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What video game genres induce hyperfocus in you?
  • It's also my favourite place to kill monsters, take their stuff and use it to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff. I do feel like it has so much build space to explore I find building without some reference to a guide frustrating, but it manages that progression well and the atlas passive trees are a neat way to let you customize what content you want to engage with.

  • What video game genres induce hyperfocus in you?
  • Incremental games are a bit of an "I know it when I see it" grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but "flower" into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
    Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they'll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings. Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you're into programming puzzles, Bitburner.

  • What video game genres induce hyperfocus in you?
  • This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.

  • How does DNA decide the shape of the body?
  • This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

    One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

    That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

    So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

  • Minority rule is threatening American democracy like never before
  • make reapportion something that happens every 10 years with the census

    That's... the current state of affairs? New apportionments of Rep seats to states take effect on the 4th year of each decade and have done so consistently since 1933 and in particular the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It also does little for the major structural issues with voting, which are much more about voting method and the drawing of voting district lines.

  • What’s a “sovereign citizen “?
  • That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

    • Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government's authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
    • People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under "natural law".
    • People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

    Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
    Primarily it's a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it's a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

    You might enjoy münecat's longer form explanation.

  • Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?
  • Interesting. I guess for me the "trans" bit just isn't as strongly coupled to the person - that it's natural to use "man" for such a person in general, and it's a context (e.g. healthcare or the politics of it) that can make the subcategory be relevant.

  • Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?
  • If I describe someone as a "tall man" or "clever man", do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a "man"?
    If they don't, I'm genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a "trans man".

  • Have companies that claim to anonymize the data gathered on individuals ever been independently audited to verify that?
  • It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn't much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

    Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

  • having difficulties explaining ADHD to loved ones
  • My only experience is with methylphenidate (the generic term for Ritalin), but I've not found anything like that personally.
    In fact, I'd say I've felt more like myself and able to actively choose what I do than I was. This is related to also working through depression, but getting medicated has allowed me to much more often weigh up long term goals like exercise vs stimulating activities like video games and make an actual choice. Before, almost every such time I'd default to the stimulation because it took all my willpower for the day not to.

  • Biden’s UAW Rally Exposes the Bankruptcy of Trump’s Populism
  • It's only 1 year ago Biden signed legislation forcing the railroad unions back to work with only 1 day of paid sick leave per worker per year. While as the author says it "One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side", that feels very much like putting the bar on the ground.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MA
    MagosInformaticus @sopuli.xyz
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