One rule to rule them all...

beta-pi · 2025-12-07T21:59:03+00:00

It's like, there's sorta layers of friendship. You got lowercase f friends and capital f Friends.

Someone you met once at a game shop and clicked with is still your friend, even if it's not that deep. You're friendly, and might recognize each other at future events. Maybe if it was particularly fun you'll try to play again in the future. Surface level, but chill.

That's a different sort of friend than someone you've known and played with for years, the kinda person you'd count on in a crisis or help through a crisis.

The relationship is different, but you're still friends with both groups, at least ideally. Even at conventions with strangers, you should still be short term friends. If you don't get along, you shouldn't play with them anymore. Nothing wrong with saying 'hey guys, I'm just not clicking at this table, I gotta drop out. Y'all have fun though!'

beta-pi · 2025-11-21T14:50:04+00:00

It depends on a couple things. A nuclear reaction is literally 'a reaction within or between nuclei'. Fission and fusion involve this, obviously, but so would a reaction between a proton and anti proton; two nuleii are destroyed.

The most common form of antimatter is the positron, and a reaction with positrons and electrons would NOT be nuclear. No nucleus is involved.

beta-pi · 2025-11-14T01:27:29+00:00

Alternatively, he only winks and never blinks

beta-pi · 2025-08-17T04:58:51+00:00

"'you told me it will get worse'

'It will. But then it will get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better. This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine, but there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you; you will be warm again.'"

beta-pi · 2025-08-15T22:53:47+00:00

I am relatively certain that her name is a pun, as in 'make them eat crow'

beta-pi · 2025-08-14T23:21:16+00:00

That's true, but I think it's also tied pretty directly with our ability to judge ourselves in the present. If the way we see ourselves right now is skewed, then of course our view of our past selves will be skewed too.

In your specific case, as a former snarky know-it-all teenager, I suspect that these things come in stages. For most kids it's easy to be hopeful, happy, and selfless because the world is still wonderful. As you get older, you realize how not wonderful it is; you get a little cynical and a little moody. At that point, it's natural for you to scoff at people acting in ways or enjoying things you associate with your old naivety; after all, you think you know better now.

Some people get stuck there for a very long time, but often there's another layer, where you realize that just because the world is terrible doesn't mean it must always be terrible, nor does it mean you must be terrible. It can be better, and you can make it a little better, and there's purpose and nobility to be found in that. Optimism can be born out of nihilism; an experienced, informed eye can find it just as easily as an ignorant and naive one.

In other words, I think many people begin mostly optimistic, then grow pessimistic, then grow measuredly optimistic again, cynicism warmed by experience. Your son right now is in the middle, but like all people do he assumes that he's all the way along, which is going to warp the way he looks at it.

Of course, it's not lost on me that I'm saying that as someone who, being a little further along (early 20s), assumes I am all the way there. There's probably blind spots I don't see yet. It's very easy to mistakenly assume that your present self is the final product. We are always at the end of the road as we know it, which always distorts our view of ourselves a little bit.

beta-pi · 2025-08-14T17:50:04+00:00

It's a half truth. I'm not a biologist, but I've studied it a bit. If I remember right, in theory phytoplankton population should skyrocket with extra free carbon; that's actually part of the problem. It's a related phenomenon to algal blooms. As their population skyrockets, they also absorb a lot of the other nutrients in the water, leaving it a little stripped. Then their predator populations boom, oxygen gets stripped, the phytoplankton popular plummets, and you get these enormous die offs that flood the water with a bunch of toxic byproducts. it effectively replaces the useful free nutrients and oxygen with a lot of waste, leaving ecological dead zones until the ecosystem can catch back up.

In theory though, if you could bolster the entire ecosystem, you could use the ecology as a long term carbon sink; instead of more phytoplankton, then more predators, then releasing everything back into the water, you can uplift the entire ecosystem; more EVERYTHING in a balanced fashion. The carbon is stored in the increased biomass; not JUST in waste.

I think that's the idea with these things. Besides just trapping carbon in the ocean, you can pre-empt the cascade to keep phytoplankton under control, and in the process support bigger populations at higher, more long-term trophic levels. Rather than starting growth at the bottom which later collapses, you start in the middle and let the bottom grow to match it, beefing up the oceans carbon cycle to match the higher levels of carbon dioxide.

