I would pay extra because I don't want the cognitive load of haggling on the cost. When I want/need A ride, it's because I'm either overloaded, away from home, or drunk. These are three times that I didn't want to bother with any more nonsense.
Having used it in Mexico, they usually have a suggested price that you can just pitch with, and usually people would accept that or add a tiny amount on it.
In a system where you are expected to haggle taking the opening price puts a pretty heavy tax on everything. It's more work to get to a vaguely similar equilibrium distributed slightly less evenly when you look at big markets for similar things.
But that's also just ignoring the fact that humans seem inherently drawn to the fantastic, whether in religion or something else. There isn't really any reason to believe that wouldn't have existed 40k years ago, correct?
That's what they mean by begging the question; you don't really get much useful information from trying to cite something as evidence of what you've already assumed.
This is the earliest evidence of such fantasy we have. It's not that this piece at this time was the earliest human fantasy, but there is a cutoff line somewhere between humans and our last common ancestor chimpanzees.
Datura is fucking dangerous. Deliriants are no joke in general. That one in particular is really dangerous because it grows absolutely anywhere and is very easy to identify.
Source; chemistry was my favorite class in high school and college because it helped me understand how to extract what I wanted from plants like jimsonweed and Mimosa trees.
That's actually a good point that I hadn't considered.
I still maintain that deliriants are for nobody though.
DMT is fine in moderation. But anything that is labeled as a deliriant will not give you any kind of joy or knowledge. It will just fuck you for a lot longer than you think.
In the Chingichngish religion, a Datura potion was administered either once or 3 times in a person's life (puberty and, in some cultures, also marriage and before death). Not that it was a particularly widely practiced religion.
The tribes are ofc intimately familiar with the dangers of Datura. Experts that had studied the plant their whole lives were in charge of this ritual. They knew what season, what time of day, and how to harvest Datura (indeed modern science show Datura alkaloids vary drastically by time of day, weather, and environmental conditions). They also paid attention to the age and condition of the plant and the type of soil. Plants growing in indirect sunlight are less potent and preferred for initiation rituals. People undergoing the ritual had to go through a rigorous physical and dietary regime in the days preceding.
They had a clear distinction between a Datura "trance" vs just straight up delirium and the experts would closely watch the person receiving the potion to know how they are doing. The initiate is never left alone and is closely supervised during the full experience (which is multiple days)
Anyways my point with all this is that, this is NOT the same experience you get from reading some Erowid posts. Even if you are taking all the precautions. A traditional "trance" that's closely monitored by an expert is a different experience entirely.
It's also extraordinarily easy and discreet to grow cubensis shrooms. The age of buying awesome RCs online are OVER, there's nothing left but horrible, horrible chemicals. Do not go there
Actually it’s entering a new era with GLP1s and peptides. Nothing will replace “our” era which ushered in bitcoin, dark net markets and hell true online community which met its end with the analogue act…
But it’s a new rebirth. Peptides are here and are unscheduled and do not fall under the analog act. Everything that was experienced in that early 10s era is happening all over again now :)
Are there peptites do get high? To my understanding that stuff is more or less the opposite of getting high, more self optimisation, more control about self aspectsy etc.
That's the thing about modern chatbots--they are nothing new technologically. They're just taking the same old neural networks and brute-forcing everything with ridiculous computing power and energy consumption. Autonomous agents just feed everything back into a loop that's even more wasteful.
EVE is on the list with Dwarf Fortress for me. I'm interested in it. I absolutely see the appeal of them, and wish I had played them instead of WoW back when I was 20.
As someone who really no life fit and played WoW, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE in my 20s, you didn’t miss much. My most momentous EVE achievement was betraying my online “friends” who had mostly stopped playing, blowing up all their expensive ships for the insurance payout, then like a true space pirate losing all my ill gotten gains playing Space Poker.
EVE (and other MMOs) had their moment and the ideas of MMOs with a persistent lived in world were very cool but the moment for them seems to have sadly passed beyond the horizon for whatever reason. If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have told you MMOs were the future of gaming.
It's worth saying that whatever they call it, GTA: Online is basically an MMO and it's one of the top three most popular game on Earth iirc. In fact I think only Tetris and Minecraft beat it.
Looking at what GTA6 is shaping up to be, and wondering how R* is evolving the online side, I think we might simply have seen MMO's turn into something people our age don't recognize.
I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?
MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.
I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.
There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?
Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.
Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.
Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.
As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.
Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.
For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.
My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.
Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.
Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).
It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.
When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.
It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.
There was no MMO like WoW before, that was a big appeal why I started after not doing homework for weeks while playing closed US beta and then later closed EU beta.
Only played casually and like a noob for a few years because I was like 12? and playing on the PC of my big brother.
They were a social network before social networks and always available IM and the gameplay provided a reason to be in the game (and therefore available to socialise with) even if you were the first/only one there.
I mean, they also had their own gameplay appeal, but I think the current player pool of WoW+FFXIV+ESO+GW is probably a more accurate reflection of how widespread the appeal of them as pure games is, while the crazy numbers of 00s WoW were about the social network aspect.
Eve online holdem? Amazing. Was a banker there for a bit while I was working as a poker dealer IRL at night. Won a fully fitted mom in a game, lost it in another:D
I had a friend who was really into EVE online and showed me about 20 years ago. It felt too much like waiting and spreadsheets for me.
I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.
Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whatever PRs and get 5 in the agent is still “winning” for the person instructing it. The maintainers though have to filter these out on the other side. A common case is a fix to something that was already fixed simply because the agent worked on old code assumptions.
It doesn't help with the additional work/chores, at least initially, but someone on HN had a really good idea IMO, just take the code, and close the PR.
I saw the argument that if OS maintainers "really care" about their projects, they would accept valid contributions regardless origin. Well, turn it around: if you really care so much about contributing, if you really just wanna HeLP, you don't need the credit. The warm fuzzy feeling that your contribution ended up being used should be enough.
> Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”.
I've heard this in a lot of places, don't have a way to verify this in action. Do you have any citation or just gut feel (still valid but less useful for me).
Anecdotally, as someone who's been starting to get more and more agent-only/driven PRs, a good amount of the time it's by an account with little to no activity until one day they suddenly start doing 50-100+ PRs a _day_ on entirely unrelated projects... you can kind of guess what they're doing.
As for motive, it probably varies, though some will loudly put that they're some agent manager or something with lots of contributions, so you can guess their motivations there.
In other cases, these are instrad brand-new accounts which is a related but I guess slightly different story... not gonna say these are spam bot accounts being juiced with fake activity but well...
These are all fair observations, I have not personally come across these yet but I am also not looking for them. I guess someone more involved in open source collaboration would have a better lens here.
Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram? Pangram is really accurate from what I’ve found…
>
Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram?
The problem is writing such an essay takes magnitudes more of an effort for people who are not native English (or whatever the language is in which discussions are done about the project) speakers.
Also, relatedly, essays written by non-native English speakers often get considered to be AI-written by common AI detection systems, even though no AI was involved when writing them; see for example
> I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
I’m as skeptical of the AI writing detection as anyone else, but I’ve been trying to beat Pangram v4 for the last week and it’s essentially impossible.
Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected.
> I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”
I don't think that's being mean at all, and it's valid.
Yes that's literally why I asked it. Simple questions, here, regularly elicit long form explanations. I was interested in this topic and have no experience. So I thought I'd try a broad overview type question to see if I could learn something today.
It's a well-known trope, that it's harder to read code than to write it, and review is more complicated than to read it, so I do not understand what you want to imply?
Maybe it is for people who have written code all their lives, but as someone who started with reading code and has read far more code than I’ve ever written, reading code is WAY easier for me.
If it's easier for you to convert written code into mental models than the other way around, you are either a incredible smart and skilled person and a good programmer and should be able to convert that into a job and money easily, or you can't really write code at all.
"A question is...". To my mind not the most important question, if one plays-out to a logical conclusion the scenario you're proposing.
> [...] if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?
No - and that's bordering-on (if not fully) rude disrespect of reviewers time and effort. One way to think of this is in terms of Brandolinis Law[0]. Pushing work back to submitters is going to have to happen. Low-effort "submissions" are first and foremost "low-effort" - that's going to have to be driven home.
Even before automation, most first time PRs were a negative time contribution to the project. The only value of them was that some contributors would become trusted project members.
Probably a time waster because of the intermediate patch contributor. It’s like a game of telephone at worst, at best the reviewer could just use their own LLM and get the same result.
Here’s my hot take: maybe code contributions are obsoleted by coding agents. No one will accept outside contributions because it’s faster to do it themselves.
Easy cases might be single use plastics outside of a medical environment and anything where there isn't a substitute with adequate properties (I'd ignore economics here and let the market solve)
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
reply