Id pay special attention to Study 4 which seems to really hit my key points of criticism as a layman. Study 4 controlled for census region but I’d really like to see this controlled for rural vs urban populations at a finer scale. Without that adjustment I question the validity of other studies included.

That said study 4, if I’m reading it right, still found a correlation with happiness in conservatives but that correlation did not survive when religion was accounted for. Which tells you everything you need to know.

The conservatism isn’t the primary ideology, this is just a roundabout way of asking if religious people report being happier and having more meaning and of course they do. The religious aspect almost overrules the political angle entirely.

If they fail to elect a speaker, we’re screwed. This causes a constitutional crisis.

That’s basically what was being said and it’s not functionally different because the vast majority of the public does not work in elections or their verification. In essence if 99% of the population does not have access to data or cannot interpret said data, trust is needed.

I think my feelings are mixed in that aspect. I used to really love Bethesda games but after playing 1500+ hours of Skyrim and many hundreds of hours of fallout now, I think I see it for its limitations as well. And the mods end up highlighting shortcomings. The vanilla games are still a fun time I think.

Also other games have just come in and created much better story arcs and characters that highlight how bad their writing tends to be. Skyrim was written okay but even then it never did anything that felt like plot development. Instead everything there goes as expected, you’re just wowed by the scenes and dragons.

And yeah I think Bethesda continues to lack polish in what they do and it’s really showing. Even when fallout 4 came out all those years ago, every piece about it felt dated. It felt more like it dated back to Skyrim in ways, so I can see why Starfield failed even if I plan on playing it. I just hope Bethesda fix their issues because Elder Scrolls 6 can’t have this many loading screens, this many bugs, or this flat of a story. Sadly they have a trajectory on all of those things.

That’s what I did. Played it once with no DLCs on release, then ignored it. But with mods it’s actually much better. And if you like the difficulty of New Vegas, the extended mod pack I used helped a lot with that.

I really missed the grit and dark tone of new Vegas and while it doesn’t live up to that, mods get it much closer.

This isn’t a review of the vanilla game, but I get your point. I was mostly just debriefing after the long playthrough after going back to it all these years later.

Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.

Andromeda and the Milky Way shall merge in the most beautiful sex display you’ve ever seen, they will become one in the flesh and yet over millions of years bangin it’s unlikely a single ball will touch. Therefore my thesis of galactic homosexuality is false and our merging is not gay and the socks can be removed.

Thank you for coming to my defense, boring questions will not be allowed.

Not sure if my brain just works differently but I’ve always felt isolated by the laugh track. It’s always made me very uncomfortable to watch a show that isn’t funny and hear people that aren’t me laughing and clapping constantly. Makes me feel like I’m being manipulated by aliens into feeling fake joy or something, I hate it.

This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.

So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.

And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.

Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.

Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.

Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.

Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.

What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.

Yeah except most consumers no longer care about goodwill when buying new products so they’ve just figured out that it doesn’t matter what they do. So if a company has goodwill at this point, it might as well just be unspent money.

The issue isn’t material choice. It’s that plastic can’t be replaced by most materials because of the current function of our containers.

Let me pitch it like this: go to the grocery store. It’s all plastic. The meat? Plastic container. Milk is in plastic. Water in plastic. They’ll even put your potatoes in a pre-packaged plastic sack.

So the issue is that plastic has made its entire niche and therefore is irreplaceable in that niche. Whereas if we would swap over to reusable milk containers and dispensers or refillable chip bags, we’d be miles ahead even if those were all made of plastic still.

The problem isn’t containers, it’s the existence of disposable packing being the only option.

The first part, absolutely. But I think a lot of that is biological so I don’t see fantasy as a problem. You should keep it to yourself though.

The second part I think Id somewhat agree with except the hacker can’t blackmail you with it because it’s just as likely that they created it. And even if they did blackmail you, I would view that as the damage caused by the hacker, not by the individual.

Like if someone put something nasty about me down in their diary where they expected it to be private, and a hacker sent me an email of that diary page, that’s entirely the hackers fault. The diary writer was expressing an emotion or desire or whatever in complete privacy. Was their creation wrong? No, I don’t think so.

And to be clear I’m not saying people should go to this type of fantasy, this is all a thought exercise for ethics, but I think a lot about this stuff because as much potential for bad as it has, it also has some potential for good. All of the women I know experience behaviors such as stalking, obsession, unwelcome sexual advances, etc. on a regular basis. There is a reason those men don’t turn to free porn. Incel behavior is also just as bad in many ways. So could AI and deepfake stuff result in many of those men keeping that stuff to themselves more? Maybe.

And before you say that these perverts will just send fake nudes to you and harass you that way, we should absolutely be prosecuting people that do so. That’s an entirely separate convo tho.

I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.

Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.

My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?

I have crohns and it resulted in the loss of my entire colon. Every time someone talks to me about the disease, they have no respect for it because they don’t know what it is.

I was saved by modern medicine and am currently saved by it. And the advances that saved me are many. Those drugs you mentioned, surgical advances, dieting, all of it. If it weren’t for those, I would have died of organ failure my sophomore year of college.

So to your point, why would they not have spotted it or noticed? Well, I think that severe cases of crohns and UC used to just kill you. But nowadays the diseases are mostly studied under the same umbrella. Crohns and UC present different, but any inflammatory autoimmune disease is similar and could have similar causes. There’s also more info that we’re getting about the brain and gut relationship. So if I had to guess based on current info I’ve found on the diseases, it’s a diet problem.

I expect huge leaps to be made on autoimmune stuff, it could even be solvable through CRISPR.

His point about the change to BCE/CE is the actual nonsense. His point is that we should keep religious terminology being used in science? Out of respect for the creators? When have we ever done that? Science is secular and should be a secular pursuit. Every biologist and anthropologist shouldn’t have to reference Christ just to date their samples even if the calendar is the same. I respect NDT for his work but his awful takes like this hurt what he says often.

I wish that consumers would act as hostile to the IP of this company and its parent as it acts towards other companies.

Well, only for us. I’m sure the intelligence community knows.

The reason you were downvoted is because you conflated their comment about gender with one about sex. That’s all.

I don’t see many people conflating the sexes at all really. I just don’t think it matters much to people. Sex is mostly irrelevant unless you’re a medical or scientific professional. The only reason I’ve ever seen anyone concerned about sex differences is because they want to invalidate trans people and claim their gender must align with their sex.