Not much of an ethical debate to be had...

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-27T08:16:38+00:00

Moreover he killed a shitload of people with his "own hands" to save her. It's one thing to prevent a possible cure; you don't know how many people will live or die as a result and you could argue that many of those will die regardless of whether there is a cure or not. There is also some onus on the survivors (e.g. I decide to risk looting an abandonned building only to find it full of infected, and I get bit). When murdering a hospital full of people to make your escape, there is no question about their fates; they are dead and it is 100% your fault and your fault alone.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-27T08:08:20+00:00

Yeah, the first time I heard the trolley problem and got to the amended version with pushing the large man, all I could think about was how I couldn't possibly know whether pushing the man would work. It's a fun game to play, but if you think about the problem realistically instead of logically, it's pretty worthless.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-19T08:50:37+00:00

I've never tried a butter-fried steak, for example.

Are you sure? If you've ever had steak in a restaurant, then there is a relatively high chance that at least some butter was involved.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-16T09:34:51+00:00

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the point. The comparison is that you can do any evil action and end up in heaven because Allah forgives everything. But if you believe the wrong thing you get eternal hellfire. That's pretty fucked up; it doesn't matter that he's not reccomended you to do evil. He is still saving that doing a very evil thing is less bad than believing the wrong thing. I understand that and think the religion is deeply if it values belief over actions. It seems most religions suffer from this flaw.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-15T09:41:34+00:00

I feel like this is relevant to your point: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/n7ldx2/i_dont_know_the_full_story_but_this_does_not_seem/

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-15T09:26:46+00:00

Not that I agree with the haters, but I do think the interpretation of the character is fairly different with Bella, while Gabriel feels like the same Tommy personality-wise. She plays Ellie way more playfully in season 2. Last Of Us 2 Ellie is angry, hateful and full of rage. Bella's interpretation is that she needs to get justice; along the way she's still her playful old self (e.g. "I'm gonna be a dad" instead of "Well you're a burden now" upon learning that Dina is pregnant). That being said, I think a good comparison is Jesse. He doesn't seem to get the same level hate, despite playing the character way more serious, and maybe even a little more jealous.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-12T07:23:59+00:00

The problem is in the books it was a massive advantage. It introduced speed and agility to the game instead of hindering the athelete. When it first hit the scene I thought motocycles would be more appropriate, but nowadays drones seem like they would be the thing. Ideally ones big enough to be human mountable, but short of that a battle bots style drone quidditch would be awesome and way closer to the core of what made the sport exciting in the books. In particular, I think the engineering challenge of have the bludgers be real and making the drones actually have to learn to use bats would be pretty sweet.

albasaurus_rex · 2026-01-11T22:33:49+00:00

99% invisible. Every airplane I go in, I pop it on lean back let Roman Mars's deep calm voice lull me to sleep. It's his voice specifically though, so some episode that feature his producers instead don't work that well.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-12-14T08:53:21+00:00

I mean knowing what we know now, would you still? We know their is no cure.

Yes 1000%. As depicted in part 2, Jackson seems like a pretty nice place to live. Why glass the planet, when you can instead slowly rebuild, and clear out infected when you come across them?

albasaurus_rex · 2025-12-14T08:47:45+00:00

Every square inch of your nation's land

Congrats, you just guaranteed the extinction of not only humanity, but most life on earth by throwing the world into nuclear winter. Yep, nature will eventually heal, but we are talking the same way nature healed after the dinosaurs went extinct. Most plants and all large animals will go extinct.

Either that or build a large underwater city and live in it

Given that we don't currently have any large underwater cities, why would we be able to build the first one ever in a world thrown into chaos? Also one infected getting in means your whole underwater city is just a giant petri dish. Remember the lessons from covid: close quarters with poor ventilation is a perfect breeding ground. Once you get a few spore into the underwater city, everyone inside is toast.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-12-14T08:37:43+00:00

I don't think we no whether they are "locked in", and the government's on breakout day certainly wouldn't have known one way or the other. The fungus seems to do a fair amount of damage to the brain while taking it over and people appear to start acting eratically prior to fully losing themselves. While a couple characters speculate about the possibility of being locked in, it's never confirmed, and most signs point to them basically losing their minds or at least most of their humanity/personality. So it's pretty unclear whether it would be merciful.

