Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

Then null will be returned, as the value of b.

Yes, I feel you.

And yes, that’s how it is. It’s an insanely complex industry if you really want to understand how things work.

Which you don’t need to get things done.

Which you still can if you really want, if you’re willing to invest the time and energy to study it thoroughly for many years if not decades.

But even then, chances are you’ll be touching libraries, concepts or technologies which you did not study in-depth yet. I think you need to be both aware and tolerant of limited knowledge, and willing to learn continuously.

13 hours later, it seems it’s gone. At least I cannot access it.

“Monad” is a shorter term though. “Structured data type” reads almost as bulky as “Curve of constant normal intersection points”.

“For agencies like the FTC to seriously consider action, there has to be harm to customers. But the sneaky formula that mobile developers have pioneered is one where the app itself is free, and the gameplay technically does exist in the application, so where’s the harm? Any rEaSoNaBlE viewer won’t be harmed. They will see and uninstall, and there’s disclosures, so who cares? But these companies aren’t targeting ‘the reasonable customers’, they are targeting the people with addictive personalities who get easily sucked in from a deceptive ad to a predatory product.”

Damn, that’s insane and evil. Like a drug cartel distributing free candies after school, with crystal meth inside. They just weather the storm, well knowing a few “customers” will stick.

I still don’t understand how this can work so well, which apparently it does given the numbers and scale. I have questions:

• Why bother making a “main product” at all, if people come for the mini game? Why not make the mini game addictive and predatory, save even more development costs and get less negative reviews as a bonus? Like, why bother with the candy when you can legally sell meth?
• Why is this exclusive to the mobile market? The same games, ads and arguments could be made for any other platform with “free”, downloadable content like PC. Why don’t they share their crack candies at college?

The obvious solution is to abandon your project not too late; leave on a high note.

I also found it very useful to document every step of my setup procedures, right after I figured out what works. At least the respective CL.

If Russia keeps this invasion up for another few years, they’ll run out of soldiers.

Both countries can probably sustain these high losses if they are only willing to keep committed. If we look at WW numbers.

Just a rough calculation: If Ukraine was to send 5% of their population to the front lines, they could lose 200k each year, for more than nine years. Russia obviously more.

Yes, my favorite comment:

pulls out the power cord for the monitor

Job done!

followed by:

Attacker must have had 5 people on the keyboard.

People with poor education are poor at spotting idiotic bullshit. Also there are other factors why people believe things. We aren’t that rational.

We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a “literal definition”, and to explicitly include “win conditions”. Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.

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

One such example definition:

“To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity.” (Bernard Suits)[14]

You seem to refer to Chris Crawford’s definition, which is in part:

If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

Explicitly calling SimCity “not a game” is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.

Was Minecraft not a game until it included “The End”? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?

If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children’s games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.

From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.

Yeah, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml ban people for posting dissenting comments. So their users can believe no dissenting opinions exist.

It’s a bid sad they cannot spot that the article, which is very short and written for children, does not say what they claim it says, but well.

Not necessarily take, but a demilitarized zone might make sense, and that has to be put somewhere.

Like prevent troops amassing in “peaceful exercise” so they cannot surprise invade again.

time to remind people that zelensky made having peace negotiations with putin ILLEGAL

Can you quote the part of the article which made you think so? I don’t see the article saying what you claim it says.

A reminder from the KidsPost team: Our stories are geared to 7- to 13-year-olds.

It’s alright if you are younger than that. Otherwise, I think all you achieved is reminding people how dishonest and untrustworthy lemmygrad users can be. You would have helped your cause more had you not made that comment.

Headline:

TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO MONKEYS AFTER GETTING NEURALINK IMPLANTS, ACCORDING TO VETERINARY RECORDS

What are these terrible things?

Up to a dozen monkeys suffered grisly fates after receiving a Neuralink implant, including brain swelling and partial paralysis.

First is the case of the monkey “Animal 20.” In December 2019, an internal part of the brain implant being inserted into the primate “broke off” during surgery. Later that night, the monkey scratched at the implant site, drawing blood, and yanked on the implant, partially dislodging it. Follow-up surgery discovered that the wound was infected, but that the placement of the implant prevented treatment. The monkey was euthanized the next month.

Before that, a female monkey designated “Animal 15” began to press her head against the ground after receiving the brain implant, pick at the site until it bled, and eventually lost coordination, shivering when personnel entered the room. Scientists discovered she had brain bleeding, and in March 2019, she too was euthanized.

The following year, a primate called “Animal 22” was put down in March 2020 after its brain implant became so loose that the screws attaching it to the skull “could easily be lifted out,” according to a necropsy report.

“The failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection,” the necropsy states.

As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk’s claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.

And so would the account of an ex-Neuralink employee, who told Wired that Musk’s claims that the monkeys were already terminally ill are “ridiculous,” even a “straight-up fabrication.”

“We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” the ex-employee said.

The testimony of an anonymous scientist conducting research at CNPRC seems to corroborate the ex-employee’s allegations.

“These are pretty young monkeys,” they told the magazine. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

Started smoking cigarettes.

As per the article, it goes like this:

1. AI is trained on publicly available data
2. AI does not credit or compensate original authors
3. People don’t like their work being used without
4. People share less publicly
5. Public spaces desert

And simultaneously, AI content of poor quality drowns what is left.

In terms of arguments, have you heard about control / alignment problem or x-risk?

Thanks for supporting your comments with sources.

producing most of the world’s goods

China makes the most goods, but most goods are not made by China. They are the top producer, but produce less than 50% of all goods.

Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads.

Somehow we got used to it when it comes to sports events, a long time ago.

But yeah, I get you, and fully agree. Seeing no ads is like the major selling point.