1. Accept the things you can’t change, and improve the things you can change. I disagree with the classical stoics on their emphasis on individual action and think that these principles can and should be applied on a societal level.

2. Mind your own business. If someone is doing something that doesn’t have any real impact on your life or the lives of people you care about, ignore it. If someone is gay or trans that doesn’t impact you at all. If someone has weird religious beliefs, let them believe them as long as they’re not hurting anyone.

3. The supernatural should be ignored for society level decisions because it cannot be proven and hasn’t been demonstrated. If someone wants to go to a psychic or astrologer for personal decisions I disagree with that but that’s on them.

4. Everyone has a god they worship. It may not be Jesus or Allah, but it may be money, a sport team, or maybe a musical band. Ritual and community are things that make us feel good. Coming together with a group of people for a common cause to enjoy something together is built into our psychology. The problem of replacing religion with bands and sports teams is that it comes with the fun parts of religion without the discussion of morality or urging to do good that religion can bring. You don’t see Kansas City Chiefs fans giving 10% of their income to the poor, for example. My ideal world would have secular temples to Reason where people come together to sing and discuss philosophy and work together for a common good. This one is weirder than the others and I won’t be mad if anyone thinks this is absurd. I just think that we have rejected religion without having a satisfactory replacement for the good things it provides.

All of my family members have Samsung phones and every single one of them has been complaining about the update. Normal people, tech people, it doesn’t matter. They all hate it. It’s actually kind of insane. The only reason I have been spared so far is that my phone is too old to get the new OneUI update. I can’t imagine any of them will buy a Samsung next time they buy a phone if the UI stays like this. People who buy Android phones are people who like Android phones. You’re not going to lure iPhone users to Android by being more like an iPhone because they’re just going to buy the real deal instead. It’s just stupid. Just the battery icon discussed in the OP was the source of a lot of complaints because it is extremely hard to read especially for older people.

Some modern religious philosophies (most notably Chaos Magick) essentially believe that thoughts, symbols, ideas, and cultural concepts gain power through their spread and repetition. Within this framework, Shrek may as well be a god because he’s the center of a popular media franchise and the basis of many popular memes. By saying “Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life” it becomes real in a sense. That’s kind of where I think that would be coming from. I’ve seen people make similar arguments about batman and mickey mouse being their personal gods.

That’s sort of what Ozempic does though. It reduces the desire to eat large amounts of unhealthy food.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with all of these comments talking about this as if it’s a real photo and not AI slop looks like complete shit. Are the comments AI generated spam too? Are they just stupid? Am I AI generated spam?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it’s so much worse on ways I don’t even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It’s crazy what people will accept if it’s done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.

Damn that’s honestly kind of impressive I don’t think I’d be able to shit on command like that so quickly

I’ve not used Epic games store much at all but I could see this leading to a proliferation of garbage on their service if they take the Steam approach of just letting anyone publish on there. This would essentially be an incentive to publish asset flip shovelware on Epic instead of Steam because “devs” get a bigger cut.

Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.

Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.

Dude it still does. Try that shit man a big shitty sandwich and chips fucking goes hard

Damn a restaurant I like is on this stupid site. It’s surprising because most of the stuff in my area that’s on here is like realtors, explicitly right wing businesses with patriot in the name, or like when you go in there it’s all thin blue line flags and shit. This is just a normal restaurant with normal decor. I’m not really surprised the owners are apparently Trumpy, pretty much all the business owners in my area are, I’m just surprised to see them on this site

It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.

This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?

In what language? Modern English didn’t exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before

I would die quickly because I don’t have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.

For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don’t. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don’t have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You’d probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There’s very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.

It greatly simplifies life from a legal standpoint. It’s basically like creating a tiny corporation of two people that can act as a single legal entity. If you’re married it simplifies buying a house together, inheritance, medical decisions, etc. As others have pointed out, these are important especially when your partner’s family don’t approve of you or the relationship especially for LGBT people.

I am going to break the mold though and say the actual ceremony is important too. Declaring your intention to stay together for life in front of your friends and family changes things. It adds a level of security and finality to the relationship- you have to put your money where your mouth is on the relationship. Although people frequently do it, I don’t know how someone can go through the wedding process without reflecting on how big of a deal it is to stand up in front of so many of your friends and family and declare your intention to stay together forever, even without the religious ritual aspect of it. I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone without having this commitment, for example. Ultimately even though marriage is a social construct, I think it’s still a useful one even in a world where women are no longer considered property of men.

I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.

THE ART OF THE DEAL

If I understand correctly this is essentially how condensed models like Deepseek work and how they’re able to attain similar performance on much cheaper hardware. If all still goes through the LLM but LLM is a lot lighter because it has this sort of thing built in. That’s all a vast oversimplification.

The commenter is referring to the fact that sending someone to a foreign concentration camp in a country they aren’t actually from is fundamentally different from “deportation” and that using that term only serves to bolster the regime.