IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It’s not an absolute property, it’s a relative statement. In other words, something doesn’t “have” free will, the term is merely shorthand for “behavior that can’t be predicted”. To me, a rock doesn’t have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it’s much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don’t have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.

That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they’re kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.

100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.

The universe is deterministic. Quantum Mechanics doesn’t really disagree with this, it’s just not as popular an interpretation as the other ones. Even if deterministic QM interpretations eventually end up being ruled out rigorously, maybe we could someday “poke through” to the underlying substrate, like a video game character figuring out the seed for the RNG that determines their universe.

Sounds like a bubble, which isn’t a bad thing but not very common in the US IME. I haven’t looked at housing prices in that area, but I’m guessing they would be obscenely expensive for most people. Even where real estate is much cheaper than that, I’ve only really known a few people that have done that sort of thing and they’re all well-off.

I’m also going to plug the community we’ve got over at !AskUSA@discuss.online, it’s great for casual US-focused questions like this.

Probably the best traction you’re going to get is in !asklemmy@lemmy.world. There exist more specific communities as listed in the other comments, but they tend to be much smaller, or defunct.

At a slightly lower level, I’m excited about Servo. Activity died off for a bit but it’s gaining steam again. Still behind Ladybird progress-wise, but it will make a very strong foundation for a new web browser.

This is probably the best explanation I’ve seen:

http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html

That definitely reads as AI generated. I don’t really get the point of making posts like that if you’re not even going to write them yourself.

Disable user-select: none; (and variants) on body to be able to select text again. I like the idea of a blog post that calls out something annoying and demonstrates the annoyance inline, though

Not sure what type of grass, it was there when we moved in. White clover

My lawn has grass, clover, and violets, with a few other random plants. The violets are great and look nice and don’t really need mowing. The clover and grass eventually require mowing, but not moreso than just pure grass.

If I search for “steam vs epic” I still see the AI-generated summary. It probably depends on when the page was scraped and when Reddit (I assume) started doing this.

This is a good commentary on it:

It’s good to want to improve the world around you, which can be given a label of patriotism. Going too far down that road leads to lots of unhappiness, though.

; and ; respectively, in case anyone wants to see how it renders on their machine and is also lazy.

That’s pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol). You can explore it through an HTTP proxy like this: https://portal.mozz.us/

It was inevitable with inflation of course, but that’s why you don’t pick names like that. Wikipedia says they go up to $30:

Five Below, Inc. is an American chain of specialty discount gift shops that prices most of its products at $5 or less, plus a smaller assortment of products priced up to $30.

Thanks, that would be great! And even if you don’t post anything, comments are always appreciated

I’ve been posting things I find interesting to !discuss@discuss.online. I’m trying to grow it as a community that can have conversations about a broad range of interesting topics, without having to subscribe to a bunch of narrowly-focused communities. Think something like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but without the tech bro mindset.

What’s an example idea that you’d like to exchange that is being censored?

I’ve seen my own posts show up in specific search results based on the transcripts, which is nice to see. Tried searching for “Great Scott! The hatch is opening” on Google just now and it linked to my post at https://discuss.online/post/14315116. That’s probably a bit of an issue actually. The link is for lemmy.dbzer0.com for my user on midwest.social to a community on lemmy.world and I just linked to it from discuss.online. Those might each be ranked independently even though it’s the same content, vs all being ranked together if it’s all centralized on one site like Reddit. Not really that hard to adjust for, but if Google doesn’t care in the first place because they think they’ll get fewer ad impressions out of it then it won’t be changed.

Kagi has a feature for specifically searching the fediverse. It’s a paid search engine, but IMO that ends up with their incentives aligned with mine.