Of course they change over time. But that already happens in every other civ game. You gain and lose territory by settling, war, and diplomacy. You build infrastructure and wonders. You develop technologically and culturally. But changing everything in one turn rollover is both unrealistic and disruptive in gameplay.

Saying something obviously fake like “it’s always been my dream to work here” is a bad idea, unless it’s a prestigious company where that could be true. The question is actually a good opportunity for the candidate to show off something if they want to, without being too awkward if they don’t.

You can say you’ve done research into the company online and are impressed by the work-life balance/leadership/worker loyalty/innovation. Sincere interest is not only flattering, it also makes you look thorough and driven. You can say you were recommended to apply by someone you know who has a connection. You can also give them some idea of what you are expecting, which can potentially save time if it’s not actually what they are offering. I had a friend get redirected to applying to a better position than what had been listed like this.

And if you truly are not a good fit, you can actually address that your previous experience doesn’t directly apply by saying something like “I’m looking for a change” rather than trying to dance around it for the entire interview. If your interviewer has any familiarity with the role, you won’t be able to trick them into thinking unrelated experience makes you well-qualified. And when that’s the case, acknowledging it early makes it much less awkward by establishing expectations appropriately. Basically, you have to be careful to limit your lies to things you can actually sell.

I read a book a while back called “The Courage to be Disliked”. That title could be used for some manosphere nonsense but it was instead an overall positive book about determining your self-worth based on your own honest evaluation of yourself, with the goal of improving things that you otherwise make excuses for. It was helpful to me as someone who’s been a people pleaser with low confidence. Hearing that mantra reminds me of it. I think it’s certainly not universally applicable, but it can be good advice for the right person.

During a stream, his dog moved off the platform she was supposed to stay in. Hasan told her to stop and reached for something off screen, followed by her flinching with a loud yelp. So it looked like he shocked her, and since Hasan is a popular streamer people made a lot of memes about it. I don’t watch Hasan, but she had apparently been laying there for 4 hours.

I don’t know if it was ever truly confirmed but I believe he did it. Hasan denied it and showed the collar the next day, claiming it was a “vibration” collar instead. But others claimed it was a shock collar that had had its prongs removed. And later he said that she wasn’t even wearing the collar, despite that contradicting his previous statement and it being on video.

I want to slap a [citation needed] on so many of these things. They’re just saying nonsense as fact with no explanation. I want to dispute it but it takes so much more energy to disprove a bad faith claim than it does to create one.

If we’re still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that’s the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society’s structure that aren’t really related to just media.

And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can’t infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn’t feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it’s only incentivized to lie when there’s a profit motive.

If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn’t control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.

I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.

I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency.

The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.

Yes, very much so. I bounce off games quick if I don’t feel like I’m working towards something, even if I think it’s fun. I know many people get ticked off by games nowadays withholding content, but I have to admit I’m part of the problem. I need some sort of progression system, even if it’s a battlepass.

But I prefer something like what modern roguelikes tend to do, where you gradually work towards upgrades that make you stronger like Hades or sidegrades that get added to the pool like Risk of Rain or Slay the Spire. And typically these also unlock higher difficulties to keep the challenge on.

Another good example is Minecraft. I used to fall off of after “solving” the basic problems of building a base and getting better tools/armor, since the sandbox aspect couldn’t hold my interest. But I played a big modpack with friends that gave us all kinds of things to do, and I really liked the progression systems they added. You could build machines that required different fuels but could be used to make ore refinement progressively more efficient, or make a mecha suit with upgrade modules, or learn a spellcasting system, or build a remote-accessed inventory system with upgradable storage, or make a nuclear reactor for massive power. And many things were quality of life improvements that solved problems I wouldn’t have thought of, like adding a crafting table interface to item storage or auto-stepping over small ledges. It felt like there was always something to learn and improve on. It was perfect for someone who chases the sense of satisfaction from a goal being completed.

Unfortunately very true. The hungry judge effect demonstrates how people tend to be more considerate after a meal.

I don’t see what would be wrong with a proposal if the lemmygrad community had gotten better. But I have no idea if that’s the case. Looks like the dbzer0 community doesn’t want them back regardless.

People do misuse the term “tankies” a lot and it is annoying. But people like diva go “no true leftist” a lot more than liberals do. I cannot fathom why they would use a political center that would put 95% of people as right wing. I guess it fulfills the classic meme of leftists’ arch enemies being people who agree with 80% of their views. And everyone seems to throw around “nazi” in a way that makes it hard to take them seriously.

Anyway, I do dislike resorting to defederation outside of extreme circumstances. I don’t know about sh.itjust.works, but world defederated from lemmygrad after an excess of hate speech and calls to violence, so I can accept that as justified. The fact that they are still federated with ml despite unaligned values gives credibility to that. I think hexbear was more from trolling, which I would prefer be handled by mods and individual user blocking but I can understand that at a certain point that becomes unpractical.

I made this argument in another thread, and someone replied that those were rules for Israelites, but not actual sins. They said God made a covenant with the Israelites about things that would be illegal, but not immoral beyond the fact it meant breaking the covenant itself. There is some reason to accept this, as Leviticus does focus on the new covenant with the Israelites specifically.

However, several books of the new testament are letters where Paul is instructing new churches and he explicitly reinforces the idea that at least some of the covenant laws still apply, including homosexuality (between men). As for Jesus, he seems kind of inconsistent about what is retconned in the gospels. He rejects things like “eye for an eye”, stoning adulterers, and complete prohibition of work on the Sabbath, but also has this passage

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Matthew 5:17–18 (NIV)

If I were trying to create a consistent biblical position, I would interpret this to mean the stuff from the old testament still applies unless something newer specifically counters it. But Christians ignore a lot of Jewish laws, so I think most would disagree with that.

The AI is the summary software. How else do you think the summary happens?

It doesn’t sound like AI is being used for either. It’s just summarizing the encounter at the end as a note, and not storing any data to train on.

Found God’s account

Yeah it was acknowledging the conflict of interest in both state-owned and privately owned media, even saying the former can be more obvious.

Instead of the popular social media sites, I use one called Lemmy. It’s kinda underground. You probably haven’t heard of it.

This is one possible answer to the Fermi paradox.

I think a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself would make it more rare than it already is, but doesn’t do enough to account for the unlikelihood of never encountering it. Once a species is spread across more than one planet, I would think it would be very unlikely for an extinction event to wipe all of it out before some survivors can bounce back. So all you would need is one or more civilizations beating the odds up to that point to become basically unstoppable.

Also, intelligent life might frequently kill itself off, but that doesn’t mean intelligence is a disadvantage to long term survival. The vast majority of unintelligent species also go extinct. It’s more that reaching stability is quite hard, with or without intelligence.

My friends’ discord has pinned messages for things like mod lists and server connections that we would still use years later. More public groups for things like fan communities probably have plenty of rules and instructions that are displayed to new users. They could be linked as a shared file to download, but having it easily viewable in-client is a legitimate use case.