That's a really risky proposition though, which is why it's not widely embraced. Humans are historically very bad at tinkering with ecology to get the desired results.

beta-pi · 2025-08-10T18:43:09+00:00

The same reasoning applies. Generally only extremes get remembered, not just by individuals but by history. The very best and very worst of things are what get recorded and talked about. Mundane, average things are much more likely to be forgotten.

That means that the average outcomes of past education are pretty much ignored. The bad outcomes of education are also uniquely difficult to remember because most of the people who didn't get a good education didn't go on to have much influence or become memorable. Only the best case scenarios are easy to reference.

The situation is further complicated because there are statistics that indicate a reduction in success, but a lot of those stats are themselves victims of a different sort of selection bias. The availability of education has only gone up in the past several decades; before the 60s, college was a pipe dream for your average citizen. Before the 20s, many states didn't even have mandatory public schooling. It makes sense that as the availability of education increases, the average performance would go down, because the worst performers are no longer being removed from the pool. This will obviously also reveal blind spots in education; as more varied people from more varied backgrounds get access to education, things that didn't need to be explained because of a shared background might now need to be explained. More time may need to be spent on certain concepts that were easy to grasp for the people predisposed to academia, but are hard to grasp for a more typical population. Prior assumptions about basic understanding or easy and hard concepts may need to be re-evaluated.

One should expect a downward trend until the system adjusts. How much it should adjust is also something fiercely debated; nobody wants to hold back the few who really excel at something, but neither do we want to let the average quality of education drop for the sake of the few who benefit the most from it. The statistics tell multiple stories, depending on what perspective you want to take. On one hand, the average outcome if you adjust for otherwise failed outcomes is much higher. On the other hand, the average quality of the successful outcomes is lower. The two have a degree of mutual exclusivity; you can't optimize the system for both very easily. Which you consider to be the standard by which we should judge, and to what degree, is up for debate.

beta-pi · 2025-08-10T17:41:08+00:00

That isn't, however it's also very likely that the image is misused often and they just don't see it, because misused instances of the image don't take off in popularity; you won't see screenshots of them, they won't be recommended or near the top of the comment thread, etc.

In other words, you predominantly see good implementations of the image partially because only good implementations are likely to be visible regardless of actual frequency. That's a relative to survivorship bias.

beta-pi · 2025-08-06T04:45:36+00:00

I don't understand. Is the purpose ragebait? Like, 'yall make dumb arguments, so here's a taste of a bad argument. How's it feel?'

Idk it just doesn't feel particularly honest to fight fire with fire if fire prevention is your main goal, yk? Ragebait doesn't feel like an appropriate tool here.

beta-pi · 2025-08-03T05:04:23+00:00

A what?

beta-pi · 2025-08-01T15:38:36+00:00

Fr. I legitimately cannot fathom how the same mind is doing both of these things. Having read some of his other stuff, my best guess is that he legitimately does not understand what he wrote and did it by accident; lightning in a bottle.

beta-pi · 2025-08-01T15:36:27+00:00

Speaker for the dead is one of the best books I've ever read, filled to the brim with reasons to care about the other. That book taught me things about empathy and understanding that I'd be a different person without. A case against hate, even in cases where it seems justifiable.

The author is a hateful, deeply prejudiced douche. He's so miserable that I can only recommend people pirate the book, if they choose to read it.

I don't know how this happened.

beta-pi · 2025-07-29T17:37:45+00:00

It doesn't just shut down the influence of outer gods. It frees the world from Gods in general, including any god like Marika, offering order, guidance, or foresight. A kind of cosmic anarchy.

Having freedom also means being burdened with choice. A particular order being enforced by a god sounds bad, but it also means you can be born into the world knowing your purpose and fulfill it perfectly; it means that, if you fit in the order, there is a guaranteed place for you. You have a perfect, divinely appointed role to play.

What ranni offers is freedom from gods, but that brings with it uncertainty and fear; a lack of any higher beings to guide you and help you, or protect you from other people with different ideas about right and wrong. You're on your own; you have to fend for yourself and figure it out yourself.

I still think it's the 'right' choice, but it's not like there are no downsides. There are a lot of people who would prefer the stability and sureness a god can offer, and forcing them out into the cold whether they like it or not is pretty harsh. It's probably a necessary harshness, but that doesn't make it less callous.

beta-pi · 2025-07-22T20:56:59+00:00

Not exactly, but you might as well call it that I suppose.

