One way to think of it is, just about anything one can measure about people tends to fit on something like a bell curve, and those curves are related in way re’anging from nearly totally correlated to nearly not at all correlated. People who are more ‘normal’ are those who sit closer to the middle of more of those distributions. This isn’t normative (what should be) just descriptive. (definition)

Looking at the normative structures around this though, becomes a bit fraught at times. A certain amount of regression to the mean helps social cohesion, as you are less likely to have large conflicts if everyone can agree on certain basic facts, principles, and objectives, but too much adherence suppresses innovation and can turn minorities into enemies, which in turn increases conflict and weakens the whole. Where society settles in the spectrum between xenophobic conformist extremism and radical lowercase l libertarianism is one of the fundamental arguments present in every society, everywhere, and in every time.

I don’t have situations that make me read in parallel with someone else, so no.

I do however suspect there might be a sort of ‘clock speed’ to different brains such that the rhythm at which they process can be faster or slower irrespective of ability to reason.

The trick arises from there being more than two people involved. In life, we have 10000 people on fire, another 10000 claiming to be on fire and also demanding help, another 10000 wearing flame-colored wigs claiming to speak for the fire-headed and demanding power, another 10000 trying to sell water buckets, another 10000 trying to sell ethanol buckets, another 10000 selling just buckets you’re supposed to fill yourself, another 10000 trying to sell pictures of the burning ones, another 10000 trying to use those pictures to say its their own fault for putting fire on their head, another 10000 trying to tell people water is too precious to be ‘wasted’ on helping people, another 10000 trying to say it’s all orange’s fault so orange has to be given the power to ‘help’ green, another 10000 saying the fire-headed should be shot as a danger to the children, another 10000 who are sick of all the noise and would gladly flood the atmosphere with vaporized kerosene if it would just mean an end to the whole thing, and all those same number again pushing for the exact opposites.

I would agree in some senses, but not others. I maintain that it is good to be precise, and that most people can be taught to be precise, given time and encouragement, and it is only a society that demands everything happen ‘efficiently’ that turns time into a scarcity such that people feel they have to find something ill-considered to say immediately rather than think for a time and find the better way to express what they mean. There are those with a mental handicap, and I wouldn’t expect the same from them that I would from someone less limited, but I will always lose esteem for those who choose speed over truth when the circumstances permit the time, or choose precision incorrectness in the service of themselves at my expense.

I make no claim of objective moral value, but rather the practical value. If one speaks, it is for a purpose. Speaking with the intention of being understood is the most common and speaking with precision serves that purpose. Speaking with the intention of obscuring is generally regarded as a form of lying, and lying can be regarded as a form of violation, akin to dosing someone with a hallucinogen, distorting their perception of reality. Such violations can serve a purpose, but they remain violations, and are generally not to the benefit of the listener. The general regard for someone who harms others for their own benefit, once the harm is recognized, is negative.

If we want to stand back from the structures of social norms, personal interactions, epistemic/ontological stakes, etc. none of it matters, but we don’t get to live in that conceptual space, only visit.

Those are essentially what I am talking about. The speaker should want to be understood, and should make it as easy as possible for the other person to understand them. By choosing to ‘play a different game’ they are going against the cooperative principle, seeking to benefit themselves at the cost of others. The cost may be fairly trivial, like cutting in line costing the person behind only a minute or two, but it absolutely suggests the person doing it is selfish.

In my experience, people often are against random murder, like serial killing, but many will go along with the idea of state-sanctioned murder or ‘defensive’ murder in various forms. The proportion of people who are true pacifists has always been pretty small.

Or you can be like a certain little turd I know and be hypersensitive to anaesthesia, so he can’t be neutered without taking an absurd level of risk and increasing the cost by thousands, making it far simpler just to keep him away from lady cats.

Asks for favor, but then says fuck you… No, fuck you, sir. Get out of my car and walk.

No idea who this is so my first thought was ‘Billy Mays here! And I’m pissed!’

I had this discussion with a former coworker. There’s selection bias in those videos. They are available because they are interesting, not because the are representative of a normal cop’s day to day experience.

They’re not wrong. The color of the background is important to how you see an object. Using the same month would highlight the effects of the war instead of washing them out in the seasonal change. Using this practically is asking people to point out the obvious problem and hurts the point being made in the eyes of anyone looking at it with less than 100% uncritical support, which is the exact group something like this could be used to convince.

That seems pretty popular out in the world as well, just usually with slightly different selections of ‘sometimes.’

I’ve been trying different flavors on my machines with Nvidia cards. It usually just works well enough for me. Did Garuda for a microsecond, mint for a moment, Ubuntu for a few, and am now trying Debian and Endeavour. I’ve honestly had more issues coming from arch peculiarities than from nvidia. Just give it a go if you have the drive space. It seems like there’s more of a question of how well your chosen flavor meshes with your chosen hardware than one of ‘can I even get this working?’

Dog.

How deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole?

Do you trust your memory? Is how you remember it really how it happened? If someone else tells you it happened another way, is there any way to tell which one, or even if either, is correct?

If the memory happened long ago, how much of the body that was there then is still here now? Is any of it?

How much of your knowledge can be trusted? Do you still believe thunder is the sound of clouds bumping together, or some other old story from your childhood?

If you have a memory of a dream, or a hallucination, is it a memory of a real event? If you don’t remember that it was a hallucination, does it become real for you?

