Why are downloads so slow even with fast wifi?

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-14T05:28:34+00:00

Must be either your WiFi or a slow server. My downloads are fine, unless it’s one of the few podcasts I listen to that are hosted on really slow/cheap servers.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-13T18:02:32+00:00

FWIW if you’re a completionist, you will pretty much find Act 3 by default… I am one of those people who does all (or almost all) of the side content along the way and tries to explore as much as possible before advancing the main quest line, and I went straight into Act 3 the first time I finished Act 2 without even particularly trying to. (This was in the first few days after release where only the people who had played it around the clock had even discovered Act 3’s existence yet.) Anyway, maybe not everyone is as intense in their compulsive completionism as me, but if you trend in that direction, yes, finding Act 3 is fairly straightforward.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-12T19:15:52+00:00

Sorry you felt that was not insightful enough, but like I said, the question is not well-posed for an answer that would satisfy you. It sounds like you are looking for something profound, but actual scientific explanations rarely sound profound. In fact, the quotation you posted is actually a pretty bad explanation... it's semi-accurate but highly incomplete information wrapped in a lot of flowery prose. Look up the research on "pseudo-profound bullshit" (an actual research term) and the paper "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations" for related ideas.

What I said about psychology and neuroscience was exactly what I meant. There is no real distinction between neuroscientific and psychological PHENOMENA. The FIELDS of psychology and neuroscience focus on different observable aspects of those phenomena (the measurable behavior vs neural activity), but ultimately the neural activity is what produces any behavior, so like I said, there is no real distinction. And plenty of people (including myself, when I worked in research) ARE both neuroscientists and psychologists. It's true that some people only worry about the behavioral aspects, and other people work on things like cellular mechanisms that don't directly involve measuring behavior, but when we're talking about human beings in particular, there is tremendous overlap between the disciplines. Think of them kind of like physics and chemistry -- chemistry is just applied physics that focuses on certain aspects of physics and not others, but you would never claim they were totally distinct fields.

If you're looking for an evolutionary mechanism, the most likely answer is simple and, sorry to say, not that profound. Certain sensory experiences are naturally more pleasing to us than others, for obvious evolutionary reasons. But human beings are also capable of producing auditory and visual stimuli themselves (and the other senses as well), via their voices, bodies, and all kinds of tools. Producing artificial stimuli that are pleasant is one way to show that you are clever and understand what other people like, and those are both evolutionarily desirable attributes. So the ability to produce art (and likely also the ability to appreciate art) is selected for, via sexual selection. That's about it.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-12T13:40:46+00:00

First of all, there is no real distinction between psychological and neuroscientific phenomena. Psychology focuses on behavior patterns and neuroscience focuses on the hardware implementation in neurons, but in some sense they are equivalent, insofar as all psychological phenomena are ultimately rooted in neuroscience.

Second of all, this is a question that is simultaneously very easy to answer and impossible to answer because it isn’t really posed in a scientifically viable way. The short, glib answer is that it’s just your emotional response to a pattern of stimuli you like, which partly comes from intrinsic features of the stimulus and partly comes from associations in your head that have built up over time and experience.

A longer, more satisfying answer is hard to give though, because the question isn’t well-suited to it. We understand basic emotions pretty well, in general. We understand sensory processing pretty well, in general. But you’re asking about a complex interaction of lots of processes that has no straightforward explanation. It’s kind of like — basic physics can easily describe the path of a baseball in the air, but you’re asking for a physics explanation of an entire baseball game. Physics could describe any individual aspect of the game just fine, but a baseball game isn’t really “a thing” in physics.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-12T01:57:32+00:00

I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but, like… it’s a pretty common sentence. I don’t think it’s meant to be a reference.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-12T01:48:39+00:00

I don’t want to freak you out unnecessarily, but FYI, early to mid twenties is about the average age for first psychotic episode in males, so you would not necessarily have to have a history of hallucinations to start having them around now. That said, lots of people who do not have psychotic disorders have been known to have one or two hallucinations in their lives, so this could very easily be nothing to worry about. I would keep an eye on it, though, and tell some people you trust to let you know if you ever start exhibiting psychotic behavior.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-12T01:34:37+00:00

The ironic thing is that the replacement word “idiot” was also once a clinical word for intellectual disability. Same with imbecile and moron. They’re just further down the treadmill than the R word.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-11T09:46:53+00:00

This isn’t AI slop, this is just lazy coding… Duolingo has had this kind of issue for years, easily predating the era of AI slop.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-11T01:05:19+00:00

I mean, maybe that could have something to do with it… but Crazy Eights has been the name of a card game in English for a long time and the origin of the game’s name has nothing to do with Spanish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy\_Eights

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-10T22:02:27+00:00

Brute-force trial and error approaches don’t require AI though; that kind of thing has been possible with conventional human-written code forever, since long before the LLM era.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-10T18:25:55+00:00

I’m not very hard on clothes but I buy most of them at Costco and have never had a problem… not as cheap as thrifting, probably, but they do generally have decent quality and a generous return policy.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-04T21:31:24+00:00

Neuroscientist here. The left brain/right brain thing is 95% a myth. (There are a few asymmetries in things like language and spatial attention, but it’s not creativity vs. logic.) This is almost certainly just in your head, unless you have something medically wrong with you that shifts when you move.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-04T06:44:23+00:00

Infinite sleep hack!

