I too once disguised to experience life as a Non-Famous Person, and it turned out to be exactly the same as my everyday life.

Don’t say, don’t ask.

Well, the more light you reflect out the better (I would expect that, for example, darker color curtains would be a problem) and ideally you want that whatever light does get converted into heat does so outside.

As it so happens, were I live the heat has been a problem in the Summer since well before AC was invented, so roll-up external shades are standard for all houses and apartments and that stuff definitely works if used as I described it.

Around here, Portugal, were every Summer the temperature exceeds 40 C for at least some days in August, we have outside rollup shades on every window, so one of the tricks is to keep the shades down and and the windows closed during the hottest and sunniest parts of the day, at the very least the afternoon.

Then at night you open the windows and let the cooler night air in (even better if you do it early morning, around sunrise, which is the coolest time of the day).

Note that this doesn’t work well with curtains or internal shades, because with those any conversion of light into heat when the light heats the shades/curtains (as they’re not mirrors and don’t reflect all light back) happens inside the house and thus that heat gets trapped indoors.

If everything was started from scratch tomorrow, the likelihood of present day California and Texas naturally ending up together in the same nation is pretty much zero, IMHO.

Those two are kept together by pretty much a country-sized version of a Sunken Cost Falacy.

One can’t even count on language or culture as a unifying element, otherwise the whole of Latin America would be 2 countries, Brasil & Everybody Else.

You were supposed to have an antenna.

I have this wonderful memory back when I lived in the The Netherlands and worked near Amsterdam of people outside in an open shopping area, sitting down on a table and eating patates (big chunky chips) and a starling on the ground looking at them and seemingly giving them a long speech.

I always imagine it was some “poor me” speech on how he had 8 starving young ones at home and would they thrown a patate his way.

For some reason in that place starlings were much comfortable around humans thanwhat I’ve seen elsewhere, and like sparrows would be going around on the ground looking for scraps.

Generally no, probably because many males when they end up in physicality make it some kind of dominance thing (playfully violence that’s just a little too much, “higher position” touches like hand on top of shoulder or physically leading other people and even the good old “measuring somebody one the firmeness of their handshake”). It’s not casual and friendly when there’s measuring and testing of others involved.

Outside close family, the only environment I’ve been in were things like hugs were normal was the Theatre world.

Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).

I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.

(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)

Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.

So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.

At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.

And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.

Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.

It’s not about debugging tools.

Different, high level software designs (i.e. architectural designs) which are normally imposed by the game engine, have different probabilities of the developers who are making the code for those to produce bugs, because of lots of factors including things like of how they approach error validation and handling in the engine itself and in which domains does the engine leave the most freedom to coders and which ones does it leave less - some things are pretty safe to leave in the hands of even bad developers, others are not.

The example of multi-threading in Unity should’ve been clear: put a game engine that doesn’t impose a single thread pattern in front of somebody with little or no experience in multi-threaded programming and you will have a huge rate of bugs (mainly critical race conditions) and as it so happens most developers out there have little or no experience in multi-threaded programming. Yet multi-threading can yield far more performance in modern CPU since they’re all multi-core. For that specific game engine a software architectural choice was made to go with a structure that is not as performance but significantly less likely to lead to a higher bug rate when used by the average coder, probably because Unity targets less experienced coders.

Good Senior Designers and Technical Architects don’t design the high level structure of the software for themselves as coders, they do it for the kind of coders that are likely to be coding for it.

Of course the developers themselves also have different capabilities and hence different baseline rates of creating bugs, hence why I said “both”.

It’s both.

The architectural decisions are at the engine level and that stuff has a massive influence on the likelihood of bugs in the code running in that engine.

For example, traditional Unity (not ECS) runs all game code (so the code provided by those coding the game) in a single thread, which avoids A TON of multi threading bugs (as that’s one of the hardest parts in programming to master) but is very bad for performance in multi-core CPUs. Game programmers can fire up separate threads using the standard libraries of the programming language itself and manage them, but everything in the development framework that’s part of the engine pushes them to use that single-threaded model, so only advanced devs bother and only for very specific things.

Also the choice of programming language forced by the engine itself has a huge impact in the likelihood of bugs, but since I don’t want to start a Holy War I’m not going to star pointing fingers at specific languages and criticizing them ;)

The EULA part is the fishy one, since EULAs are not valid in most of the World - sellers can’t just after the sale force a change of the implicity contract which is the sale itself (worse, refuse to provide access to the functionality of purchased software after the buyer has fullfilled their part of the contract) so EULAs legally mean nothing except (apparently) in a handful of US states.

The only “licensing conditions” that legally apply here are the ones agreed between seller and buyer before the sale - determining by payment having been given and accepted - not after the sale.

(Online services get away with TOS changes because it’s an ongowing service rather than a product sale, so the rules are different).

The fishy part is the “taking in account the EULA” since EULAs are not legally valid documents in most of the World.

Licenses explicitly accepted by the buyer before the purchase, sure, EULAs, no, since they’re treated as an attempt to, after the implied contract which is the sale, unilaterally change the contract.

The court order makes some sense because that’s basically to do with inheritance and who gets to inherit what, but the EULA “consideration” is complete total bollocks.

A rolled-up catnip joint…

Well, I would say that not caring about telling the truth at all (group #2) can be considered sistematically lying - they do know they’re lying, they just don’t care at all about something they say being true or it being false. Their intent is to convince others no matter how and if that requires deceit, outright lying is an absolutelly normal and commonly used tool in the toolbox they use for it.