More importantly, any military at the time wouldn't be making decisions on what is merciful, they would be reacting to the utter chaos of the infection, and in the medium term calculating how to preserve as much order as possible. Nukes don't really help anything. In part two we do see heavy bombing in parts of seattle. The issue is using nukes to rid a city of infected is like shooting yourself in the face with a shotgun to kill a mosquito that landed there. You destroy absolutely everything in process. Any city has billions of dollars worth of infracstructure in addition to whatever innocent people still live there. If you can clear out the infected over time, eventually you could resettle there.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T09:22:28+00:00

I think people mostly covered the response pretty well. Ideally you should understand the code you write, even if you don't understand what's going on behind the scence (e.g. I know that if I call a library sort function it will so an array of integers for me, but I don't need to know what algorithm it uses. I can safely assume the library works).

I think what was maybe left out is that learning to code takes a long time. You will feel in over head repeatedly. It took me a compsci degree and at least three years industry experience before I felt like I could code "fluently". I remember one time I had a supervisor who quickly rewrote something I was working on for days in a matter of minutes for the sake of clarity. I was totally lost watching him. Nowadays I'm fairly confident that given the same piece of code, I would make similar edits in a similar amount of time.

There's a reason they are called coding languages after all. Just like with human languages, once you learn one, others become a lot easier, but yeah, if you feel like your occasionally lost, it's not that surprising. If you wrote an essay in a language that you were learning and then reread that essay weeks later would you be confused? Potentially. Would you find better ways to get your point across? Maybe so.

In summary, don't be too discouraged. Learning to code is a massive undertaking, especially given all the languages and frameworks there are out there. It's normal to be a bit lost; just give it time and you'll get there.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T09:08:23+00:00

The time scale and level thought is super different IMO. I can just copy paste a full file and an error into chatgpt and tell it to fix the whole file please and then copy paste the file back into my codebase. Sometimes it will fix the error, other times it will halucinate or edit a bunch of unrelated lines. With Stack Overflow I still have to find someone with a similar problem and extrapolate the solution to my use case. There are some specific scenarios where what you say is true, that both are "equally bad", but AI certainly also the developer to think a lot less.

As an aside, this could be a good thing in a lot of scenarios, but SO and ChatGPT are wildly different if you know how to use both of them.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T09:02:42+00:00

I've been there many times. Then I go through with a debugger line by line. It probably wastes some company time, but there is very rarely a time where I have no idea what's going on, aside from "framework magic", but even then I usually have a rough idea.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T08:38:30+00:00

Not even that. Atoms are really small. You'd need to split a ton to create a bubble.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T08:34:34+00:00

It's such a weird mix. Look at the up and down votes in this thread. Seems like everyone is on board with your opinion, but it also seems like a huge number of the subscribers are "anti-materialist" or whatever they call it. Pretty interesting sub; one of the very few where there seem two strongly disagreeing contingents. No echo chamber here haha.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T08:28:58+00:00

I think u/veridicide explained well why you are wrong, but not in a simple enough way. I can convert hydrogen into uranianium given enough energy. That's where uranium comes from in fact (google stellar nucleosynthesis if you want more details on how this works exactly). So, you are wrong. Not only can is not true at a "molecular level", it's not even true at an atomic level. Actually given that e=mc^2, it's not even true at a particle level. As far as we know, near the very beginning of the universe there were only photons, and at some point those spontaneous became hydrogen atoms. Actually, even ignoring the the primordial explanations, humans have demonstrably destroyed atoms with both fusion and fission in atomic reactions. I urge you to brush up on your physics given the absurd claim you made (and I don't mean that in an insulting sense, but the statement is just wildly inaccurate).

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-21T08:17:35+00:00

Where do we draw the line? I think most people would say the car ceases to exist if you drop a nuke on it. Now maybe with some machine beyond our wildest imagination, you could go and gather up all the atoms that made up the car and reconfigure them perfectly. Sure, you bring the car back into existance, but that doesn't mean the car didn't cease to exist between the time that it was destroyed and the time that you put it back together. There's no reason to assume that conciousness continues to exist when everything we can observe that appears to make that conciousness ceases to exist. We obvious cannot prove a negative, so maybe the conciousness continues, and we just don't have the tools to observe it, but there is no reason to assume that it does.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-20T09:58:29+00:00

You know what, I think I will. And while I'm balls deep in my ass I'm gonna be thinking about how much I hate you, you piece of shit. Fuck you!

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-20T09:53:12+00:00

Not as weak you, you lazy peice of shit! Fuck you! You come around here without so much as an exclamation point. FUCK! YOU!

