The open beta was cool, worth having a look!

The read dead redemption comparison is so interesting. They would appear to be really similar, but AC is so much more fun to me than RDR. Especially RDR 2 is so serious, and I really miss the fun power fantasy of AC in traversal, mission structure, combat and so on.

Check out David Graeber's book Debt - The First 5000 Years. He argues that waaay before money people lived in complex credit economies, and that money only happened when there was war, so that you could pay soldiers.

Also barter economies only happen when people who have been used to money don't have access to money anymore. Didn't happen before money, or at least there's no evidence of it.

So a supercomputer is a physics experiment? A lithography machine for producing microchips is a physics experiment?

I guess a fair threshold would be "when it can be run and maintained by engineers rather than scientists". In which case, many quantum computers are indeed physics experiments.

Fair enough - sounds more like a problem with the specific study than with the quantum computer

In a way, regular computers are also physics experiments. As are fridges and cars. When does an experiment graduate to being a technology?

No don't

It's not kind for sure, completely agree. My point was more that even if it's unkind, it's not necessarily racism or bioessentialism.

I think we must be kind to individuals, but still acknowledge problems with groups. That does require a shift in mindset to not feel personally impacted by statements about a group you belong to, which is easier said than done.

Feels like a deep urge, short circuiting your brain to satisfy it. Like hunger or thirst. The longer I go without sexual attention, the more my brain starts to interpret everything as an opportunity for sex. When I satisfy it, it brings joy and release and calm. It's fun, intimate and satisfy needs for closeness and touch.

It also feels deeply connected to a bunch of psychological stuff like the need for approval, gender affirmation, power dynamics, competitiveness and more.

I guess that's the joke - this is so stupid and obviously won't work, but that perspective is subverted when it turns out to actually work, causing humour.

I quite like it.

TBF imaginary time is a math trick and not something that actually progresses. It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.

It's base 20 like in France, plus the quirk that we have an ordinal numeral way of saying half integers, i.e. 1.5 is "half second", 2.5 is "half third", 4.5 is "half fifth". So 92 is said as "two and half fifth times twenty". We've since made the "times twenty" implicit for maximum confusion, so it's just said as "two and half fifths".

Also, the ordinal numeral system for halves is only really used for 1.5 these days, so the numbers don't really make sense to anyone. When speaking to other Scandinavians, we often just say "nine ten two".

Why don't we just change it to the more sensible system then? Because language is stubborn.