Exactly! I’m sick of people being labelled as racist because they’ve said some keyword that someone has decided makes them racist, even when their intents and opinions are clearly not racist.

Saying it’s “uncivilised” to publicly beat someone to death because they <insert whatever>, cannot be racist, because you’re not concerned with “race” in any way. Going further and saying that a country that allows such practices is uncivilised is, again, inherently not racist, because the reason for calling them uncivilised has nothing to do with the “race” of the people involved.

I second this! I was in the US for a while and quickly realised that doing constant conversions was a PITA, so I learned some rough reference points in imperial.

I think it’s good to get some small and some large reference points, which make it easy to guesstimate other things based on what you know. Mine were (given in metric here):

• A glass of beer is 0.5 L.
• A big barrel is about 200L (0.2 m^3).
• My walk to work is 3 km, a long hike is 25 km.
• A very short person is about 150 cm, a very tall one is about 2 m.
• I can deadlift about 100 kg, and bicep curl around 15 kg.
• A potato is on the order of 100g, while a watermelon is around 2kg.
• 70 C is a nice sauna, 25 C is a nice summer day, 10 C is chilly, 0 C is sleet-temperature, -10 C is powder snow cold (depending on where you live the colder temps might be more or less relevant)

Figure out some similar things for yourself, and it’ll be relatively easy to think along lines like “That walk was a bit further than my way to work, so it’s probably about 4km”, or “that box was heavy, but far from 100 kg, so it’s maybe around 30 kg.”

Bonus points if you try some guessing like that and double check afterwards to tune in your feeling for different measurements.

With the current state of things in Gaza, I’m starting to dream that European naval powers some day have enough, and send an aid convoy with a heavy military escort to Gaza.

I can’t imagine anything but support for a mission that is literally escorting container ships with food, water, and medical equipment to Gaza. And I can only dream about the reaction from Israel if a combined NATO naval force told them that “We’re delivering humanitarian aid. If you try to stop us at sea we’ll sink you, and if you try to shoot us from the air we’ll wipe out your airfields. Stand back and no shots will be fired.”

It would be a so unequivocally “good guy/bad guy” situation, and NATO has the military power to pull it off. Of course, zionists have infiltrated far too much of our political sphere, so it’s never going to happen…

I want to fill in on the fact that any journal can end up publishing garbage science if someone is able to dupe the reviewers. This means that no matter what journal you’re reading, you need to read science critically. Sensational claims require sensational evidence, and ideally any work should be 100% reproducible based on the information given in the article.

Depending on the field, you can also often get a good indicator by investigating the authors of the article (checking out the last author first is a good tip). This mostly applies to very recent research where looking at citations is a poor indicator of quality, but where research is often dominated by a few reputable research groups around the world.

For older research, looking at how often the article has been cited, by whom, and why, can give you a very good indicator of the quality of the research. Solid research is often built upon later, while garbage is often refuted and then abandoned.

Of course, none of the above is infallible, but if you read critically to ensure the research makes sense, find that it originates from a reputable group, and see that others have based newer research on it, it’s probably trustworthy. After a while you start building up an impression of the most important names and journals in the field, but that requires reading quite a few articles and noticing which names and journals repeatedly show up.

I honestly enjoy it when this happens. It’s so satisfying getting to pull obscenely large wads of lint out of the port

I think you’re missing my point: I opened by saying that I definitely believe the world is deterministic. I then went on to problematise the extremely unpredictable nature of the human mind. To the point where an immeasurable amount of historical input goes into determining what number I will say if you ask me to think of one.

Then, I used the argument of a chaotic system to reconcile the determinism of the universe with the apparent impossibility of predicting another persons next thought. A highly chaotic system can be deterministic but still remain functionally unpredictable.

Finally, I floated the idea that what we interpret as free will is in fact our mind justifying the outcome of a highly chaotic process after the fact. I seem to remember there was some research on split-brain patients regarding this.

By and large, I agree with you: I cannot see how free will fits into a deterministic universe. I still want to make some points for the case that there is some form of free will.