Step out of self-focus for a moment. What is a memory? The resonance between a perceived pattern and the stored pattern in the pattern-recognition system in your head. If the pattern isn’t perceived to trigger the memory, do you still remember? If the connection is malformed, and the smell of chocolate reminds you of the taste of cheese, what does chocolate taste like when it isn’t in your mouth? If the connection is fully broken, and you forget your name, who do you become? Who are you if, after living longer as this new self than as the old self, your brain heals and restores your memory of who you were?

Is the body that holds this memory you? Where are the edges of that object? Materials move constantly in and out of the visible bounds thought of as your flesh, through lung tissue, through skin, through disgestive tissues, eyes, teeth, all of it to varying degrees. Nothing is impermeable. When oxygen is absorbed by your skin, carried to a neuron that forms part of the pattern that tells you you had a chicken sandwich last night, is chemically bonded to another molecule and expelled again, when it is part of you? Is it part of the memory?

Research shows ones personality can be changed by as little as how long it has been since lunch. Are you a different person when you are hangry?

How much of you is your memory? If your memories go away, how much of you remains? Does any?

Is there even a you? The you you are now is clearly almost nothing like the you you were as a child. Are you still the same person? If yes, how? If no, when did the transition happen from one to the other? If information is part of what makes you you, are you even the same person you were when you started reading this comment?

If there is no real separation between you and the things that move in and out of you, is memory anything more than a cycle of reactions, matter and energy triggering chemical changes triggering chemosyntesis, chemotaxis, osmosis. Do even those things exist, or are they merely more patterns of information found to assist the pattern of matter that stores them in the function of preserving that information?

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, PHILOSOPHY RABBIT HOLE!

I always preferred BPM to Hellsinger but that’s depressing. I was just listening to a discussion of the EA stuff from someone who has worked in the industry and he’s thinking the outlook is bleak going forward, that EA is likely to get the ToysRUs treatment.

I’ll recommend Kinetica. It’s a one-of-a-kind racing game where you race through gravity-defying tracks as a person in a kind of iron-man negligee with wheels while listening to old-school techno.

Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games ever, battling entities big enough that you run around on top of them, subtle storytelling, an enormous map for the time it was made, and fairly large even by modern standards.

The Tenchu games are also good: ninja stealth assassination.

Dark Cloud 2 is a kind of fun game. Smack your way through dungeons with a wrench and use the bits to build villages for your allies.

Bloody Roar is a favorite for fighting games. Fight to BIOS energy then transform into a wilder form, like a mole, a bear, etc. and you can kick people through the edges of the arenas into new areas to fight.

Devil May Cry is a classic.

Ratchet and Clank, classic.

Time Splitters is reminiscent of even older games.

Red Faction 2 wasn’t a bad little shooter.

Yes, if you treat someone who you say you love no differently from how you treat a one-night-stand, that suggests you don’t love them. That hardly seems like a bold claim.

And, no, that’s what generalization is. When speaking in general terms, it means ignoring the obvious exceptions. You don’t specify every little minority and specifically exclude them. I would not specifically call out those with alopecia in a discussion of hair products, and neither would you. That would be silly.

And the last part is what’s known as an analogy, a somewhat comparable circumstance in which elements resemble the primary concept. It serves as an example of the point, hopefully allowing the listener to see the pattern represented in the comparable and contrastable elements. In my analogy, there are two people in a relationship. This is one to one with the vibe circumstance, so should be pretty readily understandable. The part that is different, hopefully creating an analogy through which to see the pattern, is that instead of sexual intercourse, the circumstances are social intercourse. The parallel is that just as it would be regarded as a bad sign for the health of a relationship if someone only fully enjoyed social intercourse with their partner when there are pleasurable substances involved, it is a worrying sign if they reported only being able to enjoy sex with the aid of a vibe, the sexual analog to drugs.

Most forms of slang have a bit of that experience for me. The whole point of language is an attempt to make it possible to transfer information from one person to another. If someone is going to intentionally obscure what they are saying, they’re just being an asshole, making other people do mental work, either so they don’t have to (‘So I was, like, mluh’ instead of ‘I felt angry for being mistreated.’) or just to assert dominance. (using heavily obscurant slang their friend group came up with outside of the group, ‘totes mcgrotes crackin’ being used to mean ‘very horny’)

Isn’t this exactly what it is?

Yeah, and that’s kind of crappy. People in a loving relationship won’t be treating each other the same way one treats a one night stand, just using each other to masturbate. If you can do that to someone you say you love, I don’t think you love them.

medical reasons

Not relevant. When discussing techniques for the application of hair products, those with alopecia are not relevant. Someone who is medically differentiated like that has a completely different start and goal point from the average person and has to be approached completely differently.

social reasons

Not totally certain what you mean, but I’m guessing psychological or interpersonal. If it’s psychological, that’s medical. If it’s interpersonal, that’s the exact thing I’m talking about.

Using a vibe or something isn’t ‘bad’ (morally) so much as it is a ‘bad sign.’ (red flag) If your friend came to you and said ‘I enjoy talking with my boyfriend, but only when there’s someone else in the conversation’ or ‘but only when I’ve been drinking/getting high,’ or something else where they only seem to enjoy the interaction when they have some sort of external force modifying the experience, would you think their relationship was healthy? I would not. It might not be a horror show the way some others are, but it could be better.