It’s not “intent to deceit” in a sort of per-lie way as a normal person would have - i.e. a child denying they got a cookie from the cookie jar by blaming the dog - but a far broader “intent to deceit” that’s not limited to that one lie - i.e. constantly spinning stories and manging the impression and images one projects, using outright lies just as easilly as using half-truths or selective information: the whole structure is deceit. This is mainly how they differ from normal people, who are not casual users of lying when they intent to deceive hence use lies in a more purposeful way (as they have to first convince themselves to lie).

The only real difference between the likes of Trump and most mainstream politicians (such as Biden) on this is that the threshold for using lies whilst doing their story spinning and image management is a lot lower for Trump (who just straightforward lies a lot), but those using sleazy language, selective information and other forms of inducing others to reach false conclusions still have an intent to deceive even if they avoid easilly spotted lies.

I do agree that those in the third group are indeed not lying, which is why I separated them from the other 2 groups. They’re not trying to deceive (hence why they react so badly when accuse of doing so) even though they are deceiving, though the “lying” in their case is done first to themselves by chosing to refrain from examinining certain things they are told.

I think the easiest to understand here are religious people: they trully believe the unproven and unprovable, mainly because they chose to not check any of it for believability - the ones amongst them who present something as as being “information” rather than “hearsay”, even though they purposefully chose not to evaluate it are they ones lying, not because they knowingly are telling untruths, but because they’re lying about the “informational” quality of what they’re saying. (So, for exampl, somebody saying “The Bible says: X” are not lying, but the ones saying “It’s X” are, not on the “X”, but on the use of “is” rather than telling us they got that “truth” of their from a religious book).

I think there are actually 3 different cases:

• Knows what is true and chooses to say a falsehood. This is your normal person lying, which usually comes with subtle indications which can be spotted by the observant that they’re lying, such as them turning their eyes away when lying, because the person knowingly lying feels guilty.
• Couldn’t care less about what is true or false when talking to other people, so say whatever benefits them most to say. This is sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists such as Trump: for them talk is just a way to get others to do what’s best for them and truthfulness is irrelevant and unimportant, so they fell no guilt at all from lying since lying or telling the truth is all the same with possibly an intellectual consideration that there is no long term tisk of personal negative impact over the long run due to loss of trust when telling the truth so in that case they might refrain from telling a falsehood.
• People who have visions, see things that aren’t there or, more commonly, have a strong emotional binding to some tribe and have been told things, interpretations of things or conclusions by leaders of that tribe and refuse to even examine them mentally to determine their truthfulness. This is were you find the outright insane and the deeply religious, but also the members of political, national and even sports tribes. They genuinely believe that what they are saying is the truth, mostly because they didn’t checked those truths for consistency or for “does the source of this stand to gain if I believe it” (I.e. cui bono). This is were you find many of the medically insane, people who believe in populist politicians, deeply religious types and people who will believe in any old bollocks from the politicians from “their” side even when they’re not generally deemed populist politicians.

Anyway, my point being that the most of the lying on really important shit is coming from the 2nd group or the 3rd group, since normal people who truly know that what they would say would be a falsehood don’t like how it makes them feel so tend to refrain from doing it, whilst members of the 2nd group only consider truthfulness-vs-falsehoods in purely intellectual “what’s best for me to say” terms and those on the 3rd group actually believe what they’re saying (hence feel no guilt in saying it) because they’re unable or unwilling to examine, evaluate and judge for truthfulness statements coming from certain sources - they have no intent to deceive but they are none the less doing it because by purposefully refusing to evaluate and judge the truthfulness of certain things from certain sources they’ve first allowed themselves to be deceived, so when they parrot those things, in their mind they are telling the truth.

Well, it’s fucked up for them that the bipedes made up of delicious meat have guns…

Like parrots, LLM learn to immitate language (only, unlike parrots, it’s done in a learning mode, not from mere exposure, and it’s billions or even trillions of examples) without ever understanding its primary meaning, much less secondary more subtle meanings (such as how a person’s certainty and formal education shapes their choice of words used for a subject).

As we humans tend to see patterns in everything even when they’re not there (like spotting a train in the clouds or a christ in a burnt toast), when confronted with the parroted output from an LLM we tend to “spot” subtle patterns and from them conclude characteristics of the writter of those words as we would if the writter was human.

Subconsciously we’re using a cognitive process meant to derive conclusions about other humans from their words, and applying it to words from non-humans, and of course out of such process you only ever get human chracteristics out so this shortcut yields human characteristics for non-humans - in logical terms it’s as if we’re going “assuming this is from a human, here are the human characteristics of the writer of this words” only because it’s all subconscious we don’t spot we’re upfront presuming humanity to conclude the presence of human traits, i.e. circular logic.

This kind of natural human cognitive shortcut is commonly and purposefully taken advantage of by all good scammers, including politicians and propagandists, to lead people into reaching specific conclusions since we’re much more wedded to conclusion we (think we) reached ourselves than to those others told us about.

So are you saying that that following the Teachings Of The Prophet on how a woman should dress in a modest way and in all other thinks in life, alhamdulillah, is less important than speaking for a pig!!!???

Imagine that you go to an outdoor barbecue on a bright Summer day.

And some guy who is an extreme Muslim is going around telling some women that they’re not dressed in a modest enough way and that everybody should follow the Teachings of the Prophet and how life is a lot better when people follow the Teachings of the Prophet.

It’s not Islam that’s the problem, it’s certain kinds of people, their proselytising and, worse, their trying to force or even impose their own moral values on others.

Same with Veganism and some kinds of Vegans: because it’s a moral choice some of those who practice it have the very same behavioural disfunctions as religious nutters and because they’re the most visible representatives of it they just cause many to draw negative conclusions about the entire thing.