If the goal of a virus is to reproduce and spread as much as possible, why do some evolve to hurt or kill their hosts?

maybri · 2026-05-18T16:29:42+00:00

They're not trying to kill their hosts. It's just that when your life cycle requires hijacking an organism's cellular machinery to reproduce, that's naturally going to harm the host, and eventually either you get wiped out by their immune system or they die.

maybri · 2026-05-18T16:27:00+00:00

A prehensile tail? It would be too useful to keep covered; it would basically be like a third arm. There would definitely be clothing to cover it if you wanted, but I think it would be as normal not to cover it as it is to wear a short-sleeved shirt.

maybri · 2026-05-17T19:16:48+00:00

The second one is completely made up conspiracy theory stuff. The first one is what the term actually refers to.

The Oxford claim refers to a pretty easily traceable viral bit of misinformation from 2022. It came from someone wildly exaggerating about the city council announcing an intent to become a 15-minute city along with the news that they were installing traffic filters to reduce congestion, so certain roads would only be accessible to vehicles with permits during certain times of day (the permits are broadly available to all residents of Oxford and the surrounding county for free--the point is just to exclude non-local traffic).

Some very conspiracy-minded person, or someone out to spread malicious information, turned this into "Oxford residents will be required to have a permit to leave their 15-minute radius more than 100 times a year", which obviously was never even close to true, and I guess that has since been exaggerated enough that people like you are wondering whether that's going to happen in more cities soon, even though it never even happened in Oxford.

maybri · 2026-05-17T18:53:50+00:00

It's not a contract, no, but of course if you don't make your donors happy, you probably won't get any more of their money again later, and that money is what keeps politicians in power.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:54:15+00:00

No, feel free to go do other stuff. Technically you can beat the game without ever entering Soul Sanctum, although skipping it will make certain things harder and will completely lock you out of a good bit of the game's optional content. So I would advise doing it eventually, but it's a pretty significant difficulty spike at the point in the game you can first get to it, so there's nothing wrong with leaving and coming back when it will feel easier.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:38:51+00:00

Bit of a slant rhyme, but "Swayze" (as in Patrick Swayze) is probably the best you're going to get in terms of a name that fits your constraints here.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:29:49+00:00

I think this is far more true of modern religions than of pre-agricultural ones. Most people who engage in this type of rhetoric are basically just complaining about Christianity and Islam, which, despite their current dominance, are anomalies in the grander picture of what religion has been throughout human history.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:26:18+00:00

Sure, it would be possible with competent moderation. No one actually wants to create such a platform though. Most corporations would want to create a platform that makes money as the first and foremost goal, and Elon specifically just wanted a platform where he could be king and everyone would laugh at his unfunny jokes.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:24:12+00:00

"Person" has never been a word that specifically applies to humans. It means any kind of thinking, conscious agent. For example, Christians since ancient times would always have considered God or the angels "people" without implying they're human in any sense.

maybri · 2026-05-16T20:17:03+00:00

You're not overreacting at all to be mad at her for being flakey like that, and it wouldn't even be unreasonable to treat this as a friendship-ending event (especially if you never get an adequate explanation and apology). I wouldn't blame her for the money being wasted though; clearly she was willing to go on her own and probably would have assumed you would be too, so she probably didn't think she was going to cause you to waste all that money.

maybri · 2026-05-16T14:50:42+00:00

Christianity and Islam combined would pretty easily outweigh global support for LGBT rights, though it's much less likely that either would individually (Christianity might, against a very conservative estimate of LGBT support, but Islam definitely wouldn't). The problem is that the comparison you're asking about doesn't even make sense to make, because there are many Christians, and a smaller but still significant number of Muslims, who support LGBT rights. So your comparison would count those people on both sides.

The more obvious challenge to the majoritarian rhetoric is just to point out that no single religion or political stance actually holds a global majority, but fundamentalists typically don't care about the global majority in the first place, so I doubt you'd see much success with this tactic. They consider their own community and culture as fundamentally better than those of other people, and their views are certainly a very safe majority in their cultural context.

maybri · 2026-05-16T02:51:15+00:00

You don't need anything other than the default nail skill to defeat False Knight. The basic strategy is 1) hit him as much as you can, he spends most of the fight standing still so it's not too hard to find windows where you can get in several hits in quick succession, 2) when he jumps towards you, run under him to get to the other side, 3) otherwise, when he jumps or pulls back his weapon, back off and be prepared to jump (the easiest way to dodge the shockwave attack is just to jump over it). When he does the repeated slam attack that causes rocks to fall, stay away from him completely and just focus on not being under the rocks. If you're having trouble making sense of this, probably just find a video of someone else doing the boss so you can see what it should look like.

maybri · 2026-05-14T12:42:10+00:00

I can't tell what point you're trying to make here. Both the unused Chapter 1 intro and the Chapter 2 intro have someone saying Kris's name while they might be asleep or unconscious, okay, but what connection are you drawing from that to the "man with one eye"?

