Active users in the last six months. It will drop off when the usage peak is no longer included in the six-month period.

Better to brush after getting up to remove any bacteria and plaque buildup. And then right before bed, floss+brush.

Yes you can, with one caveat.

According to Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, compelling, comprehensible input is sufficient to acquire a language. That means input that you find interesting and that keeps you engaged, and which you can understand at least in part. That evolving sweet spot can indeed take you from complete newbie to fluency without ever speaking.

In my experience, though, being able to speak with other native speakers is a huge source of motivation and creates its own compelling input. So I wouldn’t discount that.

I personally know someone who went from no English to being able to converse just by watching The Simpsons.

I’ve seen people with diabetes unable to quit sugar even though it’s killing them, and THAT sounds like hard drugs to me.

There’s a form of recency bias at play. We tend to compare recent middling movies with the ones we remember from the past, which tend to be the exceptions. But trust me, there were some very shitty blockbusters in prior decades as well.

Give it a decade or two, and people will remember the '20s as a decade of amazing blockbusters. I mean, heck, we had Barbie and Oppenheimer in theaters at the same time just a few weeks ago. The fact these two movies were released the same weekend is gonna blow people’s minds in twenty years.

Just to add to this… When I first saw the trailer, I became completely obsessed with the film. I visited the website and read a bunch of short stories on there about the world of the Matrix.

And besides all that, when I finally sat down in theaters and watched Neo take the red pill, I had absolutely no clue what was happening. Their marketing material 100% avoided even spoiling the very premise of the film. All they did was build a mystery.

Johnny Depp was a toxic boyfriend and a chronic substance abuser. So was Heard, but the fact she’s a dumpster fire of a human being doesn’t make Depp a saint despite what the internet tried to tell you.

Just two shitty human beings who made each other miserable.

This is exactly it.

I’m moving to China for work, so I’m interested in alternative points of view on Chinese society from the usual U.S. mainstream media CCP hate boner. I checked out hexbear, and… my goodness.

They cheer for a version of China that the Chinese themselves would be embarrassed by. It’s clearly driven by 14-year-old white boy edgelords who are enamored with a hardcore Marxist-Leninist vision of China that never existed, most likely in reaction to a dislike of modern Western capitalism. I mean, they referenced “struggle sessions” with nostalgia and cheer for Bashar al-Assad because China is being friendly to him.

Real-life China is quite different from the depictions you see on main Lemmy instances, but it sure as hell isn’t anything like what the tankies are jerking off to, either.

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Hang on. You can get blocked by AI for asking what it deems are inappropriate questions?

I enjoyed The Creator for its visuals but the bad script makes it impossible to recommend it. Might do well as a brainless Star Wars surrogate in streaming, and it might turn into a cult classic down the line, but I’m not surprised it’s bombing.

I think generalizing the good of human beings to all sentient beings is a great example of how a rigorous ethical discourse can expand traditional morality. The idea of giving rights to great apes is a wonderful example and I hope we can get there soon.

And likewise, a lot of traditionally “wrong” behaviors can be argued to be morally neutral if they don’t really diminish the well-being of human beings. Sex work is another example.

I think simply put:

Morality is an inherent classification of right and wrong behaviors, often the result of tradition, upbringing, and/or society.

Ethics is a moral system at which one may arrive through philosophy and rational thought.

Ethics tends to define right and wrong in terms of its impact on human well-being, and not just as a inherent sense of right and wrong. As such, it may arrive at conclusions that feel “morally wrong” but actually perpetuate a greater well-being. (One example being utilitarianism.) This is also its danger, as one may argue oneself into a behavior which is rationally ethical but inherently harmful (e.g. eugenics).

The power of ethics is that it can be used to derive moral guidelines for new circumstances, such as AI or global ecological considerations. Such considerations can be derived from morality, but they have a tendency to not truly appreciate new variables and instead attempt to reduce new systems to familiar circumstances, thus often missing nuance.

I’d argue that ultimately, a sound ethical system must be derived from rational ethical thought, gently guided by sound morality as a safeguard against dangerous fallacies.

Haha, I’ve caught plenty of Chinese speakers having what they presume are private conversations in my presence, and sometimes even about me. People just automatically assume non-Asians can’t speak Chinese, even when these non-Asians live in China.

I wouldn’t say we speak in people’s faces, but we make comments to each other about random stuff. I would never say something rude about somebody in their faces, but my spouse might go, “Can we go back to the hotel, I really need to take a shit” or something silly and unfiltered like that.

My spouse and I lived in a bunch of countries over the years. We speak Quebec French, English, and Spanish, as well as a smattering of Chinese, Bulgarian, Korean, and a few odds and ends here and there.

We basically speak whatever we think people around us won’t understand. Very colloquial Quebec French in non-French-speaking countries, Chinese around white people, Bulgarian around non-white people, or even a cryptic mix of everything when we’re not completely sure.

We figure anyone who understands is probably someone we want to know… Hasn’t happened very often, but it does happen. So far we weren’t saying anything overly embarrassing when we got caught, but we sure as hell have no filter between us because of this!

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What truly annoys me about biopics is that Hollywood makes no attempt these days at these being true to the real-life characters they’re portraying. They’re 100% fiction using well-known public figures as the source of their verisimilitude. Movies like The Social Network and The Imitation Game, to name just these two, have barely any resemblance to their real-life counterparts. That’s also true of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Given that, I don’t even understand what’s the point of them.

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People will go to movies if they’re good and hear from their friends said movie was good.

Yeah, I don’t know. I hear Blue Beetle is good and I have zero interest in seeing it. I was also told by friends I trust that the Flash movie was fun and interesting and I can’t be bothered to watch it.

I’m not saying I don’t want to see any superhero movie anymore, but I don’t know that just “good” is good enough anymore. Even so-called “good” superhero movies these days just seem to invariably devolve into forgettable CGI mush.

Anecdotal, I know.