You've stumbled upon the basis of the debate between free will and determinism. imo, we are merely under the illusion that we're making our own choices. The universe is one infinitely complex system of falling dominoes, with each choice and action just being the result of the parameters set by the ones preceding it. We are all made up of the same basic building blocks, and are thus just subatomic systems obeying the laws of thermodynamics... it just happens to be the case that when a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it is able to think about itself - we are quite literally the universe experiencing its own existence.
Why is this? I don't know. Nobody knows. Consciousness and 'the ability to experience' is one of the most elusive and complex questions facing science and philosophy today. It's my personal belief that there is certainly 'something' more to this whole cosmic experience, but I'm not convinced by religion's answers and believe 'it' to be something so vastly incomprehensible and foreign, we'd never understand it even if the mystery were revealed to us. It isn't something I like to think about too deeply, because unfortunately, it opens up an infinite regress of questions we will likely never have the answers to.
If anything it’s the reverse I’d think. Just look at books without a Happily Ever After and how that’s looked down on, and why its a requirement for Romance publishers.
Romance isn’t exactly a respected genre. Misogyny has a lot to do with that but the genre’s tendency towards formulaic tropes doesn’t help.
And before you get to the Happily Ever After? It has to be a rocky road, with a break-up. It’s almost like the HEA has to be earned through pain.
Abandon the philosopical concept of an independent thinking mind capable of evaluating something by itself.
“Decisions” and “Thoughts” don’t exist without the environment, as they’re a succession of neuronal activation cascades in response to the current state of all stimulus, the previous connections formed in your brain, and reinforced patterns.
Leave a human being in an empty void and their thoughts will be built by severely boosting sensitivity and then responding to random sensory noise. Sever all sensory connections and the mind shuts down.
If I remember my cognitive science classes, all decisions even complex are powered by a person’s neural circuits, in which neurons talk to each other chemically using neurotransmitters. Basically, large groups of constantly-rearranging neurons are what turn what you call “chemical laws” into constantly-evolving decisions.
Frankly, the decisions that we make are chemical reactions. The difference is in the complexity of the decisions that we can make. At that point, though, in order to answer your question, we would need to argue about what one would consider to be a decision that’s complex enough and a decision that’s not complex enough, and that leans much more into philosophy and ethics rather than science.
I can only tell you that, from a mechanistic point of view, there’s not really much distinguishing our decision making process from, say, the decision making of a flatworm
Darn, I promoted Lemmy and KBin on Reddit, Voted for mods to continue the protest, encouraged people to request their data from Reddit, and linked my KBin in my bio before completely leaving the platform.
Side question: Why do Reddit and Twitter and all of these other social media shitshows use idiotic terminology like 'permanently suspended'? Surely the correct term is 'banned'. The word suspended in this context usually implies a temporary nature.
Mistborn: The Final Empire! If I’m not mistaken, “heist book in fantasy setting” is literally one of the main things that inspired Brandon Sanderson to write this.
The chemical reaction that binds concrete in a matrix takes place after you add the water and continues until you dry it out. Anything you put in the crack will be a temporary fix only. The material will work itself out over time, and you will additionally be trapping a certain amount of moisture in the crack with it. You will now have a concrete pad with a ‘pocket’ and a ‘plug’ made from different materials. Materials that are likely to expand and contract at different rates exposing an opening for moisture and debris at least once through the year.
You only get (1) chance to successfully pour concrete i’m afraid. Your pad is damaged for all time. The crack will certainly grow from thermal conditions alone. It’s incapable of healing itself. What you need to stave that off is good chemistry for binding and something that expands and contracts at approx. the same rate as the concrete. I’d call the company that poured it. They’ll know what repair product best matches their chemistry. If you put the wrong products in it, it’s going to accelerate the degradation.
I am a refractory designer, and the company I work for makes several ‘patch’ type products of different chemistries. They all have a use. Temperature, application, chemistry, elevation even. While these do work, they are again only temporary.
