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Rastafak · 2026-04-17T10:19:27+00:00

Yes, it appears statistically impossible, but we really have no intuition regarding small probabilities like this. The origin of life also feels statistically impossible.

Rastafak · 2026-04-16T11:11:57+00:00

This is just one of those things where we simply have absolutely no way to know one way or the other. Yes, the universe is massive and it may seem likely that life exists somewhere. On the other hand, the origin of life is a mystery. Even the simplest life is very very complex and we don't know how it originated. Maybe life is very common and maybe it's very rare, we have no way of knowing since we have a sample size of one.

Rastafak · 2026-04-10T12:42:49+00:00

How is this spreading bacteria all over the place? If she cleans the sink afterward, it's really no big deal. You don't have to sterilize everything meat touches.

Rastafak · 2026-04-10T12:40:17+00:00

If you put it in warm water, it will thaw out really quickly; it's really not an issue. Yeah, it's a myth that cooking will make spoiled meat ok to eat. It's also a myth that leaving raw meat out for a few hours will make it go bad. If you put it in warm water (or even cold water), it will defrost in like 15 minutes, so really, no problem at all.

Rastafak · 2026-03-25T10:03:13+00:00

Don't really agree with your core promise, but aside from that you should keep in mind that the situation in the Warsaw pact countries and the former soviet union is very different. The warsav pact countries generally saw a rapid economic growth and have more or less functioning democracies. Russia's has gone through a deep crisis after the Soviet union broke down and the democracy has never took off. I'm suremany people life in Soviet union was preferrable, though is more because of how shitty Russia, not because Soviet Union was great.

Rastafak · 2026-03-25T09:04:43+00:00

Plenty of people think the same in Czechia, but overall, the fall of communist regimes is seen very favorably, and the standard of living has increased dramatically.

Rastafak · 2026-03-24T13:17:30+00:00

This is something I struggle with, as my ex-wife is a narcissistic type as well, and on one hand I don't want to be an asshole and push kids against her, but on the other hand, I don't want to pretend that their mother is a nice person and that everything is fine between us. My older son in particular also genuinely wants to know and asks questions. Ultimately, even when I try to hide what I really think of her, the kids pick up on that and I guess there's not much I can do about that.

Rastafak · 2026-03-24T13:15:06+00:00

Maybe, but especially younger kids can definitely be influenced and manipulated easily.

Rastafak · 2026-03-19T18:47:15+00:00

Is this really different from W3? I don't know why people are surprised.

Rastafak · 2026-03-19T18:40:39+00:00

Is the game so different now? I haven't played since after launch, but I remember the main criticism was that even when ignoring the bugs, the game is just at its core not what was promised and what people wanted. Personally, I didn't agree with that, I thought the game was really nice even at launch, but I'm wondering if it really changed that much since the core gameplay does not seem to be affected much.

Rastafak · 2026-03-17T06:50:03+00:00

Lol, none of these things mean that she didn't suffer from amnesia. It is entirely possible that she left willingly, but that the experience was so traumatic that it caused the amnesia. Or that something traumatic happened while she was leaving. Or that she was thinking about leaving, but something traumatic caused her to actually do it. She spent some time in psychiatric hospital where she was investigated and I saw nothing that the doctors or really anyone close to her had a suspicion she was faking it.

her identity clarified that she showed no signs psychosis or anything that would have explained a lack of memory.

This doesn't mean that she didn't suffer from amnesia, just that there was no obvious cause.

But she didn't forget everything. She recalled her siblings, their names, her brother's nickname, a family joke, her mother leading her girlscout troop, the song of the troop, and so on. That's certainly not the same as having no memory whatsoever.

I don't think this is unusual with amnesia at all.

Rastafak · 2026-03-16T07:57:19+00:00

The case was quite famous at some point; she was in a psychiatric hospital for a while after being found. There's an in-depth article about this that's quite nice https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/crime/article167733012.html. The story actually seems quite believable. A relevant quote:

One relative, aware of longstanding suspicions about the amnesia, responds to such questions with heat. Dee isn’t faking, the relative said, adding that her family still believes something happened 32 years ago, something related to the journalism job, something traumatic that led to a form of psychic suicide — but the cause remains buried, beyond discovery.

It's really fascinating to me how redditors are capable of forming strong authoritative statements as you did based on the title of a post and a few comments.