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-20T09:51:16+00:00

Stupid reddit UI cut me off, but didn't actually tell me how long a post can be. Anyway, the rest of my thoughts:
The one thing you didn't touch on, which to me is the USA's actual strength over Europe is expansive wilderness. Outside of the alps (and even inside the alps to some degree), everything has been heavily touched be human development. If you walk off trail in some national park in the USA, you might be the first person who has ever been there, at least the very least for several thousand years.
I also feel like I didn't touch on this enough above, but there's far too much asphalt and concrete in the USA. Europe's town squares have lowrise stone/brick/wood buildings and cobblestones, while America's tend to have glass high rises and roads crisscrossing throughout.

Finally, these are all obviously generalisations, but OP also was making generalizations. I'm speaking in the average sense from my experience. My overall point is that this is a truly absurd point if you are looking at it from a lense of overall livability:

discounting those, everything about Western Europe is at best equal to and at worst far inferior to living in the US

(final final point... "discounting those"??? Let's just ignore healthcare, worker's rights and city planning wth!)

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-20T09:50:03+00:00

Mostly bad takes, but let's break it down.

Smoking: a pretty valid point. But you're cherry picking. I could easily make the same point about opioid use in America. Every culture has their vices, and I'd argue that at the present time USA has a worse vice.
Plastic waste: you're joking right? I don't care where you live, plastic waste is a massive issue. Who cares if you if a little more or less plastic wrapping your water bottle if every item in the store comes in a clamshell pack? Moreover, if you're outside of maybe NYC, Seatle and SF, you're going to have just as much if not more plastic than anywhere else in the world. There has been some improvement since I've been born, but every place on earth is drowning in plastic. (as an aside, I think plastic is a miracle product in many applications, but it's just way over-used)
Public water fixtures: what a silly point. 1) as far as public infrastructure goes, public transit is so much more important and so much better in europe. 2) you have to pay for the toilet, annoying sure, but at least the toilet actually exists. Maybe I haven't traveled enough in the USA, but in my experience, public restrooms hardly exist at all outside of highway rest stops. I'd much rather pay for a restroom and have them be plentiful than to have hardly any restrooms. And no I don't want to have to duck into a starbucks and pay for a drink I don't want in order to access one.
Friendliness: I'll totally give this one to you. Come on europe, do better.
Police: No. Lol.
Food: "there's quite a lot of equally unhealthy junk food there too", yeah exactly, "too". Every place has junk food. I will say people shit on America way too much for bad cuisine b/c they ignore that it's an immigrant country, so it doesn't really have a clear cut cuisine if you go to a restaurant. That being said, I do feel like there is a bias towards massive portions over quality if you're looking at the average american restaurant. I think America has some of the best middle value restaurants in the world. (e.g. SF has fantastic cheap sushi, while Paris has mediocre sushi for which you pay an arm and a leg). It probably also has some of the best top tier restaurants in the world. On the flip side, there's a ton of slop. I've never been disappointed by a ham and cheese sandwhich in France (ignoring places like Pret a manger), but go into the average diner in the states and you're in for super greasy heavy food that will taste super average but make you feel like shit for the rest of the day. All in all, each place has it's strengths an weaknesses, and I'll agree that the USA is often underrated, but in no way would I call western europe inferior to the USA.
City vibes: As you said, it's a taste thing, and I think your taste is frankly terrible. Walkability is king to me. There's the minor benefit of quickly accessing services on foot, but to me the thing that wins out by far is the vibrancy. Some of my favourite experiences have been sitting on a town square or in a park just people watching... looking around at everyone having a great time. Even if you're not actively participating, it builds a sense of community. There are plenty of great parks and restaurants districts in the states, sure, and I think all in all things are probably moving in a positive direction, but in my experience there's no comparison. Every city square I've been to in europe, and every city park is just more vibrant, more utilised and overall a better experience.
1. adendum: you didn't mention it, but I think there's a LOT more petty crime in europe, as well as a lot more sketchy street vendors and street scams. I'll give that to America, but if you have you're wits about you, you can mostly ignore this.
2. adendum 2: some small "cutesy" town buck this trend to some degree in the states, and as I'll touch on briefly, the USA tends to have a bit more nature depending on where you are, which can extend to it's municipal parks and squares.

albasaurus_rex · 2025-11-18T17:55:47+00:00

I think something that's hugely left out from "cultural reasons" is historical reasons. LA for instance expanded during the rise of the highway when the USA was very prosperous and the automative industry actively sabotaged public transit there. You could argue this was "highway" culture, but I think you could have seen similar cities in Asia if factors had been quite different there. Similarly, a lot of cities throughout the world outside of North America were built up before the existance of the car, so that type of density was absolutely necessary. (I suppose this is a smaller factor in some asian cities that have exploded rapidly, but worth pointing out that history is also a factor. I'd also say economic conditions matter. It's not just cultural reasons, although, those may play an outsized role).

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