If you just want to know, without further investigation, that’s going to be very hard. People say a lot of things, and often aren’t clear themselves if it’s something they actually know, or just something they’ve heard. All that’s happened is that something interesting / helpful has popped into their mind and they’ve shared it.

If you are willing to discuss it, but don’t want to be rude by asking “do you actually know anthing about this?” you can just ask follow up questions, asking for more info / details. That way people who really know can answer, and people who don’t will probably just not answer or say that they just read it somewhere (often they’re not trying to deceive, just sharing something interesting they heard about).

But as others have said, just be sceptical of stuff you read, especially on the Internet. Lots of people have first had experience of something and still have unhelpful or strange takes on things. People massively over estimate how representative their experiences are, and if you get two experts in a room they’ll pretty soon be disagreeing about something they both know throughly.

I’ve never met a bi person who insisted that they’re attraction to the genders were equal. Many had preferences (mostly into women, but defintely go with certain guys) and many had phases (more into men today, but was previously crushing hard on that girl). It’s one of the commonly talked about sources of bianxiety, that you can go through a period where you start thinking “am I really bi? Maybe I’m just straight / gay” and then you see someone and remember “no, I’m totally bi”. Bi erasure is such a thing it even effects bi folks! (source am bi, have lots of bi friends)

Totally. I was just being descriptive not prescriptive. I wasn’t aware of the sub, and thought this was a fun lemmy thing, particularly suited to its smaller user base. And I’ve always associated asklemmy / askreddit with asking people’s opinions, wanting a broad range of answers.

Looking at the guidelines, there doesn’t seem to be any guidance about what kinds of questions beyond “ask away”. The rules are mostly about no trolling, NSFW, etc. So, my comment was giving the perspective of someone who didn’t associate the community with a reddit thing, and the message it’s giving off is “ask any question” and that seemed cool to me. But I have no problem at all with it being more specific than that, having explicit guidelines or just a culture of up/down certain types of questions. Community guidelines and specialisation are good! But with lemmy smaller user base more broad communities can also be good!

I think most people don’t like to see obviously leading/rhetorical questions, but I’m (personally) happy with seeing more abstract, whimsical, or interesting questions than just "stuff you feel like you should know but don’t ". Looking at the top posts in the community, there are some “what is wage theft/a sovereign citizens/etc” which seem to be the classic “everyone else seems to know something I don’t” situation. Then there’s a bunch of fediverse, corporation and tech industry opinion questions, which definitely do seem more like an asklemmy thing. But “can you live on pickles?” or “would nuclear weapons be useful in a space battle” are the kinda questions I think are fun and I generally enjoy reading the responses and learn something, but they’re not “stuffy you should be expected to know” (well, maybe the pickles answer is pretty obvious, but the reasoning isn’t necessarily…)

Ah, I wasn’t familiar with the subreddit, so I was just taking it as a free for all, so no question is out of place. Especially as lemmy is smaller, and lacks enough traffic in niche communities, it makes sense to have a bigger community for just answering whatever comes to mind.

But obviously there’s issues with that, if the community was swamped it would make sense to have a stricter guideline.

Yeah, growing up before digital photography was common, loads of people hated how they looked in photographs. When you only saw a couple of photos of yourself in a year, it was really easy to be horrified and ask “is that really what I look like”. Now you can take ten selfies in a row and you know that how you look varies massively depending on the angle or lighting. And anyone who has to regularly work with their own recorded voice generally gets over the cringe pretty quickly.

That’s exactly it. I think one of the reason many people who struggle with small talk is because they take these conversations at face value. It doesn’t matter if you don’t care about how their family is doing, you’re not asking because you want the information. You’re asking because the question itself means “I respect you as a peer and am showing interest in you”.

And it’s also why the answers don’t generally matter. They don’t care what you’re really doing for your holidays, just give a simple but positive response “just looking forward to getting some rest!”, “going to see my family”. If you show you’re interested in them, and you respond to their questions that’s enough for most people. Even if those questions and answers are completely vacuous.

That’s really helpful! Exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I wasn’t aware of the role of temperature and embedding, thet explain a lot.

That’s my take as well, I would just like to know more about the weighting/bias.

Just to make clear because it seems to come up a lot in some responses - I absolutely don’t think (and never have) that chatgpt is intelligent, ‘understands’ what I’m saying to it or what it’s saying to me (let alone is accurate!). Older chat bots were very prone to getting in weird loops, or sudden context/topic switches. Chatgpt doesn’t do this very often, and I was wondering what the mechanism for keeping it’s answers plausibly connected to the topic under discussion and avoiding grammatical cul-de-sacs.

I know it’s just a model, I want to understand the difference between it’s predictions and the predictions on my Android keyboard. Is it simply considering the entire previous text as it makes its predictions vs just the last few words? Why doesn’t it occasionally respond with a hundred thousand word response? Many of the texts it’s trained on are longer than it’s usual responses. There seems to be some limits and guidance given either through its training data or its response training that guide it beyond “based on the texts I have seen, what is the most likely word.” and I was curious if there was a summary what the blend of corpus based prediction and respinse feedback, etc. has been used.

Yeah, I’d say SO generally are like great friends (with benefits), but often, over time you end up doing so much stuff with them that they eclipse any other individual friend. And eventually (especially if you end up living together) they become such a part of your day to day life they can begin to feel like an extension of yourself (or rather, that you’re both part of one being) and it’s hard to live with out them. I remember laughing at my dad for wanting to phone my mum everyday when he was away on business. I’d be like “what do you even have to talk about? You see each other all the time” But now, if I had a day where I didn’t at least message with my partner I’d feel so isolated.