They come in different consistencies. One of those is what we call a plastic. It is very much like a putty until it dries. It does contain some moisture so it will shrink as it dries out. It does not contain as much moisture as a self flowing castable would.
Yeah, I called the company and they did a big fat “cracks are normal and we do not guarantee concrete against anything.” Was really frustrating. Found out about half way through the project they just subbed the whole thing out… but reality is around here if you aren’t a contractor willing to do a big order for multiple jobs at once, you aren’t getting a concrete guy. Called 10 different people and these were the only ones that answered…
Honestly though, I’m not expecting a miracle to “undo” the damage. Just trying to see if there is something that can minimize the amount of damage water seeping through might do.
I don't think the scraping is the full reason. I was not on lemmy/kbin or any other part of the fediverse and I still got this random permaban, in fact it happened before the pricing changes were announced on May 31st.
Also, my username there is different to what I'm using on the fediverse.
Prior to being permabanned I also never used the API for anything. Only used it for the scripts to wipe my account clean (so being permabanned doesn't typically prevent one from creating the API tokens or actually using the API, it seems).
Well that rules out (most) of the malicious possibilities. What we're left with is probably either Hanlon's razer, or something you commented about spez.
If it's the latter, the four accounts I nuked are still alive.
Sadly, it wasn't the later. I never mentioned spez and didn't even know what the CEO's name or username was until the blackouts (i.e. after i got permabanned).
VPN? They have this half-baked user "reliability" rating system that they claim "identifies known alts".
Which is marketingspeak for "we log ips," I think. If they did that as poorly as everything else, it's possible they think you're the last guy to use that vpn before you.
If you have (or know someone who has) dogs? Get some excrement. Burying it in the mole hills tells them a predator is there and to burrow away. There used to be moles where I live, but bringing in dogs have moved them out of the area. The yard has been mole free for years.
Depending on where you live, another alternative is flushing them out. Use a hose and flood the entrances which also makes them move away. However, with water shortages in a lot of places, I'd recommend the first option.
Cats also work wonders. The cat doesn’t even need to hunt them, just being present is enough to drive them off. We had an indoor outdoor cat who didn’t hunt but just wandering around the yard drove away the moles. Now that that cat is gone, they are back.
Is there a way to get rid of the space on the left and right sides of the screen and make comments and posts cover the whole browser window like old Reddit does?
V. 0.18 disables CAPTCHA support, which we're not willing to do at this time, as there are a lot of bots on the platform. It's supposed to be re-instated in 0.18.1, so we're probably going to wait for that.
From what we understand, it should be possible to simply bypass the warning that Jerboa sends, and use the instance as normal - let us know if that's not the case.
Also, the instance can be installed as a PWA through Chrome on Android phones - I've found that to be a good experience overall.
Ah shoot, I just confirmed this. We had tried it with Jerboa, but we were already logged in.
While we consider our options, I would suggest accessing the instance through your web browser. I don't think you'll have any issues doing it that way, and the mobile interface is pretty decent.
the thing about Enterprise is even at its worst, it’s not an entirely bad show - the supporting cast is good, they are set in an interesting time period, and the premise is ostensibly interesting.
The main problem for me is that, setting aside the fact that the main theme comes straight from the Patch Adams soundtrack, the show is straight up boring. They came so close to something really interesting with Archer being flawed because he was the first, and perhaps even not really the right guy to be captain. But then the writers had to make him a mary sue, he fails is way to success every episode, and becomes like the ship’s alcoholic dad, constantly getting into the dumbest yelling arguments with his wife first officer — who he is also canonically racist against by the way. You would think/hope they were setting him up for some growth on that, but, instead they chose to try to make a lot of the show indirectly relevant to 9/11
By the time the show finally set the stage to become interesting the majority of its audience had already been alienated
What Paramount ought to realize about it is that Enterprise failed because of the writers and producers and not because of the cast or setting and it should not be very difficult to do significantly better than the original
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