athroway

There's a staggering lot we don't know about plants. It's partly due to their nightmarish genome complexity (often polyploid), their slow generation time (taking often decades to mature and reproduce) and the impossibility to reproduce the complex micro-organism communities found in the soil in which they thrive.

Much of the cool stuff we know (such as e.g. transmitting responses to stress to other individuals) we've only learned a couple years ago. This is truly an exciting time to make discoveries.

This is certainly not unique to America but it's true the "poor people suck" vibe seems especially prevalent there.

Yes, and actions movies are silly entertainment for teenagers. Hopefully adults don't actually think the tropes found in action movies should reflect the real society.

Depends where you live. Many clubs display prohibitive/punitive fares on purpose, by the owners' own admission - not everyone is a rational market agent.

In many clubs there are also areas (usually smoking ones, but also backrooms, lounge areas, and so on) where the sound is muted and conversations (and other things) easily take place.

Alright, I'm intrigued. What use case isn't filled by most nightclubs?

-Bouncers often compulsively search you in order to make sure you don't bring extra alcohol inside

-Prices are at a ridiculous premium, typically to profit from the artificial scarcity but also in order to discourage and punish drunken behavior

-Loud party music galore

What exactly is missing?

Dropbox has been operating at a loss since its creation and is currently not making a profit, so the jury is still out on whether it is actually successful (or just a VC-subsidized service that got advertised a lot).

Yeah, they're called nightclubs with outrageous prices for drinks, or juice bars. Been to a few myself. But somehow I doubt your idea of "a space where people dance without alcohol" involves loud rave-type music. Maybe you could clarify

People don't dance when they're sober, period. Even in cultures where alcohol isn't traditonally consumed, either another substance is used or very energic and rhythmic music is performed in order to induce trance-like states. People don't magically start moving when there isn't anything to entice them (drinks, or money for professional dancers).

Alcohol, like all drugs, is about socializing. You get to experience strong sensations (energizing, relaxing, uninhibiting, etc.) but most of all you share these sensations with people. That's why sober people tend to get bored in a room of drunk people, or conversely why drinking (or otherwise indulging in substances) alone is a red flag for addiction. Recreational drug use, from the shared cigarette on the rooftop to binge drinking to collective mushroom trips is about making yourself vulnerable to others through strong sensations in the knowledge that they are feeling the same way. This lets you connect to people more easily: strangers strike up conversations, acquaintances become friends, friends become close friends, etc.

That's also why it's often recommended that you only drink alcohol or do drugs with people you 100% trust, especially if you're not used to it.

You aren't going to have much of a nightlife if you don't drink. Most people would rather go to sleep after 1 am if completely sober.

This just reeks of first world problems. People who "don't drink" (you know the ones), take pride in it, and when it turns out they don't have as much fun as their drinking friends, complain that alcohol and partying are "pushed on them" and justify their need for complete teetotaling spaces.

I mean, these spaces already exist. They're called Starbucks, Costa Coffee, and so on. They're fancy tea houses and smoothie stores or whatever. Why not just go there instead?

In that case I guess it's up to Wheaton's law. It is much less distressing to accept designating people with pronouns one believes to be wrong, than to be designated with pronouns that mismatch one's inner identity. Purposefully distressing people is kind of being a dick, and the amount of dickishness should be curbed, so the conclusion naturally arises.

The vast majority of mathematicians hold platonist views. There are interesting alternative views (e.g. ultra-finitism) but I'm not well-versed enough to tell you if they yielded interesting insights or have a significant audience.

If Facebook disappeared overnight, my life and that of most of my social circle wouldn't change that much. I think the issue of Facebook penetrating everyone's aspects of life is perhaps unique to your side of the Atlantic. They only have the power people chose to give them. You could opt out any time you like, it's maybe not convenient but it's liberating. See Stallman on freedom etc.

Nobody is entitled to a Twitter-sized audience. I agree monopolies are bad but the fact that right-wing tolerant platforms are shitshows and niche compared to more mainstream ones is perhaps not the fault of the left. Maybe, just maybe, there aren't that many people holding (and willing to listen to) the kind of opinions commonly posted on gab et al.

The platform shouldn't exist as a monopoly for discussion in the first place. If all people, when facing a website that sucked, just stopped using the damn website like GP and me, the platform wouldn't have this much power.

Seriously, what's so hard with not using social media? Aren't there plenty of offline stuff to do and people to talk to in meatspace? Is its prevalence a uniquely American thing?

That's the case for many abstract notions no one seems to agree on. Art, culture, nation, justice... No one really agrees on what they're supposed to be, only on single instances. Doesn't make the more encompassing abstraction any less real or useful.

Before you go on disparaging the author and philosophy in general like the proverbial xkcd physicist, take a look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

I remember trying out Julia for the first time. There weren't many libs but I found out about @pyimport and I was like "cool, let's try some stuff" and I found out that pretty much all I wrote was calls through Python bindings, so I thought "wait it's probably simpler to just use Python then", and left it at that.

Point is, I hope the ecosystem has gotten better last time I tried it ~3 years ago, and I also hope the interoperability didn't turn out to be "too good" for the ecosystem's own health.

DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much.

When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.).

An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.

Interesting. Many people I talk to about this stuff tell me they basically only like whatever they used to listen to when they were teenagers and have a hard time getting into other musical genres as an adult. You also see it in non-niche nightclubs generally broadcasting a mix of pop music from 10 years ago + a few recent viral hits. They know what demographics to target.

I wonder how much is it due to general attitudes towards profanity and generally colloquial speech being increasingly relaxed. They only analyzed the word content, not the meaning of the songs per se.

"It's cheaper to just die." Interesting argument at least.