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What's the most likely end of mankind and our world as we know it?
  • End of mankind - nothing, really. Even with climate change or nuclear war, the rich will live on. It will be a shitty, greedy, undeserving populace that lives on, but mankind will live on.

    End of the world as we know it - climate change. I don't know of anything else more existential

  • what is the worst case scenario that can happen at the presidential debate?
  • I expect it'll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can't control himself so he's going to say some unhinged shit, but it's definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

    Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the "Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me" strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

    I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it'll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked

  • What do you think the Great Filter is?
  • My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don't really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

    As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

  • How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds"
  • Not a paleontologist, but I think it's a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

    I'm pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can't.

    And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

    My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like

  • Academia to Industry
  • No, not weird at all. PhD's are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you're good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you've locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out

    Edit: Also, you need to have a highly sensitive red-flag radar. As a graduate student, you are highly susceptible to abuse from your professor. There is no recourse for abuse. The only way to avoid abuse is by not picking an abusive professor from the get-go. Which is hard, since professors obviously would never talk badly about themselves. Train that red-flag radar, since you'll need to really read between every word and line to figure out if a professor is right for you

  • Sorry I can't do it.
  • Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS's (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.

    There's also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of "OS lineage." The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn't copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won't apply to Arch (hence the meme, "I use Arch btw")

    Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various "flavors," which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu

  • The most irreplaceable thing
  • It is self-aware ironic cringe. This is from r/laughjokes, which is where people try to make the cringiest, unfunny jokes possible, a la Funwaa (but Funwaa does it unironically)

  • Factorio Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0
  • 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

  • Disable windows updates
  • Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don't need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

    The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don't fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.

  • which one is the best anime in your opinion?
  • Dr. Stone. It's not for everyone, but if you're into STEM, it's probably the closest you'll get to media accurately portraying science and technology.

    It also puts into perspective just how much knowledge, expertise, and experience went into basically everything that we take for granted today. Makes you at least a bit hopeful for the future of humanity

  • What is your favorite kid friendly book made just for traumatizing children?
  • Yup, story goes that the publisher thought it was too scary for children, so Neil Gaiman, the author, told the publisher to read it to her daughter. The daughter said it wasn't scary, and so it was published as a children's book. Years later, the daughter said that she was actually scared but lied about it because she wanted to know the ending

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    How does it feel being into a loving relationship with someone?
  • If you want a real answer, it's like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

    Don't believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That's just attraction, not love. In some ways it's similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

    In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need

  • Do you prefer Gaming PCS or Gaming Laptops?
  • Desktop. Gaming laptops end up being the worst of both worlds when it comes to power and portability. Weaker than a desktop, heavier and bulkier than a laptop. Makes it hard to game, and hard to carry.

  • Who or what started the multiverse concept and why?
  • Not an expert, but my understanding is that the multiverse (at least, what we today associate as the multiverse) came about due to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, quantum physicists had an observation - particles were moving as though they were being pushed by an invisible wave, and they would pick a random position based on that wave when observed.

    The most prevalent explanation for this behavior is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the particle is the invisible wave, and the wave collapses into a particle when it is measured. But another common interpretation is the many worlds interpretation, which states that the invisible wave is just a statistical probability of where the particle is. And the reason why the particle seems to pick a random point on the wave when observed is actually because the particle creates branching timelines, and we can only observe what happens in our own timelines. Hence, it seems random to us.

    I speculate that the idea of multiple parallel timelines, each slightly different, was probably pretty popular with scifi writers, especially since it's an easy way to portray "what if" scenarios in their stories, and so the concept became popular because of that

  • If you didn't have to work, how would you spend your time?
  • This answer might be somewhat unusual, but honestly? I would continue working. I like to keep busy, and I feel like I would get bored quickly. Sure, a break might be nice for me to catch up with personal projects, but in the long term, I would like to work.

    I suppose it also helps that I'm a rare case where I enjoy the work that I do

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