In contrast to a monarchy, where people cannot choose their leader, in capitalism people can choose from which company they buy, or even create their own.

As another person already pointed out, these are obviously two different categories.

The question then is, why do people choose the way they do, both when buying and when running a company? To me it seems, they don’t because of some external pressure (like monarchy requires).

The point can be summed up as a question: Why don’t people run (more) non-capitalist services and productions, and why don’t they prefer them when looking to satisfy their demand?

These non-capitalist things exist, it’s certainly possible. But as far as I know, they are all very niche. Like a communal kitchen, some solidary agriculture or housing project. Heck, entire villages of this kind exist.

So the alternative is there, but it requires actual commitment and work. I don’t see how capitalism could be abolished in an armed uprising (in contrast to monarchy). But it can be replaced by alternative projects. Partially. Why are they so small and few?

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.

You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.

Adding a comment so people can experiment more in this thread.

I didn’t know about that [under this name], so thanks for bringing it up. But no, I meant something slightly different.

Colors of noise describes how to generate different distributions. What I meant was how to transform distributions.

Many of the examples in the article start with a random number distribution, and then transform it to reduce discrepancy.

This reminded me of audio/video signal processing. For example, one can take a picture and transform it to reduce discrepancy (so that neither very bright parts nor very dark parts overshoot). Or you can take an audio sample and transform it to reduce discrepancy in loudness.

So the idea was that maybe techniques of either field (RNG, audio, video) could be applied to both other fields.

That’s a very long list of different techniques with examples, very cool!

Though I wonder, is there some connection to image processing, high dynamic range?

Or audio compression, the kind which brings out the kick in the mix, not the kind which saves disk space?

The similarity I see between all three fields is, they try to bring down extreme values, outliers, to level the field, while still retaining characteristics.

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

So why is this? The answers so far seem unsatisfactory, since things like phones, SUVs and car-centric infrastructure are on the rise in other countries as well, without that staggering rise in deaths.

I spent about 3 minutes browsing the report linked in the article, and am rather less confident than before. For example, on pages 25 and 26 they look at the share of SUVs in deaths and sales. And while both figures are rising, the bodycount from non-SUVs has gone up as well.

The answer is probably not a single factor anyways. Can anyone make a more or less informed guess what might explain the US being so bad?

Are the Dutch naturally more responsible drivers or something?

Maybe: https://www.dutchreach.org/

But don’t take that as a conclusive answer, your question still stands.

I think that’s one of the best use cases for AI in programming; exploring other approaches.

It’s very time-consuming to play out how your codebase would look like if you had decided differently at the beginning of the project. So actually comparing different implementations is very expensive. This incentivizes people to stick to what they know works well. Maybe even more so when they have more experience, which means they really know this works very well, and they know what can go wrong otherwise.

Being able to generate code instantly helps a lot in this regard, although it still has to be checked for errors.

There’s a very naive, but working approach: Ask it how :D

Or pretend it’s a colleague, and discuss the next steps with it.

You can go further and ask it to write a specific snippet for a defined context. But as others already said, the results aren’t always satisfactory. Having a conversation about the topic, on the other hand, is pretty harmless.

Those LLMs are great fools, but I am just paranoid to use it in that manner.

Exquisite typo. I also agree to everything else you said.

You can do that when you control the frontend UI. Then, you can set up the input field for their name, applying input validation.

But I would rather not rely on telling the user, in hopes they understand and comply. If they have ways to do it wrong, they will.

Best take imo. Yes, the “bliss” is that we are ruled by ruthless billionnaires instead of cruel dictators. At least some of us.

As pointed out in my top level comment, the post is quite one-sided, omitting the dark truths. Cooperation is the overall best strategy, but so is to exploit as much as you can. Both are true, the combination is true.

Yes, and no.

First and foremost, you need no “justification” for being a decent person. And there are other reasons to be that way, as arbitrary as “I like it this way”.

Game theory is strongly related to evolution. It is safe to assume that everything we can observe in nature is a successful strategy. So this confirms the statement: Cooperation is a successful strategy. But the other side of the picture also exists: Betrayal is as well.

What the excerpt omits about the Prisoner’s Dilemma (not sure wether it’s mentioned in the video, which I did not watch now): The Nash Equilibrium can be the overall worst outcome. What does that mean?

A Nash Equilibrium is a situation in which no player can improve their own position. It is therefore a stable state. Things will change until they have settled in a stable state. It can be shown for Prisoner’s Dilemma that the Nash Equilibrium can be the worst case, where each betrays the other. Yes, they would both score better if they cooperated, but the system will still tend towards the state where both play nasty.

When multiple iterations are played, this changes a bit. It seems, if you not just meet once in a lifetime, but can remember your past, and have a common future, it makes more sense to cooperate. But there is still a place for uncooperative exploitation.

So yes, it’s true what you say about “best performing strategies”, but it should be noted that “evil” strategies don’t go extinct either.

It should be questioned how much these theories can be applied to our lifes. I mean questioned, not implying an answer. Either way I find it interesting how behaviour which we associate with morals emerges in very simple and abstract games.

I would not work with or even for someone with such an attitude, not even for money. Ok, do it yourself, bye. Got better places to be.

That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.

I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.

Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?

Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.

I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.

We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

Which might be seen as a positive by some people (not me).

It encourages social interaction. Every answered question becomes a valid option to ask again just a short time later. And to answer again.

It also takes the burden to search from those who have questions. Just keep the chat flowing.

Maybe it’s a bit like asking people on the street for directions, instead of using your phone. Less efficient and accurate, but you might get a smile in the process.