I won’t try to argue about the morality of it, though I can’t agree that pickpocketing any random American does anything to fight the military industry or their imperialism, though I will grant that culpability for it is complex. But when you play with fire, you should expect to get burned occasionally.

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.

For me, a historical fiction that put norse and chriatianity on similar footing was the push that got me from “ugh this religious stuff is annoying” to “oh, it’s probably bullshit, too”. In hindsight, it’s pretty telling that christianity puts the most emphasis on having faith no matter what evidence or lack thereof is presented, to the point where that alone determines whether one is punished, ignored, or rewarded in a way that is completely unverifiable to anyone living.

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.

If you want to steal shit, at least be moral about it and go to a walmart or something. I’m sorry but I’m not even going to pretend to be sorry about a pickpocket targeting normal people getting his (or her) ass beaten.

Though, on that note, is it harder or riskier to shoplift in Europe? Maybe that’s why we have fewer pickpockets because stores are much easier and safer targets. Unless you get a particularly enthusiastic mall cop after you, even if you get caught, it’ll probably be a fairly polite interaction involving more disappointment than rage, all the way from capture to sentencing, at least in Canada.

Plus these days the odds of getting cash is low and the expensive device everyone carries has gps tracking built in, so the reward might be too low for the risk.

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.

Yeah but that chart accounted for deaths per distance driven and the bit about speed enforcement and the autobahn was to challenge your assumption that people in the US drive faster on average because people here speed so much they have to be exceeding the limit by a good amount before the cops even blink at them.

Canada and Australia, the only other countries in the OP, are both below the US.

As for speed, at least where I am in Canada, they don’t even bother enforcing the limit until you’re at least 20% over it. And Germany, famous for its highway without a speed limit, is still lower than all three countries listed.

Whatever is going on in the US to cause a higher amount of car fatalities isn’t just distance driven or speed.

Could be that Canada is ready for the snow it gets while you see some states shut down completely when they get a light dusting of snow.

That child might conform! Only when they don’t bow to the powers that want to use them is it ok to kill them!

Proton proves that you don’t need to run on a web browser for cross platform compatibility. Turing-complete platforms are equivalent in their capabilities, it’s just a matter of adding a translation layer that doesn’t need to be as heavy as a browser DOM (at least for going between windows and Linux on x64).

I’m never buying another Logitech device again because that problem that happened with my G7 back in the 00s still happened with my G900 in the 20s.

With my G7, I’d open it up when it started happening, and open up the switch to re-bend the metal piece to give it some spring back. Kept doing this until one day the plastic button that presses down on that metal part fell on carpet and was gone forever.

With my G900, I said fuck it and just bought some better mouse button switches and replaced the left mouse button. Was actually kinda glad I needed to because the battery had become a danger pillow so I replaced that, too.

But with the button issue existing for so long and being fixed by a part that cost a trivial amount compared to what I paid in the first place, you can’t convince me that Logitech isn’t deliberately using switches that fail quickly to drive up demand for mice.

From a programming pov, a definition of AI could be an algorithm or construct that can solve problems or perform tasks without the programmer specifically solving that problem or programming the steps of the task but rather building something that can figure it out on its own.

Though a lot of game AIs don’t fit that description.

That’s not quite accurate because the two numbers have a relationship with each other. i^2 = - 1, so any time you square a complex number or multiply two complex numbers, some of the value jumps from one dimension to the other.

It’s like a vector, where sure, certain operations can be treated as if the dimensions of the vector are distinct, like a translation or scale. But other operations can have one dimension affecting the other, like rotation.

Huge in 3d graphics and AI.