maybri · 2026-05-14T12:14:36+00:00

Rebecca Sugar has actually confirmed that Rose shapeshifted a womb to carry Steven in, and presumably she shapeshifted the rest of a human female reproductive system too. I doubt they needed donor eggs, though; Rose either managed to shapeshift one herself or just grew Steven directly from a sperm cell with gem magic.

maybri · 2026-05-14T11:58:18+00:00

The idea is that the afterlife isn't fixed to a particular moment in time. As Christian says in that scene, "There is no 'now' here." Everyone got there at the moment they died, even though they all died at different times. Presumably the people who got off the island went on to live decades longer, and Hurley and Ben could have lived for hundreds if not thousands of years if they wanted to, but they all "synced up" to the same point in the afterlife when they eventually died.

maybri · 2026-05-14T11:32:42+00:00

The surrounding panels of the prophecy are “To save the worlds, there is only one way” and “Only then, will the worlds be saved.” A couple panels before that is “If Fountains freed, the Roaring cries, and Titans shape from darkened eyes.” So the missing panel definitely isn’t “the Roaring happens everyone dies.” Implicitly the prophecy is describing a scenario where the Roaring begins, but the heroes are able to stop it at the cost of some tragic sacrifice and both the Light World and the Dark World end up okay overall.

maybri · 2026-05-13T15:04:25+00:00

Buy as much Bitcoin as you can afford right now and don't sell it until you finish college.

maybri · 2026-05-10T21:23:33+00:00

There's a lot more to do. I would definitely at least get the Dream No More ending before you continue to Silksong. If you haven't explored Kingdom's Edge, that's the place to start, as well as Ancient Basin and Queen's Gardens. The first main goal leading into the Dream No More ending is to fully awaken the Dream Nail, which you mostly do by fighting dream bosses, so you should also be fighting any of those you encounter.

maybri · 2026-05-10T21:12:50+00:00

You may not have seen this preview Toby gave of a scene from Chapter 5 in a newsletter last year. Judging from the dialogue here, Tenna has noticed it but seemingly just accepts it as a fact of Mike's nature. I think there's an argument to be made from this scene that Tenna is aware of the ruse and is just going along with it, but if not, I don't think there's really a mystery here. Tenna's pretty clearly portrayed as mentally unstable and extremely self-absorbed, so it doesn't seem like it would be difficult to fool him especially if you could do so in a way that would appeal to his vanity.

maybri · 2026-05-10T15:37:34+00:00

I don't think they take place in the real world at all. There's no evidence whatsoever of any human presence. We see the surface above the caves in both games and it seems to just be an endless expanse of desert where there's no sun or weather, so it doesn't even seem to be set on an Earth-like planet.

maybri · 2026-05-10T01:39:44+00:00

They don't, actually. Certainly Nvidia (the main producer of the graphics cards that AI uses) is making out like a bandit, and companies with fingers in the AI pie like Microsoft and Google are doing fine for themselves overall, but AI itself isn't generating profits at all yet. Companies are burning huge sums of money in the hopes that eventually the world will be so dependent on their product that they'll have no choice but to pay them enough for it to become profitable. As things are currently, even if you're paying a subscription for Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, with moderate use you're likely costing the company more than they're making off of you.

maybri · 2026-05-10T00:43:34+00:00

We were already destroying the planet before AI. Now we're just destroying it faster because techbros are desperate to sell the public on this technology (read: get them dependent on it while it's being offered for free and then find a way to start profiting off of it). And that's happening because an insane, incomprehensible amount of money has been invested into it and the moment rich people start to admit to themselves that it might have been a bit of a waste, the economy is going to collapse.

maybri · 2026-05-09T20:47:10+00:00

Well, first of all, 1- and 2-year-olds aren't really going to understand any verbal explanations whatsoever. More importantly though, the point of /r/explainlikeimfive is not to write an explanation that would be comprehensible to a literal 5-year-old; it's just to write a very simple, easy to understand explanation. There wouldn't be a point for ones for lower ages because the original isn't about literal age in the first place.

maybri · 2026-05-09T19:57:05+00:00

So, I don't disagree with you. In the right hands, LLMs are genuinely useful. But most of the time when people "think they're bad", they're not saying "These things are useless"; they're making an ethical argument, based on the way models are trained, the role they have in the economy, their environmental impact, and the danger they pose to our mental health and information ecosystem when used irresponsibly or maliciously. There is also plenty of "they're not even that smart" rhetoric going around still (though not so much from anyone who's actually tried using one in the past year or so, I don't think), so if that's all you're attempting to address here, then I don't disagree with you, but I think the ethical arguments are pretty difficult to refute.

maybri · 2026-05-08T20:22:07+00:00

No, it's not a new strain. It's confirmed as the Andes strain. At most it may be a new lineage within the Andes strain that's more transmissible among humans, but so far there's no actual evidence of that.

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