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

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  • I can kinda see both ways. I think both systems aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive - I think the old system works more intuitively for pipes with low volumes of fluid, and the new system works more intuitively for pipes that are full or near full.

    I hope that the developers can mix the two systems, so that pipes function with the old system when pipes are empty or near empty, and it switches to the new system when pipes are full or near full










  • I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

    But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

    If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.


  • My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

    And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun

    To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

    We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

    My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)




  • The screen size matters significantly. More specifically, what humans care about is pixel density. A 24 inch 1080p screen does not look the same as a 27 inch 1080p, which does not look the same as a 32 inch 1080p.

    A 24 inch 1080p screen is perfectly fine. A 27 inch 1080p, you can start to see the pixels more clearly. A 32 inch 1080p IMO is unacceptably bad.

    I would say the standard should be 1080p for 24 inch or under, 1440p for 24-27 inch, 4K for 27 inch or above

    I personally run a 24 inch 1440p screen because I’m pretty picky with pixel density, and the monitor was relatively good deal.


  • Games, as with all creative media, by default improve over time as people learn what makes something enjoyable. I think people tend to forget that. So I think for older games, you have to keep 2 “ratings” in your head - how was it compared to the games at the time, and how is it compared to games now?

    I loved GTA3 when I played it. But that was back then. I’m not sure if I would say the same thing now, comparing it to modern games.

    I get that people like to clown on all the remakes and remasters that are coming out, and for the most part, rightly so. But I also think it’s really important to encourage high quality remakes for this exact reason - when a good game ages poorly, it doesn’t feel quite right to just tell new, younger players to deal with it if they want to figure out what the hype is about


  • I address this in the last sentence of my previous post.

    To reiterate, your argument does not matter because if you keep asking why, you are no longer answering the question that is being asked, but an entirely different question altogether. You can answer why there are so many metals. We might not figure out why the laws of physics are the way they are, but if you’ve gotten to that point where you’re trying to answer that question, then you’ve deviated so far from the original question that you weren’t even trying to respond to it to begin with.


  • That’s blatantly incorrect. The properties of metals is an emergent property that arises from how atoms interact with each other.

    Dense network of bonds with a lot of electrons -> higher chance of absorbing incoming light of a particular wavelength -> electron gets excited to the precise energy level of the incoming light due to the dense network of molecular orbitals -> electrons releases the exact amount of energy absorbed when it falls back to ground level -> a photon with equal wavelength to the light that was absorbed is emitted -> we observe that as something being shiny.

    There’s nothing fundamental about why metals are metallic - inorganic chemists don’t just spend their entire day looking at elements and categorizing them as metals or not. Their entire job is figuring out why metals are the way they are. If you want to debate about why quantum mechanics (which is what ultimately causes atoms to interact in a particular way) is the way it is, then sure, we don’t know that yet. But then you’d be talking about an entirely different topic than the one that was asked


  • I’ll try my best. I’m not an inorganic chemist, but I did take a class on it once, and I’ll try to remember as much from it as I can.

    Metals are metallic mainly because they’re able to form these vast networks of bonds between many atoms. All the properties that we associate with metals - shiny, conducts electricity and heat, such as that - arise because of how this network of bonds interacts with the environment. For instance, having a network means electrons can go from one side of the network to the other which we observe as being electrically conductive.

    In other words, the metallicity of an object is an emergent property that’s dependent on how large this network of bonds is and what types of bonds make up the network. As a side note, because we know that the network is the basis of metallicity, we can kind of cheat the system by making networks out of otherwise non-metallic objects, and if we make these networks act similarly to the networks found in metals, we get a non-metal that looks and acts like a metal (what we would then call a semiconductor)

    It turns out, the higher energy orbitals that you find on heavier atoms have the tendency to form networks. I don’t fully remember why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that when you get so heavy, you have so many orbitals that you can just form a ton of bonds at once (I was surprised to learn that metal atoms can form more than 3 bonds with another metal atom)

    So basically the lighter elements tend to be non-metals because they don’t have the number of orbitals to form a cohesive network (outside of select cases) and the heavier elements tend to be metals because they have so many orbitals that they kind of have to form networks.