Think about scratching your nose right now, and decide whether or not to do it. It’s banal, but I can’t help being convinced by that simple act that I do have some form of choice. I can’t fathom how someone, even given a perfect model of every cell in my body, could predict whether or not I will scratch my nose within the next minute.

This brings up the second point: We don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to get large-scale uncertainty. It’s enough to assume that our mind is a complex, chaotic system. In that case, minute changes in initial conditions or input stimuli can massively change the state of our mind only a short time later. This allows for our mind to be deterministic but functionally impossible to predict (if immeasurably small changes in conditions can cascade to large changes in outcome).

I seem to remember reading that what we interpret as free will is usually our mind justifying our actions after the fact, which would fit well with the “chaotic but deterministic” theory.

I would absolutely be happy to have a feature where an LLM could read previous issues, the docpage, and the FAQ/wiki, then you could query it regarding your issue to (a) see if it is a legitimate issue, (b) check that the issue you submit contains the info you need, and c) help you link in previous issues/PR’s referring to relevant stuff.

Never in hell do I want an LLM to be generating issues by itself.

So it’s not that her family won a court case or anything? The government just decided to give them compensation?

There’s a paywall on the article, but how the fuck is the woman who attempted to breach a door against armed security and got shot for it entitled to compensation???

Exactly: I have friends that got a drivers license in th US, and the education/test is honestly a joke compared to what they require here, and it clearly shows in the number of driving-related deaths.

It is, in fact, very easy for them to tell whether you license specifies that you can drive a manual or not. If it doesn’t say anything, then it doesn’t qualify.

That’s exactly the point: If there’s no way to differentiate, the country is free to say “welp, that’s your problem. Your license doesn’t specify manual, so no manual for you.”

I would say that the “bad part of town” usually has overlap with the poorer part of town, regardless of what skin colour people have there. Of course, especially in the US, there’s significant overlap between economic status and skin colour. I just hate how the typical American view on “race” is projected onto other countries.

Americans typically have this hang-up on “race” that you really don’t find anywhere else. A lot of places you have talk about “ethnicity” or similar, but the American fascination with categorising people by their skin colour and then using that to make generalisations is pretty unique.

Drinking age is 18 in most of the world (with 16 also applying some places). Additionally, my impression is that it’s not as big a deal for 16-17 year olds to get ahold of alcohol in other places.

Where I’m from, the drinking age is 18, but it’s not uncommon or a big deal for people to get some beer or drinks for their 17th birthday party.

Luckily you can always fall back to a handbrake start if you need to, I’ll usually always do that if I’m driving a car I’m not at all used to and find myself in an uphill start.

You might want to check the details here: I know that in some European countries, you’ll have trouble renting a car at all with an American license unless you pass a driving test in a European country first to get certified. In fact, in several countries I don’t think an American license is valid at all until you pass a test. It’s probably worth checking out the details for Romania.

I don’t really think there’s any “generally” here: It differs quite a bit between countries. I believe in some countries they won’t allow you to drive a manual unless your license specifies it (i.e. an American license isn’t valid for a manual).

For that exact reason some countries (my country included) don’t accept an American license unless you do a test here first.

Though IIRC, that applies for both manuals and automatics, because American drivers education isn’t really trusted here.

I could definitely run Linux on the machine, no doubt it would work even better then. In fact I have an old Ubuntu partition on it that I haven’t booted in years, but which worked fine when I last used it.

However, the only purpose that machine serves at the moment is being an x86 Mac with a toolchain for compiling whatever, so that I can quickly compile distributables whenever I need to distribute something for x86 mac and don’t want to spend time setting up a full pipeline for cross compiling (once or maybe twice a year).

I have an old MacBook (2012) that runs macOS 10.13 (High Sierra, released in 2017) on 4GB RAM. I use it a couple times a year if I need to compile something for Mac x86 and don’t want to spend time setting up cross-compiling from my newer (M1) machine.

That MacBook is literally 13 years old, and the only upgrade I’ve given it is a new SSD back around 2018. It runs just fine.

Rip on the walled garden all you like, but if you want an OS with the stability and simplicity of a commercial OS, together with unix compatibility and a shell that lets you do whatever you want… macOS is your best bet. Using it literally feels like using a commercially polished and widely supported version of Linux.