It’s a pros and cons thing. The pros in this case are our upright posture with narrower hips that let us cover long distances more efficiently than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can even do things like carry food to eat while walking, which something like an antelope would struggle with. Then a second pro is the whole big brain thing. These two factors did let us take over most of the planet over the course thousands of years, pretty quick work, really.

Then the cons are high mortality in birth, and taking something like 10 years after that risky birth to become even semi-functional at a practical level.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

attributed the incident in part to a lack of proper Holocaust education and historical context on hate symbols, such as the swastika. “We have absolute faith that if the district takes actual measures to teach students the right lessons about being inclusive and anti-hate, that Jews are a minority that deserve compassion and understanding and deserve to be equal to everyone else in this education system, then that would be a huge step towards tomorrow’s society,” she said.

No, I’m afraid not. They’ve likely been preemptively inoculated against lessons by anti-intellectual sentiment, lessons will not cut it. They won’t trust anything that might be attributable to a “deep state”.

You need a more natural, more grounded style of communication if you want to have a chance.

A Trump ally using a bunch of funding from the Middle East to buy out an American company well-known for producing children’s cartoons? Where’d their Islamophobia go?

If we had a real propaganda arm and a complete lack of morals, we could exploit this.

Uh… doesn’t S02 turn into sulfuric acid in the atmosphere…? We, uh, used to have this thing we called “acid rain”, it was killing forests and shit so we had to do something about it.

Diane wrote letters to Idaho’s governor and to Trump demanding Binod’s return. She was “disappointed” by the governor’s response – a form reply – and noted that the White House never replied

This reminds me of those videos you’d see in the early parts of the Russo-Ukrainian War, where some Russians would make some sort of appeal to Putin about some problem, as if he actually cared about some random soldiers on the frontline.

I think it was Angela Collier that did a pretty basic test with a common store bought alkaline water, a lemon and some test strips. The water doesn’t start very alkaline at all.

edit: Yep, here we go. https://youtu.be/rBQhdO2UxaQ

It’s an amusing video.

… yeah I’d read that.

Five maps so far. Is someone doing this by hand, the hard way? I figured it was an AI someone programmed, but if it’s an individual or small team, big respect. Very neat project.

Given the distance required, what kind of economic payoff could be possible from such an expensive project? It’s not like overland would be a cheaper transport option than Pacific shipping routes or anything. It’s not just the Bering Strait being the problem with connecting the two after all, but the fact that there’s nothing in NE Siberia or NW Alaska to bother connecting together. Are we making it for the polar bears maybe? Or are people going to drive the thousands of miles from Juneau to Vladivostok to sightsee?

if someone is doing that

Key words. I think we can look at

Someone showed me a TikTok video of a…

and assume with a fair degree of confidence that something a little fishy is going on here.

I find it useful to remember that entertainment products are designed to be both understandable and fun, where real life was not designed to be understandable and fun.

With that in mind, no, I would not.

200 yards would be a pretty normal deer hunting shot, remember that people use scopes. Something actually impressive would be more like a mile. (1760 yards)

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

Should be a simple enough thing to determine, in multiple different ways. How many people only shocked themselves once, vs how many did it more than once, would be one. Would need to look at the details of the experiment and what data was gathered, which sadly seems to be behind a paywall.

I wonder how age factors in. Being alone with your thoughts is something that probably becomes more comfortable the more you practice it. In the modern age, though, nobody actually has to practice it when they can just pull out their phone. Anyone who grew up in pre-smartphone times has encountered countless times where they had no choice, though, usually you’re waiting for something or another, so you just sit there and wait. And think. Gets you rather used to it.

An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll from April found that nearly a third of U.S. adults under 30 are feeling lonelier and more anxious about the future than their elders.

This is interesting. Loneliness and anxiety are two different things, but I strongly suspect that anxiety can cause additional loneliness, due to how it discourages risk-taking behavior. Let’s make no mistake, going out and connecting with people can come across as a risky behavior.

It’s in the same vein as gamma ray bursts. Could possibly cause problems, but space is so big, so heavily occupied by empty space, that the odds of ever encountering one vs just more empty space is almost infinity:1.

I mean, our planet is billions of years old and hasn’t encountered a single one yet, based on the fact it’s still comfortably in orbit around the sun.

Asteroids are far, far more concerning. Encountered a bunch of those already.

In my experience it’s usually the whole factory farming thing that bothers them the most. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone complain about someone else having a pet dog, unless they weren’t taking care of it or something.

Would be interested to see a poll on how they feel about ethically raised livestock, if that’s more acceptable than most of the stuff you find in a supermarket.