I will say, Chick-fil-A is incredibly well run as a business. Compared to other fast food, they have steadfastly maintained quality while keeping prices reasonable, service fast, and their restaurants are always clean and well staffed. This should be a bare minimum, but unfortunately this is not true of pretty much any other fast food place, where quality is dropping rapidly, service is extremely slow, and restaurants are routinely staffed by like two teenagers with no adult supervision and social skills that suggest they have never been outside before. That said, I really don’t understand why there is always a giant line at them and why some people are just completely obsessed with them unless the whole point is the homophobia and the fact that they’re the one fast food place that isn’t “woke.”

I am skeptical of the premise that long chain hydrocarbons can only be explained by life. Mostly because that logic fails whe examining how life arose on Earth in the first place. If complex organic molecules can only form life, then how did life arise on Earth to begin with? Life itself is complex organic chemistry and large organic molecules. If complex molecules like polypeptides and RNA can’t form without life, then life can’t come into being in the first place. Particularly with these long chain hydrocarbons it’s not that hard to imagine exotic conditions where they might be able to form. It is certainly easier to imagine these conditions than imagining the self replicating RNA or polypeptide strands that most likely became life as we know it. If they had found chains of nucleic acids or amino acids I would be a lot more willing to buy that it’s a sign of life. But hydrocarbons? It’s definitely interesting and a very good thing to look into (particularly in terms of the origins of life) but it’s far from a smoking gun.

That said, I am very interested in this finding because, at the end of the day, I do think it is relevant to biochemistry. Mostly that there are two possible explanations and both are important. If it’s not proof of life on Mars (I don’t think it is), then it is proof that complex organic molecules have formed elsewhere in relatively normal chemical conditions in the universe without existing organisms, which is a major unsolved problem in trying to determine the origin of life.

I can’t believe the but for the first time in my life I am now just straight up telling normal people to just buy Apple shit instead of Windows or Android devices. For the average person, it will be a better experience and Apple is at least a bit more trustworthy. These morons have destroyed everything that made themselves better than Apple and now there’s no point in buying their shit. I think Linux and FOSS are much better paths but the average person will simply just not be able to handle running Linux as soon as something goes wrong. As for a phone I’m legit considering just downgrading to a dumb phone because I’m sick of all of it and everything sucks on the Internet these days anyway.

People were a lot less weird about stuff like this in the past, even in the 90s and early 00s. My dad gave me a pocket knife when I was like 8.

They’ve been saying this shit for the past 5 years. Idk how investors keep falling for this scam

Hero shooters? Yeah. TF2, Overwatch, and APEX legends are all very popular. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of room for new games to come on the scene because of how hard these games are to make and balance, and how deeply invested people are in their games of choice. People still play TF2 despite the fact that it’s nearly 20 years old and hasn’t had major content updates in a long time. Overwatch is 10 years old and is still getting updates, and APEX legends is nearly as old.

In the latest Epstein files, it was revealed that Epstein met up with Christopher Poole (Online name- Moot), creator of 4chan, on like the day before /pol/ was created.

This reminds me of a hilarious side quest in The Witcher 3 where a wizard gets locked out of his tower because he didn’t know it was equipped with a Defensive Regulatory Magicon (DRM) when he bought it and the only way to fix it is with Gottfried’s Omni-opening Grimoire (GOG). GOG is the game store started by CD Projekt to sell DRM free copies of old games.

This is something that actually brings up a lot of interesting questions in Christian theology. A lot of Christian thinking specifically centers around humanity and the special place that humans have within the world, having “rational souls” and being “made in the image of God.” Therefore, it is not impossible for other beings to have been made with this formula, but it does raise a lot of questions. I think the multiple Incarnations is the most interesting possibility. Christians believe that God took on a human form as Jesus and shared his message with mankind, and I think the stance of the Catholic Church would be that this is a singular event - after all, it is considered so significant that we still use it as the basis of our dating system to this day. Aliens talking about crab Jesus probably wouldn’t be the end of the world for Catholicism though. After all, God is supposed to be all powerful and so if He decided to become a man to save mankind there’s nothing that would prevent Him from becoming a crab to save crabkind. I would still lean towards the Catholic church deeming that crabs must accept human Jesus and that their crab Jesus teachings are false, akin to Krishna beliefs encountered by missionaries in India. That said, Catholics also believe that Catholic teaching is so fundamentally true that it is possible to arrive at a lot of Catholic principles without Jesus having taught them, and so they would probably focus on how close the Crab Jesus religion is to Catholicism to try to convert Creezus followers to following Jesus.

Nope. This was mostly a psychological fad in the 1980s that led to many ruined lives from false accusations. Even the Wikipedia page starts off by saying the phenomenon has been largely discredited. Many people still believe in it but the vast majority of cases of “repressed memory” cannot be independently proven outside of the patient and therapist and in many cases are actually contradicted by externally verifiable facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory

This is frustrating but anyone dumb enough to let this be a major hinderance to them working on their own cars deserves to get scammed by the dealership. $30 on a knock off set of these screw heads vs thousands of dollars at the dealership. The main problem with BMW cars is that they’re designed to be difficult to work on even in spite of stuff like this. You have to take the whole car apart to do basic maintenance.

I feel like I’ve been hearing this stupid “PhD level intelligence” claim about every LLM that’s come out since ChatGPT was first released, including GPT-3.0 which it launched with. It kind of amazes me that people keep falling for it and not questioning how the new model having “PhD level intelligence” is both a true claim and also noteworthy when the claim is made about every new model.

The problem is that LLM outputs cannot be constrained to only factual information and only information about the book. For example, say a lot of reddit comments falsely or jokingly claim that the reason a certain plot point in a book was that the author was smoking crack, and not a lot else was written on the subject. The LLM may then be influenced by this in its training corpus to answer the question “Why did the author write this scene?” With “Because he was smoking crack!” And there’s nothing really that anyone can do to prevent it 100% of the time.

Yeah that immediately set off the bullshit detectors. Everything else in this post looks stupid but that sounded like utter crap

There is a board game called Wavelength where you play on teams and try to get your teammates to guess where a randomly placed dial lies on a spectrum. The game is really about guessing what your teammates will think the two extremes are because everyone has different ways of thinking. For example, on a spectrum of cold to hot, you could think of it from like ice to fire or from absolute zero to the Planck temperature. It’s very interesting and I think it’s good to play because it shows that people’s perceptions differ even on pretty basic things.

I feel like reading this story is an internet nerd Rite of Passage. It had a huge impact on me when I read it as a teenager and I think about it a lot.

From what I understand, the universe would just be in equilibrium. Nothing but cold particles floating around.

My LinkedIn feed is like 90+% AI at this point. I don’t know why anyone bothers looking at the “content” on that website anymore. I only see it just incidentally on my way to the job listings and I am always shocked at how terrible it is

I have become convinced that Microsoft is a company with no actual direction going off of pure momentum from early wins. It’s actually crazy how bad this shit is.

Also consider that on top of money being different, most people weighed goods against the local currency because coins were the most standardized objects they had access to. So not only does the local currency change, but as a result, the system of weights and measures does too.