The interesting thing is that anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago and did live exclusively as hunter-gatherers for about 280,000 of those years.

How are you guys getting all these wrong answers? Because I do use ChatGPT to look up information about software development, which is something I have a lot of experience with, and it’s almost always right. “Almost always” isn’t “always” but, if I’m being honest, it’s probably better than my own memory.

Any possible negotiated end to the war at this time would involve territorial concessions by Ukraine. Putin himself won’t agree to withdraw from most of the territory occupied since 2022, and even if he is replaced by a new, much less expansionist ruler willing to withdraw from all that territory, the new ruler still won’t give back Crimea.

I used to worry about what women would think when they saw my home, but it turned out that none of them ever see it at all so I might as well be true to myself and collect all the My Little Ponies.

The Uyghurs in Guantanamo didn’t want to go back to China.

Do you remember how prisoners were kept in Guantanamo Bay, even after they were no longer suspected of any wrongdoing, simply because there wasn’t a country that would both accept them and treat them in accordance with US law? Many of those prisoners ended up nowhere near where they came from.

Some countries refuse to accept deportees. Some countries are so likely to mistreat deportees that sending them to those countries is illegal. Some countries simply don’t exist anymore.

It sounds like the point they’re trying to make is that Americans don’t want to have children because things in the USA are getting bad, but if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.

It’s annoying to repeatedly read the same completely unsupported explanations for fertility rate declines.

Except for the part where the fertility rate in El Salvador is higher than it is in the USA. If we’re becoming more like them, our fertility rate should be increasing.

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn’t quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

No, not the bees. My eyes!

Or so I’ve heard…

What can “never” mean here?

For coal, however, if you invest 1kWh you typically get below 0.4 kWh in return.

So people run coal plants to destroy energy? Like, you have too much electricity and so you build a coal plant to get rid of it?

I’m not sure that whatever metric this source uses matches what most people think when they hear “energy amortization”.

Bezos looks pretty good for a man his age.

This is Bond-villain level megalomania, and therefore actually kind of cool.

Do pampered modern dogs even know that meat comes from animals? My guess is that my dog didn’t. He wanted to chase animals very much, I never let him catch one, but I suspect that he wouldn’t know what to if he did. On the other hand, when I let him chase me he would try to trip me by grabbing my pants at my ankles, which might be a wolf behavior.

(My ferrets didn’t even know that meat was food, because they refused to eat anything expect their pellets. They wouldn’t touch something like wet cat food even if they were hungry. I read somewhere that ferrets don’t eat anything that their mother didn’t teach them to eat when they were young.)

My dog had nightmares sometimes, or at least I think he did. He would twitch and do his sad/pain squealing noise. I woke him up whenever I noticed him doing that, and he always woke up calm and happy. I don’t think he remembered his dreams at all.

Convicted?

I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.

There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…

I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.

If improving leads to winning more…
and losing ELO leads to winning more…

Losing ELO is a sign of improvement!

My hope is that if they wait two years then it’ll be to minimize the damage until the midterm elections, at which point Democrats will win both the house and the senate. I think that’s the best-case scenario.

There isn’t much the court can do if Trump refuses to comply and Republicans in Congress continue to support him. I hate to say it, but avoiding a confrontation may be better than getting into that situation, both for the court and for the country.

In practice, no one will be hurt by this change, except for the pain caused by a defeat in the culture war. If I were you, I would consider risking my career over real harm done to individuals, but not over abstract harm done to an idea, even an idea I supported.