Here too. Weird.

As soon as the front tire gets 1/4" deep in salt water, the entire truck just turns instantly to solid rust.

Yes! It could be like Assassin’s Creed where most of the story takes place in Civilization, but then there are interludes that take place in the modern world.

And why not chew it off?

Last time I had sushi (about a week ago), I tried a place I’d never tried before. I ordered some sashimi and they were huge. If I’d eaten those in one bite each, it would have been like that game “chubby bunny”. But then again I don’t really know how authentic this particular sushi place was. Tasted great, though.

Someone needs to bundle up that network misconfiguration and put it on Steam as an indie game.

What would you think of a show with basically the same premise superficially but it also just constantly and blatantly ridicules the flat earthers?

Where’s the love for SatansMagottyCumFart?

Is this the sort of thing you’re looking for?

https://www.drkarafitzgerald.com/recipe/super-hydrating-electrolyte-formula/

Honestly it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of risk with giving it a try. If it doesn’t work out, you can always buy regular commercially-available keycaps later.

You mentioned the potential of stems breaking off in the switch. I kinda doubt that’s terribly likely. (If they break off, I’d think the chunks that broke off would be big enough that they wouldn’t end up in the mechanism of the switch and could just be shaken out or retrieved with needle-nose tweezers.) That’s just speculation on my part, but I have plans to print myself some self-designed keycaps (and a self-designed keyboard base, in fact) at some point out of PLA and I’m not terribly concerned about that potential issue. I also don’t really mind buying more keycaps later if I need to, though.

3D-printed keycaps can also be replaced easily. If you’re concerned about them breaking, you might want to print some extras up front so you don’t have to wait for a print to finish before you can use your keyboard again. (And so you don’t have to try to use it with one keycap missing. Lol.)

But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.

And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.

I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.

Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.

There’s a western meditation guy named “Daniel Ingram” who I have a certain amount of respect for. He readily answers questions about the risks and benefits of meditation-related things as well as the subjective experience of them. But any time he is asked about the “real world” (like, the metaphysical implications of these experiences), he responds that he’s “a pragmatist” and won’t speculate about the nature of reality or the existence/nonexistence of entities or powers.

(That said, there is one and only one story he tells that seems to have made him believe certain supernatural claims about the real world. He was “practicing magic” and drew an amber pentagram in the air and someone who hadn’t been present at the time later walked into the room and said “you just drew an amber pentagram in the air right here.” Or at least that’s roughly how he tells the story. And he does seem to believe there’s something to that beyond the natural.)

I’m not quite the purist he is. I don’t think it’s necessary to straight up refuse to believe anything about the real world or the nature of reality. And I don’t think that there’s nothing that can/should be gleaned about metaphysics from subjective (“religious”) experiences. (My experiences with contemplative practices has definitely changed my mind about some metaphysical things. The nature of conscious and of reality, the existence of capital-G-“God” (though the answer I find most compelling now definitely isn’t “yes” or “no”), etc.)

But it’s also important to keep it in perspective. Some of these experiences can feel like the most important thing every to happen to anyone. (That’s probably how many/most religions start, honestly. Someone has a mind-blowing experience and tells everybody about it and everybody else grossly misinterprets it because these experiences are ineffable – can’t be put into words – and before you know it you have the crusades and witch burnings and abstinance-only sex ed.) But a contemplative practice, done well, will tell you not to hold too closely to, well, anything really (potentially “except god”). Coming to some belief and holding it as the most important thing ever or basing your whole personality on it is absolutely problematic.

My advice is to hold any beliefs you come to from a religious experience (and any other beliefs you have for that matter) “loosely”. And I think this is helped by not restricting yourself to one religious system. Borrow from both western and eastern religious traditions. Monotheistic, pantheistic, pagan, etc. Indigenous spiritual practices. Even left-hand-path stuff. The more you do that, the better you drive home to your reptilian brain the point that nobody has a monopoly on religious experience and often those experiences even contradict each other.

I guess one other thing to mention is that adpting a particular set of religious beliefs can potentially be a boon to one’s contemplative practice. But for the reasons above, it can be dangerous.

I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.

I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.

Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”

I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.

And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.

But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.

These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.

All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)

Just some followup thoughts:

• Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
• There are a ton of good books on these topics. “Stealing Fire” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal is a good place to start if you’re interested in the science of it or The Science of Enlightenment if you want to get a little deeper into the practice.
• If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don’t matter. Personal experience does. “But do you believe god exists?” Honestly it’d take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let’s go with “neither yes nor no” for the short version.
• Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.

Human languages or programming languages? (I find it amusing that there’s one comment here assuming the former and one assuming the latter.)

Stop giving Republicans ideas.

Thank you for bringing more awareness of this. I’m what you might call an “AI skeptic” and don’t really care what happens in the AI space as long as it doesn’t screw up things I care about.

But I care deeply about FOSS and AI is screwing it up. I don’t want to have to explain why XYZ thing absolutely is not Open Source and that “Open Source” has a specific meaning beyond “you can look at (at least some of) the source code.”

(Compare it to the term “hacker” that has among at least a lot of muggles taken on the exclusive meaning of committing some kind of fraud with computers. Originally it meant something very different. And it’s unfortunate the world has forgotten the old meaning.)

Another project that is diluting the term “Open Source” is Grayjay, a video streaming app that is a FUTO project (and FUTO is a Louis Rossman thing.) Rossman has called it Open Source in YouTube videos, but it’s not Open Source. (The license is here and forbids things like “commercial use” (selling the software or derivative works) and removing facilites for paying the FUTO project from derivative works. Which is a lot less restrictive than the license was last time I checked it. Previously it didn’t allow redistribution or derivative works at all. But it’s not Open Source even now.)

Cryptocurrency always ran on nothing but prophesy (“to the moon”) and curses (“bearish”, “FUD”).

Nice!

You didn’t print the plastic parts yourself, did you? Just bought them? (Still cool that they print them with off-the-shelf consumer printers.)

Also, what’s “detent?” Is that the ratcheted-ish feel where it kindof sticks in regularly-spaced spots? (If that makes any sense. Lol.)

Minetest is an excellent candidate for this use case, I’d say. I play Minetest on a Raspberry Pi 4 connected to a Minetest server hosted on a different Raspberry Pi 4 (both running Arch Linux Arm) over Wifi regularly and don’t find latency or lag or anything to be a significant issue.

The world I’ve been playing in that particular way is on the game VoxelLibre (Formerly Mineclone 2). It’s intended to mirror Minecraft’s functionality as closely as possible. It’s not 100% implemented, but a lot of it is implemented, and it’s very playable. The default Minetest Game is great too. It lacks mobs, but mobs can be added with mods like the various Mobs Redo API plugins. (And it’s easy to have mobs but not enemy mobs that can kill the players if that’s the vibe you’re going for.)

Ok, I get that writing a browser rendering engine is “hard”. But Jesus do we need more, better options. And full-featured ones. Not just Gecko and WebKit.

How is a visual novel half a gigabyte?

Video games are weird now days.