But there’s just something about watching things fight to the death that makes it so fascinating. Though I agree that it is best if they are each in their own natural environments rather than just shoved in a glass box together. They should have the option to disengage, too, because it’s also interesting to know when two killing machines opt to not try each other (and based on the one video I did see of wolf spider vs black widow, I’d guess most of them would go that way because the wolf spider wasn’t very interested in getting anywhere close to the widow and only killed it in the end because it kept trying to web it up).

That makes me wonder how many of the animal vs gladiator fights would have resulted in them walking away from each other.

I’m going to need to see some videos before I can determine who is winning this debate. With heavy metal background music, though I would also accept a David Attenborough narration. With and without the wolf spider swarm.

sigh For completion sake, should probably also check out some videos of each of those spiders vs other things like scorpions, mice, mongeese, non-mon geese, snakes, etc.

It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.