palebluethought

joined 1 year ago
[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Psychonauts 1/2. The first game literally takes place at a summer camp. Second one has basically the same vibe.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I almost hesitate to bring up the other problems with your plan since, obviously the total monstrosity of it. But that's anyway pretty well covered so I'll just throw in that blowing enough nukes to kill that many people would create considerably worse environmental disaster

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"digestible" and "nutritious" aren't social constructs, so no. If your body can transform it chemically in a way that produces energy, it's food. Otherwise it's not. The same things are food regardless of your culture.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm really trying to make this one make sense, but it's just not happening. Can you rephrase?

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 52 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

Everyone is talking about dominant and recessive genes, so I just want to clarify a couple things.

The way your body directly uses genes is as a blueprint to construct proteins. Your cells are always producing proteins from the genes in all your chromosomes. It has complex ways of regulating how much of each it produces, but your body doesn't care what chromosome it's coming from. Once an embryo is fertilized, there's really no distinction between "mom" chromosomes or "dad" chromosomes, as far as the embryo and its protein machinery are concerned.

"Dominant" and "recessive" characterization is about how those proteins affect your body at the macro scale, not whether your body actually uses the gene and produces its proteins -- it always does that. For example, brown hair is a dominant trait, and blonde is recessive. But this is because producing any amount of brown pigment will make your hair brown, regardless of what other pigments you're making, simply because it's darker. Literally the same as combining blonde and brown paint. It has nothing to do with whether the genes are actually being expressed -- the brown hair gene doesn't stop the blonde hair gene from making its pigments.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Perhaps "always-on display" is clearer? Keeps it from turning off when idle

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Why would anyone stop using those standards? You seem very confused about the incentives for adopting standards. Sure, maybe US-driven standards were chosen over other possibilities partly because of political environment, but once you have a perfectly good standard adopted you're not just going to throw it out because the original author isn't cool anymore. You don't need a dominant power to adopt standards.

And for being "slightly political" and "focused on the standards," your post sure does spend the majority of its time talking about only politics and not about standards at all

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Sure, but now you're talking about running a physical simulation of neurons. Real neurons aren't just electrical circuits. Not only do they evolve rapidly over time, they're powerfully influenced by their chemical environment, which is controlled by your body's other systems, and so on. These aren't just minor factors, they're central parts of how your brain works.

Yes, in principle, we can (and have, to some extent) run physical simulations of neurons down to the molecular resolution necessary to accomplish this. But the computational power required to do that is massively, like billions of times, more expensive than the "neural networks" we have today, which are really just us anthropomorphizing a bunch of matrix multiplication.

It's simply not feasible to do this at a scale large enough to be useful, even with all the computation on Earth.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

"uncommon" is an overstatement, you can get them pretty much anywhere that has pots and pans. It's uncommon in that most people don't bother owning one, not that they're hard to get

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 78 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In addition to what others said, the way you perceive light intensity is not linear. Between your eye adjusting to changing light levels and just the way your brains visual centers work, it's closer to logarithmic. Indoor lighting at night probably feels like, what, 10% of the brightness of daylight? In reality it's less than 1%, sometimes closer to 0.1%.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.

[–] palebluethought@lemmy.world 77 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: "teaching to the test." Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: "data-driven decision making" optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That's just off the top of my head.

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