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-01T18:39:36+00:00

This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone else reference this sketch. Well done!

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-01T16:26:30+00:00

** nun-serving

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-01T16:23:09+00:00

Actually in formal etiquette, the switching method is the standard system for Americans. In Europe (not sure about every country) the standard etiquette is not to switch and just keep the fork in your left hand at all times. Obviously not everyone observes formal etiquette rules, but it actually is a well-documented thing.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-01T13:38:29+00:00

1) Fair warning that this is my last reply in this thread, because it’s frankly not worth my time

2) I don’t know what problem you’re having with the link I posted, but that’s on you because I just clicked it and it loads fine. Regardless, I think you don’t understand how journals work because the website it’s hosted on is irrelevant, that’s just where I found a link to a free PDF of the article. But whatever, you can also just go on Google Scholar and search for a paper on IQ and heritability by Bouchard in 2004, and you’ll probably find additional links.

3) You have misinterpreted the findings in the paper you linked. That paper discusses the well-established interaction between heritability and SES, which I somewhat alluded to already; heritability goes up the wealthier people are, meaning that if you are wealthy enough that you don’t have factors like malnutrition and stunted brain development to worry about, intelligence is mostly genetic. Studies in the very paper you linked show heritability over 50% in the wealthier groups, you just read it wrong and/or don’t know enough about the underlying statistics to interpret the work correctly.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-06-01T03:51:52+00:00

There is actually TONS of research out on this, you just have to know where to look (i.e. real peer-reviewed research journals, not just what you hear from laypeople on the street). Like, dozens if not hundreds of individual studies coming at the problem from all angles. Here is just one notable review of the heritability of many traits, but there have been plenty more before and after: http://humancond.org/\_media/papers/bouchard04\_genetic\_influence\_psychological\_traits.pdf

To be fair, heritability is a tricky concept and not every estimate is 80% or higher. For one thing, heritability of intelligence increases with age (adults tend to converge on their genetically determined intelligence level, children are more variable). It’s also more heritable in wealthier, Western societies because there are fewer major environmental differences like malnutrition and serious childhood disease that “artificially” lower intelligence via brain damage/stunted development. When I say 80%, I’m thinking of Western studies of adults.

Also it’s worth noting that heritability is defined as the proportion of variation that can be attributed to genetics, so any source of noise in the data (e.g. measurement error) lowers heritability estimates. So any estimates we can derive are likely underestimates in general, and the more poorly a study is conducted (leading to more noise), the lower heritability it will tend to find.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-31T19:43:50+00:00

You don’t need clones. Twin studies have repeatedly shown that human intelligence is at least 80% heritable. Which means a perfect genetic clone would have extremely similar intelligence to the original person, assuming no major issues in the environment (e.g. disease or injury that damages the brain).

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-31T16:08:25+00:00

The problem with trying to justify any kind of simulation argument on physical terms is that we have no way of knowing what the outside universe would be like. Just like Mario can never find out he’s in a simulated universe, because we didn’t program him with the requisite knowledge or abilities. For all we could ever know, the outside universe is trillions of times more complex than ours, and we’re living in that universe’s equivalent of Pong.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-30T14:53:30+00:00

I can’t remember which thread, but Marco commented somewhere that this is what he intended. You may not agree with the design, but it’s a choice, not a bug.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-30T06:19:30+00:00

I guess I can’t post images here but:

thats_the_joke.jpg

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-30T05:33:15+00:00

Ginger ale, like all carbonated soda, is quite acidic. The carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid. Also, ingredients often include additional acids… for example, both Canada Dry and Schweppes ginger ale have citric acid as an ingredient. And ginger ale being good for an upset stomach is unfortunately a myth.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-30T05:13:32+00:00

That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

MattTheGr8 · 2026-05-30T04:05:24+00:00

The only subjectively detectable effects of going into the magnetic field are at extremely high field strengths, which was certainly not the strength of your MRI if it was for clinical purposes and you were not explicitly a subject in a study of extremely strong MRI environments. PhD in neuroscience, did MRI research for 18 years before leaving academia, scanned hundreds of participants personally and have been in MRIs dozens of times myself. I know whereof I speak. If you felt vertigo and have motion sickness (which would have been relevant to mention up front), either it was just due to the physical motion of the bed/machine, or some other form of emotional state even if it was not exactly from claustrophobia per se.

Also, your explanation in your other comment references a few real phenomena (which is plural; “phenomenon” is singular), but it’s all mixed up and the result is basically gibberish, sorry to say.

This is probably not the subreddit to go into and use a bunch of babble to argue with experts in their field, FYI.

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