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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don’t really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

    As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct


  • Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

    I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.

    And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

    My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like



  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldDisable windows updates
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    17 days ago

    Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don’t need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

    The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.




  • Not an expert, but my understanding is that the multiverse (at least, what we today associate as the multiverse) came about due to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, quantum physicists had an observation - particles were moving as though they were being pushed by an invisible wave, and they would pick a random position based on that wave when observed.

    The most prevalent explanation for this behavior is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the particle is the invisible wave, and the wave collapses into a particle when it is measured. But another common interpretation is the many worlds interpretation, which states that the invisible wave is just a statistical probability of where the particle is. And the reason why the particle seems to pick a random point on the wave when observed is actually because the particle creates branching timelines, and we can only observe what happens in our own timelines. Hence, it seems random to us.

    I speculate that the idea of multiple parallel timelines, each slightly different, was probably pretty popular with scifi writers, especially since it’s an easy way to portray “what if” scenarios in their stories, and so the concept became popular because of that






  • Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I am a biologist (more specifically, a microbiogist).

    The crux of the misunderstanding, I think, is that the definition of what counts as advantageous or “good” has changed over time. Very rapidly, in fact. The reason many diseases are still around today is because many genetic diseases offered a very real advantage in the past. The example that is often given is malaria and sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia gives resistance to malaria, which is why it’s so prevalent in populations that historically have high incidence of malaria.

    Natural selection doesn’t improve anything, it just makes animals more fit for their exact, immediate situation. That also means that it is very possible (and in fact, very likely) that the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.

    If we remember that natural selection isn’t trying to push humanity towards any goal, enlightenment, or good health, it becomes easier to acknowledge and accept that we can and should interfere with natural selection




  • I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

    But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

    If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.


  • The screen size matters significantly. More specifically, what humans care about is pixel density. A 24 inch 1080p screen does not look the same as a 27 inch 1080p, which does not look the same as a 32 inch 1080p.

    A 24 inch 1080p screen is perfectly fine. A 27 inch 1080p, you can start to see the pixels more clearly. A 32 inch 1080p IMO is unacceptably bad.

    I would say the standard should be 1080p for 24 inch or under, 1440p for 24-27 inch, 4K for 27 inch or above

    I personally run a 24 inch 1440p screen because I’m pretty picky with pixel density, and the monitor was relatively good deal.