Not OP, but coming from the same place: less annoying (I hope!) atheist.

“Do cheap tickets encourage public transport use?”

What kind of question is that? Obviously they do??

Subnautica

Related: Alt + ., to cycle through arguments used in previous commands

Could you uh… elaborate a little?

I’ll bet Ada Lovelace had some somewhere.

“Boy, I sure wish some megacorporation would dump a massive codebase on me to maintain without any financial assistance!”

• No one, ever

San Francisco had an emperor.

(He even “decreed” the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)

Sigma Star Saga for the GBA. Really creative mashup of an RPG and a side-scrolling shooter, with a cool weapon-configuration system thrown in. Definitely suffered a bit from platform limitations, but there’s absolutely more that could have been done with the core concept.

Shockingly good writing, too.

Good lord yes. Overwatch is just a corporatized TF2 ripoff, but Battleborn was a creative, unique game with a soul.

Anyone who hasn’t seen it should watch the game’s intro cinematic, which gives a great sense of just how much character the game had.

FYI, “anthropomorphizing” doesn’t strictly mean “viewing as human”. I never meant to imply that people see a spoon as a human being.

Anthropomorphization is the act of associating human qualities with non-human entities.

My point is that humans are remarkably good at doing this, even as far as, e.g., ascribing “unhappiness” to a spoon simply for being unused.

This kind of behavior is why we must be extremely wary of the Turing test and other measures of machine “intelligence” - humans may see intelligence even where none exists simply because it’s our nature.

Yep, this is the major flaw that’s becoming clear about the Turing test, and why people are so hyped over LLMs: computers don’t have to be good at imitating people, because people are so good at anthropomorphizing computers (along with everything else).

Hey, in my defense, the explanation there was only added in 2022, and I’d already given up looking by then!

Thank you! You would not believe how long I’ve been trying to figure out where the term came from.

The best explanation I’d heard prior to now was that the practice of composing functions was akin to mixing ingredients for curry, (the food) but I’d never really bought that line of reasoning.

Pretty sure the lyric is “ride the pony”, my dude.

There’s that old chestnut: “you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”

Alien might be the scariest movie of all time, IMO, so this makes perfect sense to me.

A high-quality dumb TV.

Get your ads (and security vulnerabilities) out of my damn house.

In the Michael Bay Transformers movies, the Autobots are actually manipulating humanity into helping them rebuild a military empire, while the Decepticons are actually trying to destroy a much greater threat.

Well, that one was already in all caps