How do you ever solve a problem if you don’t acknowledge it exists?

I’m not from the US, but live in a country that is a US ally with a lot of military bases. The US election effects us. The fact the DNC is fielding an old age pensioner who should be sitting comfortably in a retirement home complaining about the birds obstructing his view against an equally old fascist is deeply worrying.

Technically, yes. Practically, it’s complicated. It doesn’t really exist within the same ecosystem as other Linux distros.

It’s not as different as Android (which is also technically a Linux distribution), but running a normal DE and all the programs that come with it is very clearly still an advanced user thing locked behind knowledge of how bash and virtual environments work.

There are plenty of new age wuwu types that do define reality as a god. If I thought they had any legitimacy I wouldn’t be an atheist, but the core idea is that we essentially exist as constructs within the imagination of this god.

Sorry, I edited in the stuff about deists and pantheons as you were responding. What’s your opinion on that?

No, but most people do think of Reality as a god.

But they don’t think He is a god

These two statements directly contradict eachother. Either you think of Reality as a god, or you do not. If you don’t think reality is a god, then you don’t think “he” is a god (wow, the tautology was weird to type).

Also, there are many examples of religious people who don’t think reality is a god. Deists, for example, believe that god showed up, made the universe, and left. Under that belief system, the deist god and the universe it created are two entirely separate things.

There’s also pantheons, where gods exist within their own higher reality with their own set of rules, limitations and powers that interact with our reality. Reality (either ours or the supernatural plane in these belief systems) are clearly separate from the gods operating under these rules.

People are perfectly capable of worshipping, praying to, and generally being religious towards someone they refuse to believe is a god.

What’s your opinion on people who do neither? That don’t believe in a god and don’t pray to anything either?

What normal people hear: “He took down the routers with some crazy complicated algorithms. He’s Neo in the matrix.”

What IT professionals hear: “He hired a bunch of people to keep sending spam letters to their tiny mailboxes until they were so stuffed that they couldn’t receive any legitimate mail.”

The pithy version of that is that we know more things than our ancestors, but we’re not smarter than them.

deleted by creator

Does it come with a coupon for their hitman service too?

hay, grass or silage

All of the above, as well as other feeds such as corn. That percentage includes pastures and growing crops for feed. Here’s a pretty good breakdown.

Interestingly enough, if someone doesn’t care at all about veganism but wants to reduce agricultural land use, removing beef, lamb and dairy from their diet would be enough to get there (while continuing to eat chicken, fish, etc).

sweeping, emotional appeals

I don’t think my comment was very emotionally charged.

Surely, there are stronger arguments against eating meat than that

The power of an argument is determined by the reader. There’s compelling reasons in terms of zoonotic diseases and rampant antibiotic use, there’s other reasons from a moral point of view, there’s others in terms of environment (like this argument), there’s others in terms of human health, etc. Which one is convincing to which person depends entirely on what that person cares about.

Over 70% of farmland worldwide is used to make animal feed for the ranching industry, so if you’re not eating meat you’re already doing your bit to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture.

At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals

This is absolutely the right approach, even if you were planning to quit from the start (not the case with you, but still). “This is my last ever cigarette” just caused me to delay and delay and delay. The only realistic way to do it for me was one craving at a time (“I’m not smoking for the next hour”), then a day at a time. Handling the hours and days was hard, but once you do that the weeks and months take care of themselves.

Vaping for me was a major misstep. Just caused me to consume more nicotine than when I was smoking.

There’s two separate addictions going on with smoking: habit and chemical. What patches, nicotine gum, etc are trying to help people do is tackle them separately.

This means you can focus on getting out of the habit of lighting up after a coffee, or after a meal, or whatever triggers you had, while delaying the chemical withdrawal which seriously messes with your head until later. Tackling the two seperately is easier for many people.

With that said, patches don’t work for everyone, and I hope you find the cessation aid (if any) that works for you. Quitting smoking is an absolute bitch.

For me personally, the most helpful aid was nicotine gum, and then swapping out the nicotine gum for normal gum once I was confident I’d kicked the habit part and could focus on the chemical withdrawal.

The kitchen is operated by volunteers and rely on donations and food banks. I Believe this is also common practice in many temples within India proper.

Here’s a great little mini-documentary on that I saw on exactly that a few months back. Sikh temples seem amazing in terms of the sheer numbers of people they feed with no limiting criteria.

Lol, took me a minute to figure out you’re literally talking about a football match happening now. I was re-reading my comment thinking “Wait, what’s this got to do with Ukraine? Did the Romanian government do something that hit the news I don’t know about? What does this mean?!?” xD

Probably most countries think so of themselves.

Funnily enough, Romanians are the exact opposite in this regard. Romanians tend to think that Romania is terrible, backwards, and filled with awful people. That isn’t exactly the case (like any country, it has it’s pros and cons, and there’s a lot we need to work on) but it is how they tend to see it.

Even the question of “who” is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the “who” doing the thinking in the first place :))

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are “simply” more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn’t cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There’s many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as “the force that pushes you downwards”.

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito’s brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I’m not saying we’ll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I’m just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

That’s a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That’s what they are.