I wouldn’t base your decision on what Lemmy says. They’re pretty unreasonably salty about the game. Reviews from players are very positive and the game’s only $23 right now.

• Despite what they’re saying, there is actually a lot of legitimately interesting and sometimes fantastical biomes and this update has added even more.
• There are a lot of different parts of the game that you can pretty casually engage in. Various missions, settlements, settlement management, ship collecting, manufacturing, fleet management, trading, piracy, archeology, and more.
• It’s a relaxation game for me. Just hop on, pick a direction, and go. Do whatever piques your interest in the moment.

If “casual” and “relaxing” are dirty words for you, then it probably isn’t up your alley. It’s certainly not going to be intense and action packed (though it does have its moments). But it’s a good game if you, like me, sometimes get tired of the sweaty online shit, crunchy brain melting games, and the overall weight of life in the real.

My wife and I watch a lot of sitcoms before bed, often from the 00s. One had at least one anti-gay joke per episode. In one of the middle seasons, they had an episode where a character makes a gay friend and has to deal with their discomfort around gay people. Then the next episode, they’re back to gay bashing. Wild times.

Nah but here’s the real staggering part. It should be far easier for universes to form locally conscious beings than it is to form all the pieces necessary to naturally evolve conscious beings. These would mostly be very short-lived arrangements of energy with no hope of surviving but certain arrangements would even have false memories, making them believe that they have existed far longer than they actually have.

They may even have false memories of living on earth.

They may even have false memories of your exact life.

And they would be, by far, more common than any form of actual sustainable life. It is vastly more likely that you have experienced this post as a false memory created inside one of these short-lived consciousnesses than for any of this to be real.

There’s no good party for most people but that doesn’t stop many of them from demanding better from their parties. The story, though, is about how Christians are demanding their religious leaders change rather than demand better from their politicians.

I don’t mean to imply that Christianity is progressive. But how a person reacts when politics is at odds with their religious beliefs is illuminating. Do their political beliefs follow from sincerely held religious beliefs? Or do they contort their religion in service of their political beliefs? For much of the religious right, it’s clearly the latter.

It is definitely telling that when conservatism has come at odds with Christianity, so many Christians have chosen to abandon Christianity instead of abandoning conservatism.

I work at a pretty progressive company (comparatively but definitely not perfect) and DEI there has nothing to do with preferential treatment, nor does it need to be.

The fact is that if you want to hire the top X people in the labor market, but your hiring and business practices exclude, say, half of that market, you absolutely will not get the actual top X. You will have to reach deeper into your half and be forced to pick people that are less qualified and/or capable.

So DEI, at least where I’m at, is about widening that pool so that you can actually get top talent. That means reevaluating your business practices to figure out why you’re excluding top talent. Maybe your recruiters always go to specific colleges for recruitment and certain websites. Maybe just the way they’re talking to candidates is more attractive to a certain type of person. Maybe you’ve got hiring requirements and an interview process that is not actually predictive of success. Maybe candidates are looking for some benefit that you’re not offering. Everything needs to be looked at.

For example, “Women just want more flexible working arrangements so that’s why we can’t get them” is something I hear often. Well, have you actually evaluated why your company is so inflexible? Is it actually necessary? Or are your executives a bunch of people who learned how to manage in the 20th century and haven’t changed since then? Maybe there are things you can do to enter the 21st century and make room for more women, not just because they’re women, but because you gain access to people who are actually better at their job than the ones you’ve had. Not every company can be supremely flexible, of course, but the number of times that inflexibility is actually necessary of much smaller than its prevalence.

The demographic breakdown of your workforce is a quick and easy weathervane to help figure out how these efforts but of course they’re not everything. Diversity comes in maybe forms, not just skin color and genitals. But in my company they’re used in a backwards looking manner, to see how new policies are working, not for quota filling and preferential treatment.

The exact temperature of 32 is not usually that important when it comes to weather because the amount of heat in the ground or water and the difference in temperature of the atmosphere impact whether or not snow or ice forms. It’s not like everything freezes over when the temperature dips below 32. You need the lows for the day to go into the 20s usually.

The American people are pretty fickle. It won’t take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating “Yay! We got rid of the fascists!” they’ll be going “Hmm… These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again.”

* There’s a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.

I feel like this one is going to fly over a lot of heads. Bravo.

I think when you consider the rate of advancement of any technological species, “roughly the same level as us” basically implies that they got started at exactly the same time. Even an extra thousand years of technological advancement would put them far ahead of us. A million years would put them unimaginably far ahead.

On a cosmic scale, that’s nothing. That’s a tight window and given the like 8 billion years that planets with the required elements have had to form, I would doubt that no other species had a chance to surpass us.

Maybe a helpful visualization is one of the precursors to quantum field theory, Dirac’s sea.

The idea is that you can think of a particle as sitting on top of the surface of the “sea” while an anti particle is represented by a hole in the surface, large enough to fit one particle. When a particle encounters such a hole, it naturally drops down into it and settles there. This essentially “destroys” both the particle and the hole (the anti particle).

So essentially the opposite charge, spin, etc of a particle and anti particle are a consequence of their opposition in their fields, not the cause for the annihilation.

(Not a scientist, grains of salt and all that).

I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

One of the biggest areas of ongoing research is about incorporating data from outside systems, like databases, specialized models, and, other specialized tools (which are not AI based themselves). And, yes, modern models can do this to various extents already. What the fuck are you even talking about.

That’s… the point? Civilizations with that kind of tendency may very well destroy their planet and/or themselves long before they advance to the point where they are detectable to an outside observer many light years away.

The human race is at the moment in a race against time. We’re hoping that we can develop new technology to save ourselves faster than we destroy everything around us. This kind of race has probably happened countless times across the vast universe and perhaps the laws of physics ultimately make the race unwinnable. These laws limit how much technology can do for any species, no matter how smart, so it would be a universal filter.

If the only way to win the race is to slow down the destruction of the environment to the point that the species is undetectable, that solves the Fermi paradox.

Your inability to come up with a way to produce evidence doesn’t make the strong atheist’s stance unfalsifiable. Unfalsifiable isn’t “We can’t produce any evidence that would falsify the claim right now.” That would take us to an absurd definition of the word where any scientific theory that requires more advanced technology than we currently have is “unfalsifiable.” That’s not what the word means.

The difficulty in proving that God exists isn’t what makes theism unfalsifiable. You shouldn’t make any assumptions about what can or cannot be proven true at some point in the future. What makes it unfalsifiable is that there’s no rational way to prove that God doesn’t exist, not because of an inability to collect evidence, but because the logical framework constructed by religious claims forbids it. Strong atheism has forbade no such thing. There’s no equivalence here.

Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.

Um… Show evidence that a god exists. Poof, you have falsified the claim that no god exists. Pretty easy, actually.

Those… don’t hold any weight lol. Once you post on any website, you hand copyright over to the website owner. That’s what gives them permission to relay your message to anyone reading the website. Copyright doesn’t do anything to restrict readers of the content (I.e. model trainers). Only publishers.

Just because it’s a manipulation doesn’t mean it’s always avoidable, though. Like Lex Luthor manipulates Superman by putting Lois Lane’s life in danger. Letting Lois die isn’t typically a real option. He’s got no choice but to play the game because he’s a moral person.

Are we supposed to just let LGBTQ people die so we can make inroads on the class war? I don’t like it, but that’s not a real option either.

ITT: A bunch of people who have never heard of information theory suddenly have very strong feelings about it.