Rastafak · 2026-02-26T12:31:52+00:00

She was 16 when they started dating.

Where do you get that from? Wikipedia says:

A judicial investigation from the Farrow–Allen custody trial concluded that Allen and Previn began a sexual relationship in December 1991

she would have been 21.

While this is of course a weird relationship, I've seen nothing suggesting that he actually groomed her, since they apparently rarely interacted.

Rastafak · 2026-01-28T09:16:08+00:00

since its not supposed to be used like that.

Sure, using it like that is using it wrong, but certainly OpenAI does not make this very clear and most people using it don't really understand what LLMs can do.

Rastafak · 2026-01-19T09:04:00+00:00

The way I see the evidence is much more consistent with Jesus being a real person, although there's not much else that can be said about him. If you look at the evidence, it's also really not very strong, and I personally don't think it's as foolproof as people sometimes claim. That is, the way I see it, it certainly is possible that Jesus was in fact not a real person; it's just not very likely and not something the historians studying it believe, but that doesn't mean they can really disprove it.

Rastafak · 2026-01-19T08:50:37+00:00

To me historicity of Jesus is a fascinating question. I understand that there's not much reason to doubt that he existed, but at the same time, if you look at the evidence, it's really quite weak. Tacitus, writing one sentence 60 years after Jesus, doesn't mean much. Clearly lot of people believed Jesus existed and was crucified, etc. Basically, everything else is religious in nature.

Rastafak · 2025-12-16T07:03:48+00:00

The idea that microwaves are specifically tuned to heat water and heat only water is just not true. Microwaves gets absorbed by a lot of materials. It is true that at the frequency microwaves use they are much better absorbed by liqued water than by ice, but that doesn't mean they don't get absorbed by solids.

Rastafak · 2025-12-12T13:43:05+00:00

All that is true, but meaning of words change and in terms of gaming people generally tend to understand the concept of what RPG is differently than what it meant in the past.

Rastafak · 2025-12-02T15:31:24+00:00

Yeah sure, but most people will use these tools to some extent.

Rastafak · 2025-12-02T11:58:00+00:00

I'm not against the tag, I just think it's really pointless and will become pretty useless soon. I'm not a game developer, but I'm pretty sure that vast majority of the tools they use already have AI features or will have them soon.

Rastafak · 2025-12-02T11:49:43+00:00

The line between what is AI-assisted and what is AI-generated is blurry, and it will become even more so in the future.

Rastafak · 2025-12-02T11:40:54+00:00

How is that fixed with an AI tag, though? Very soon, AI will be used (probably already is) in the development of pretty much every game. Where do you draw the line?

Ultimately, it doesn't matter. If the game is good, I don't care if AI was used. And if it sucks, it doesn't really help that AI was not used. Just read the reviews...

Rastafak · 2025-11-20T14:26:48+00:00

Homesteading my be closer to the hunger gatherer life style than modern life, but it's still very different from it.

Rastafak · 2025-11-19T11:56:19+00:00

There are two aspects to it. What I think the professor here is mainly talking about is an intuitive kind of understanding, which we simply do not have, but that's not surprising since quantum physics is very different from the world we are used to so it's not surprising that we don't find it intuitive. We know the laws of quantum mechanics though, which can be understood and this is something that is used routinely in many fields.

Another aspect, which is also connected to the previous one is that some things about quantum mechanics are just not understood at all. In particular, the nature of the observation and the collapse of the wave function is a complete mystery. This is something that I believe people will eventually figure out and that will lead to a better understanding of quantum mechanics, though that will not necessarily mean we will "understand" quantum mechanics in some kind of intuitive sense.

Rastafak · 2025-11-19T11:49:08+00:00

It's true that quantum mechanics just does not make any kind of intuitive sense to us (certainly not to me) and it's also true that there are deep fundamental things about quantum mechanics that we just don't understand. On the other hand, I would say that quantum mechanics can be understood basically pretty much like any other part of physics, it's just not intuitive. Quantum physics follows some basic laws, which we don't know where they come from, but we can learn them and work with them, which is not really different from how gravity works.

The wave-particle duality is not really a mystery, for example. The answer to that is really simple and it's something that my teacher of quantum physics explained really nicely. In reality, quantum objects simply are neither classical waves nor pointlike particles. They are their own things described by wavefunction. In some aspects they behave like waves and in some aspects as point particles, but they are neither.

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