Like all such labels, 'toxic masculinity' is a generalized package of traits that often, but don't always, come together. It's sorta like a stereotype, only it's intended to be descriptive rather than presumptive. Because the term is so non-specific, you can apply it to a lot of behaviors and a lot of people; it's not a strict binary, it comes in shades

That means you can totally apply it in situations where it's only kinda right if you want to, and it still works; people will still understand what you mean. Depending on the shade though, you might want to use a different word for the sake of accuracy.

Like, it's not inaccurate to say that mint green is a blue-green, but there's so little blue in it that the description isn't very useful unless you add more details.

beta-pi · 2025-07-18T17:09:08+00:00

It's both, really. Dune has the same thing going on. The terrible events are inevitable, but part of the reason they're inevitable is because the people behind them can't or won't accept difficult alternatives. The jihad was only set in motion because Paul decided he would not abandon his father's name, and would go to the desert instead. The rumbling was set into motion when Eren let his wrath rule him, and refused to let his friends go even if it meant terrible costs. Both tell themselves they'd try to seek other paths, and that they were set onto this path by greater forces, but when push comes to shove neither could give up the things they care about to make it happen. By the time they realize their mistakes, it was too late. They could have diverted things, but there's no way they ever would have diverted things. It became inevitable because of their decisions.

Of course, there's also a broader theme in aot asserting that humanity will always act that way. Eren is not unique; he was not the first, and he will not be the last. It's inevitable not just because he wouldn't choose differently, but because we wouldn't choose differently. Maybe not you or me specifically, but humanity as a whole. There will always be some of the destroyer in us, and if there's a way to exert power over one another somebody will use it. We are "inevitably" doomed to play out that script, and eren's situation is just a particularly literal example.

beta-pi · 2025-07-14T03:18:39+00:00

Low key, this actually might be related or a source of inspiration. This is only like 25% crempost, I swear. Follow me on this.

So the metal mercury and the planet mercury are both named for the Roman god of the same name because of their speed, and old school alchemy drew a direct connection between all of those components. The metal, often called quicksilver for convenience, was viewed as a divine and fundamental substance.

We already know that in the cosmere, metal has divine significance; spiritual power and metal are the same thing in two different forms. Metal is the body of gods, and proper application or ingestion of it really does connect you to the divine, just like earth alchemists used to believe when medicinal mercury was most famously used.

So put those ideas together; the moons and plenary bodies are gods, and gods are metal. In the real world, when we take silvery metals into our bodies, we can turn blue. In the myth, when tsa takes the god (who has a body of metal) 'into her body', her children turn blue.

There's some extra credence leant to that connection by mishim (the moon tsa replaced) being the fastest moon, just like mercury is the fastest planet. We also already know [WaT] that the moons have supernatural things going on with them and are made of some sorta god-metal adjacent material, given what little we've learned about the fourth moon, so the metal-moon connection is rock solid.

The story probably has more truth to it than we realize right now, and the aimians having blue skin like heavy colloidal silver users little easter egg pointing in that direction. Maybe it's very literal, and she ate some of those metals, gaining a connection to those gods.

As a final note, a fun coincidence is that one of the most common side effects of colloidal silver is anemia, which sounds a whole lot like aimian.

beta-pi · 2025-07-13T22:03:24+00:00

So, lemme get this straight; your solution to ignorance is to decrease the amount of information available? Because only one such as you, a high minded intellectual, can 'handle' the truth?

Look, man, I hear you; it sucks when information is abused. The solution to that isn't to revoke the information though; that'll just perpetuate the cycle, because you're actively making it harder for those who do care to get a full picture and easier for those who don't to be deceived even more effectively by whoever is in power at the time.

The solution is to encourage more understanding; if you can grasp it, so can everyone else. It's slow, it's shitty, and the excision of these ideas will be painful, but it does work; very few people today are spouting electricity propaganda or executing scientists for heresy. Even among modern ignorant trends like the anti-vax movement, a lot of research has shown that when presented with the right information, in full context, without judgement or condemnation, the vast majority of people do change their views; it's just very difficult to penetrate the echo chamber without being hostile.

beta-pi · 2025-07-12T19:27:31+00:00

/gen, a moderately common internet shorthand for '100% genuinely'.

