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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

    It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

    Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

    Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

    This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

    This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.


  • One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

    Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

    Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

    The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

    I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.


  • You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

    This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.


  • I think that’s one of the best use cases for AI in programming; exploring other approaches.

    It’s very time-consuming to play out how your codebase would look like if you had decided differently at the beginning of the project. So actually comparing different implementations is very expensive. This incentivizes people to stick to what they know works well. Maybe even more so when they have more experience, which means they really know this works very well, and they know what can go wrong otherwise.

    Being able to generate code instantly helps a lot in this regard, although it still has to be checked for errors.







  • Spzi@lemm.eetoFediverse@lemmy.worldFediverse sustainability
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    10 months ago

    That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.

    I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.

    Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?

    Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.

    I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.

    We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.

    Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.