Remember to throw in “=” at the start just to toy with the poor sap who has to manipulate the results in excel

C is probably closest to reality with light weight ceramics and so on. Though still very very far away from actual reality.

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I’m afraid you are not going to find anything in the brain except “dead molecules”. There isn’t anything in there except the laws of physics and chemistry acting out like clockwork.

But in terms of the scale of how “decisions” work. Then, yes, far simpler decisions (perhaps better to say “reactions”) happen with relatively few neurons. The complete brains of small insects have been mapped by researchers, maybe several million neurons. They can detect movement reactions happening in response to stimuli.

This though is a very different thing to what people mean when referring to their conscious decision to do something.

That’s how neurons work, yes. But you can’t reduce a “decision” down to a single neuron. It depends what you mean by decision really. Do you mean “the smallest thing that can affect something else”, in which case, yes, neurons are the smallest unit (it seems) of brain function. But not consciously so.

Or do you mean the collective input that goes into the brain generating an output? In which case, the brain appears to function more with swarms of neurons firing together. You won’t find any examples of a single neuron affecting, say, the choice of going to the cinema. We don’t know the brain in enough detail for that, nor does it seem possible for it to work that way (neurons die and are replaced but our behaviour and decisions seems far more stable).

Or do you mean the conscious experience of making a decision (free choice)? Which is a different thing again. The mechanics of the brain operating input and output and the conscious experience of it are not the same thing. They may be generated by distinct but overlapping parts of the brain. Often in step but not always. Conscious choice can’t have elements of it reduced to single neurons, brain experiments seem to frustrated any attempt to turn up evidence for that.

Whatever it is we colloquially mean by making a conscious decision about something doesn’t exist on the neuron level. It exists on the millions of neurons acting simultaneously level.

A “decision” is highly complex emergent behaviour. Looking for it in a single neuron is like asking if there’s a single air molecule where a gale started. We almost certainly will never identify single neurons corresponding to single mental ideas. A “go to the cinema” neuron versus “go to the park” likely don’t exist. What is more likely is that large ‘flows’ of neutral activity correspond to these things or to what we call ‘decisions’. However when we think of more and more specific mechanical things (like lifting a finger) then it’s more likely this corresponds to very small areas of neurons that controlled their activation and it makes a bit more sense to talk about that being a switch to ‘decide’ to move a finger. But the decision itself is actually the vast cloud of neutral activity leading into it not a single thing.

Just remember: imposter syndrome is real. Everything you learn exposes you to ten things you don’t yet know. Successful devs are comfortable with this reality - the job is one of constant learning. Best of luck!

Looking forward to more :)

There are council houses in SW London approaching 900k and more. Surely someone managing to buy a property in that range shouldn’t be getting a discount of 136k?

“Best Guitar Pics”

merely an example. Be sure to let BestOfLemmy etc know…

“dull and completely unimaginative”

and your solution is to tack “Porn” on the end? oh dear

Buttery popcorn

Why does everything have to be sexualised and sensationalised? That’s encouraged on Reddit, and any other profit driven social media, because they’re bending over backwards to bleed you dry of engagement. It’s thoroughly unpleasant.

Lemmy has a chance to be something different. BestGuitarPics is what you’re actually curating. Or AwesomeGuitarPics if you want a little something extra. Jamming “Porn” on to everything just to try and stir a sense of interest is just sad.

The “implied perverse thrill” seems a bit of projection on your part

You can read the critical reception of the film yourself here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_(film)#Critical_response

A sample of adjectives: “nasty”, “nihilistic”, “mean”, “insinuatingly creepy”, “derivative”, “loathsome”, and, yes, “perverse”

“visually appealing/stimulating images that have no context and at best provide a simulacrum of interest in the object or activity”

what a silly self serving definition. “porn” has a particular meaning which you can look up in the OED, Cambridge, Websters etc. Definition 3 is how it was used - with negtive connotation - for “torture porn” and (the example in MW) “the pornography of violence”.

The extension of that to mudane everyday things (food, cars, guitars) and especially when the material shared typically falls well short of “sensational” is just a lazy habit that reddit picked up (and other online spaces too) that I, and clearly others in this thread, think Lemmy wouldbe better without. etto…

that was the beginning of the change, when it was still meant pegoratively and implied the watcher was getting some sort of perverse thrill out of it. later things like ‘earth porn’, ‘food porn’, ‘guitar porn’ are just stupid and rely on the really unpleasant trend of using “porn” to mean anything mildly interesting

“guitar porn”

can we not?

I have worked for financial institutions that have variations of the last one. If I saw it I wouldn’t even blink. Semi realistic reasons might be:

Status attribute - because the project is using the base library of [project whatever] which was the brain child of eNtErPrIsE aRcHiTeCt whose hands on skills are useless and the off-shore dev team who assigned [random newbie] because that’s who was available at the time. They used a status attribute because they didn’t know how to get the status of the http response. No-one with budget control is interested in hearing about technical debt at the moment. Everyone has to use it now else the poorly written test classes fail.

Message code: because “we need codes that won’t ever change even if the message does”. Bonus points if this is, in fact, never used as intended and changes more frequently than…

Message: “because we still need to put something human readable in the log”. Bonus points x2 if this is localised to the location of the server rather than the locale of the request. Bonus x3 if this is what subsequent business logic is built on leading to obscure errors when the service is moved from AWS East Virginia to AWS London (requests to London returning “colour” instead of “color” break [pick any service you never thought would get broken by this]).

I have seen it all etc

Because they won?

What would be the point of this from a non fucked up standpoint?

I think the bad and good reasons can be true at the same time. Plenty of others list the bad reasons. For the good reasons:

• it is unlikely Hamas could evacuate its weaponry, rocket stockpiles and other supplies in 24 hours undetected
• so some will be flushed out at which point they can be engaged
• others will remain, so having the civilian population leave - even if not completely - it’s the best way to reduce collateral deaths and give Hamas as little time to prepare as possible
• hostages area likely being held in the north, hence the time pressure to separate as many civilians as possible and isolate Hamas
• the crisis would be less of a crisis of the Arab nations actually stepped up to help but none of them want anything to do with Gaza Palestinians…
• finally (up to you if this is a good or bad reason) Israel may well intend to bulldoze every building in North Gaza to deny its use to Hamas and it’s obviously safer for the population to not be there when it happens. This may increase the chances of the UN / Egypt creating a viable refugee camp inside the Egyptian border which may well be Israel’s end game

They have also bombed the caravan on primary roadway people are taking out of the city, according to several news sources

Fwiw the video that Hamas themselves released shows an explosion that is very much not a missile or artillery. It has a large orange flameball, doesn’t leave a crater, leaves windows on the vans intact.

This was most likely a propane IED of which Hamas are known to use. Or a tragic accident (trucks propane tank exploding).

The Catholic church has nearly entirely considered abortion a sin since the first century (yes there are exceptions, but a minority). You are thinking of the adoption of “life begins at conception”, which was ruled in 1869. Prior to that the church considered early abortion an immoral sin on par with contraception. What changed in 1869 was the category from sin of contraception to sin of murder. But it was still “sin” beforehand.