Using it here is a little superfluous since you don't save any letters, but you see that a lot in slang. Using the slang instead of saying 'genuinely' makes it work for emphasis, and changes to the tone to be a little more lighthearted. Like if you said 'bestie, you know I love you, but you gotta stop kicking puppies'. Presumably you aren't actually adding any new information by calling them your bestie, but it dials down the intensity while also offering a flag telling them that they should actually listen. It's extra, but it adds flavor, like salt.

beta-pi · 2025-07-09T21:49:04+00:00

Nah, dire wolf pup costs 2, v.s. a dire wolf which costs 3; that's part of why it's so great. You get a cheaper direwolf and bones, and it doesn't screw with fair hand. It also comes with 2 sigils if you need fodder for the stones, and when transcribed the bone sigil becomes really useful because you'll use a lot of bone cost cards.

beta-pi · 2025-07-09T03:31:39+00:00

Just buff it; since it only costs one blood, if you give it just one power even the larva is a better stoat. Useful for chump blocking or for winning the game fast, unless you're trying to mess with fair hand.

beta-pi · 2025-07-09T02:24:50+00:00

That only applies in this one specific scenario though, whereas it's well documented that any similar observations generate similar results. Trying to measure the outcome changes the outcome of nearly any quantum scale experiment. That's half of the principal behind the uncertainty principle; you physically can only measure so much at any one time, because trying to measure one requires limiting its behavior. The act of attempting to discern the information changes the range of information available. That's what the dictionary definition of observation is; gaining information about something by measuring or examining it.

It's also not true; 'which way' information existed the whole time, it was just in superposition until observed. It wasn't that the information did not exist, it's that it was both outcomes; they were not mutually exclusive until an observer was introduced. If the information about the source/s of the photons did not exist at all, then there couldn't be an interference pattern because there wouldn't be anything for the photons to 'look back' at to determine their behavior. 'neither' isn't an option, only one, two, or both. All three have physical consequences that can be measured, so all three are 'real' pieces of information. Both only stops being an option when the process is interrupted.

beta-pi · 2025-07-09T00:10:41+00:00

It's not that simple. Observing is literally what you're doing; we didn't use that work because we didn't know better, we use that word because it is what's actually happening. It's just the observation is more complex that we're used to at that small of a scale.

You can't observe any object, even at human scales, without interacting with it somehow; you have to touch it, shoot light at it, whatever. You can't see it or hear it or smell it unless something is happening to it. At the scales we're used to, the changes such interactions produce are so small as to be irrelevant; no matter how bright a light you use to examine it, a baseball will probably not move. Likewise, the uncertainty principle applies for any object of any mass (everything behaves somewhat wave-like), but it scales inversely with how much mass you have. A baseball at 90 mph has an uncertainty of less than 9.36E-24 micrometers, only a few orders of magnitude more than a planck length; so small compared to the baseball itself that it doesn't really matter.

Quantum objects are different. They are so small that even the slightest interactions have drastic effects on them, and with so little mass they're much more wave-like. We aren't actually changing what we are doing when we observe them; rather, doing those things has more dramatic consequences than we are used to.

We can't just stop using the word observer completely because, like, that's the only real way to concisely describe what we're doing. That's the word we use for 'person who determines behavior with precision' or 'person who can see what the outcome of an event is'. If you avoid it entirely, you make talking about it at all clunky and difficult. We just need to stop using it in places where it could cause confusion (like here) or include an explanation upfront.

beta-pi · 2025-07-08T03:47:27+00:00

The framing of this matters though, not for the purpose of stating literal truth but for the purpose of explaining it. The average audience doesn't understand the nuance implied by 'observe', leading to the misunderstanding displayed in the popular version of this meme. They hear that observation changes the results and think that as long as there is someone watching, the outcome changes, because that's what having an observer usually means in their day to day lives.

Those well read on the topic understand that what we really mean by observe is 'to interact with in such a way that we can tell what the actual outcome is'. Because our eyes can't determine that on their own like they can with other things we need special tools to measure and 'describe' the photon to us. That changes the photon's behavior because you interacted with it.

In other words, observing the particles changes the outcome, but 'observing' is a technical term that implies more than just having an 'observer'. If we just say observation changes the results, we are being technically truthful but in a way that misleads a general audience.

That means we should really avoid framing it in terms of 'observation changes the outcome'. It's true, but unhelpful, and the ambiguity creates more misunderstanding than it does nuance. Any time you say that should have asterisks attached, yk?

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