Ereaders like kobo / kindle have gentle backlight, just make sure you get one with adjustable warm /cool white backlight, so you can make it warm and not blue. I also use a little clip on booklight with adjustable brightness and color. If it’s dim and red/orange you’re not disturbing anyone but it illuminates the page perfectly.

Yeah, I was confused about this… A little sugar won’t ruin your French toast, and you can always salt it afterwards… I genuinely forget that people eat it sweet, I’m a cheddar and bacon boy myself.

As others have observed, a glottal stop on its own is completely silent. But the idea of responding to distinct weird sounds is awesome! I’d like to be able to whistle commands like Alexa is well trained sheepdog!

That’s a really good description. I feel like people focus on the highs and the lows of addiction. But one of the main reason it is hard to give up an addiction is it’s such a comfort. The ecstatic highs are fun, but the real appeal is having something so simple that makes you feel good.

Like everyone else’s comments, if it’s actually noisy you should speak to a doctor. But I do deep breathing sometimes when I’m angry/anxious to help me relax, and now my partner is conditioned to spot the very quiet sound of me doing it. I’ve had a chest cold for the last few weeks and he kept asking if I was okay because I was taking deep breaths.

My point is, even if their breathing is quiet, the sound of someone taking slow breaths can be noticeable. Only tip I can think of is to practice breathing smoothly and regularly. When I’m actively trying to take a slow, long breath I notice it can be quite uneven. I breathe in, that breath tails off and I breathe in some more. That leads to an uneven sound that is more noticeable. If I really focus I can breath steadily and smoothly and it’s much less noticeable.

How do you think it would hold up for someone who didn’t play back in the day?

I got my Trekkie mom the Star Trek 25th Anniversary game for christmas, but I defitnely ended up playing it more myself!

Any particular thing will change, and if you look more specifically at the factors and data around it, you can make a more accurate guess about that change. But that’s pretty difficult for big, unpredictable things that we don’t have a lot of examples of (like “big world religions”).

Current data is that Christianity has been on massive growth spurt since the 1800s. There were 2.4 billion in 2020 and that is estimated to go up to 3.3 billion by 2050. So if you’re looking at growth rates, forecasts etc, Christianity is only going to get bigger.

Obviously, a lot of that growth is due to general population growth (although growth rate of Christianity was higher than the global growth rate) And if you make some pretty big assumptions about world development, ‘progress’ and waning religious belief you could believe that Christianity will boom and then shrink. But there’s not a lot of evidence for that currently. And that’s why I brought up that general guideline - we don’t have any reason to believe that Christianity is going to disappear anytime soon, and we don’t have any evidence that it’ll be here in 10,000 years. So, if I was an immortal onlooker, and I had to make a bet, I’d guess it’d be around for another few thousand years.

Maybe it would help if you explained more about why you think it’s surprising these religions are still around after thousands of years? Religions and cultural items like that don’t generally get ‘superceded’ by new inventions (as happens with technology), instead they general adapt and change to the needs of the culture that uses them. Christianity is the 2000s is massively different from even 500 years ago, let alone 1500 years ago. And in the 3000s it’s more likely that Christianity will be around, but significantly changed, than that it has faded away.

I can’t remember the theories name, but I came across a suggestion from a historian (or sociologist? Or something…) that if you have to estimate how long a cultural feature will last, your best guess is “roughly as long as its existed for”.

So the pyramids at Giza are over 4000 years old. If we lack any specific knowledge of reasons ( predicting the stone erosion, or knowing that bombing is likely in the area soon) then all we can know is that they have lasted a long time, so probably could last a good bit longer. And if we guess random ages, they will average out to a middling number (just like if you roll a lot of d6s you’ll average out 3.5). The could be destroyed next year, but that’s an extreme outlier, and they could last 40,000 years but that’s also an extreme. So something around the 2000 - 6000 mark would probably be a good bet.

Similarly, Facebook has been around for 20 years. If the company collapsed next year, that’d be possible but unlikely. They could last into the next century, but again, most companies don’t. So guessing in the 10-30 years would be safe.

Obviously, it’s just a huge “rule of thumb” but I found it interesting. So instead of being surprised that Christianity is still here, twenty years past its second millenium, it’s more realistic to assume that you’re seeing it somewhere near its midpoint, rather than at an extreme. So we’re likely to have Christians for another few thousand years!

Tl:Dr if something has lasted a thousand years, it’s likely to last a good time longer.

My parents grew up in working class 1950s Britain. My dad’s parents slept in the kitchen (with a curtain round the bed for privacy), which was also the room that most “living” was done. The three kids shared a single small room, with both teenage boys sharing a double bed, their older sister got her own single bed, and she stayed there until she married and moved out in her early twenties. I remember seeing that room and even as a child it seemed cramped, no space really for anything else once the two beds were in it.

While the whole the family was living, eating and sleeping in two small room, an immaculate “front room” / parlour was kept solely for the two or three days a year where they had “company” (a family event like a wedding or funeral, or the priest visiting or something). The front room was bigger than both the others. It’s hard to comprehend the priorities that led to this sort of thing, but it was apparently extremely common in that time and place.