I don’t use twitter and never have. I do use Facebook and it’s been giving me a steady diet of Carney ads. I haven’t seen a single CPC ad on any platform for that matter!

Honestly that sounds like a really annoying personal relationship issue that you have.

I have in but past been the “computer guy” in my family and it’s the opposite. Family members wanting computer help drove me to recommend iPads for them.

I’m glad no one in my family is a “car guy.” In general I don’t like doing favours for people and don’t want people trying to do favours for me. My dad has had a car guy friend for a long time and has to deal with so much frustrating extra travel to get his car fixed.

I much prefer the transactional nature of dealing with a business. Sometimes businesses are dishonest and that really sucks. But I’d much rather drop off and pick up than have to deal with other logistics and conflicting schedules.

Eat two of them right away and save the third one!

Read up on cognitive biases.

People are social animals. We form groups and we stick with them. Some of our cognitive biases are very clearly geared toward preserving the cohesion of the group. The truth is very much secondary to group cohesion.

Individuals vary a lot, however. And some individuals are much more open to changing their mind than others. Groups are stronger when they have a variety of different personalities within them. Different people can have different roles within the group and help it adapt to changes.

Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

Weight limits are critical for the flight. An overweight plane can fail to take off. The more weight in passengers a plane carries, the more weight in fuel they need to add. This extra fuel weight also requires more fuel to carry it. And so on and so on.

There’s a tipping point with weight of passengers and cargo combined with flight duration where the plane becomes uneconomical to fly. Planes have crashed on takeoff because they were overweight but the weight was miscalculated. Temperature and weather also play a role.

A lack of communities. Communal child care works great when you live in a village and you know everyone and most people around you are related to you.

We don’t have that anymore. People live in suburbs where they don’t even want to talk to their neighbours. Their relatives live far away, potentially in other provinces/states or even other countries.

Heck, a lot of people don’t even like their own relatives!

I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.

But what if you grind the head into sausage? How do they deal with that? I guess the sausage grows into a new head without memories?

They never die! That’s the absurdity of “death isn’t a thing but otherwise nothing else changes.”

Their face is still burned! You’d have to reduce them down to a brain in a vat. But then all they have is the memory of that searing pain.

The claim is no death. That means if you burn someone at the stake their body turns into a charred husk but they’re still alive and now they’re trapped in this state of unimaginable agony forever, unable to die but also totally helpless and in constant searing pain.

Burying someone alive. Or trapping their feet in cement shoes and throwing them into the ocean.

The love for the Nazi flag comes from white identity politics and white nationalism. The confederate types and the Nazi types have begun to rally together. White nationalism is spreading like a wildfire not just in North America but all over Europe.

But you don’t really have an advantage there. The super rich have a populist army of their own (maga) and they’re going all out with it in an attempt to destroy the left by attacking its foundation: academia.

Systemic change doesn’t happen without political will. Political will depends on personal opinions. Try to bring in systemic change with an election win but not overwhelming support then you get reactionary backlash like we’re seeing right now.

Generally nature doesn’t keep doing a useless thing if there’s no longer any need to do it. Energy efficiency is a constant selective pressure in the absence of all other challenges.

My bet is that baobabs are shaped that way for very good reasons. The fact that the trees are spaced far apart even in baobab forests is a clue: the environment is very harsh, especially on saplings.

Since baobabs reproduce via many fruits and since they can be spaced very far apart my hypothesis is that they evolved to be very tall with featureless trunks in order to attract fruit-eating birds to carry their seeds. The tall and featureless trunks would make the trees difficult for ground-dwelling predators to climb, keeping the birds and their nests safe from attack.

I believe leopards are fairly common in these areas and they love to climb trees, although they prefer ones with lower, wider branches they rest on and even eat their prey within. Leopards have been known to carry large prey such as gazelles up into the branches of a tree to protect their kill from being stolen.

You don’t think that’s one of the root causes of all these issues? Pride and resentment and a deep inferiority complex met with sneering on the other side?