oh, neat!

i didn’t know that!

*Catholiban ;)

hic sunt dracones; here be dragons

leones means lions ;)

or, you know, host it somewhere with existing fucking infrastructure???

it’s not like brazil doesn’t have any conference centres anywhere else…

the ancient greeks are so fucking jealous right now…

to save some folks a click:

the phenomenon is called the “halo effect”, and the opposite is also the case and called the “horns effect” (ugly people/things getting more negative judgement based on appearance).

there’s a LOT of research into these effects (for obvious reasons)…

wow, no.

none of what you said is actually true.

• “gridlock” happens in non-grid layouts too, the english name is just taken from american road patterns.
• “show me…” no. YOU made a claim (that local information suffices, which is a VERY bold claim), so it’s on you to prove that local information suffices.
• roads are absolutely NOT “like wires”; they are like pipes. which is why civil engineers commonly use fluid dynamics to simulate traffic.
• the rest of what you said is irrelevant to everything else.

seriously, if you make a claim contradicting both the very premise of the post, and common knowledge on the topic, then at least provide a source for that claim, lr explain WHY you think your claim is true.

“all the information is there” is not enough information to verify the claim; it’s a wild guess without evidence to back it up.

if shit where THAT simple, we’d have it figured out 50 years ago… it’s almost like this isn’t the simple problem you desperately want it to be…

this completely ignores larger traffic patterns like arterial roads.

with your idea you are guaranteed to get massive gridlock all along the major roads.

and biochemical assembly of proteins has just about nothing to do with either shop-floor-planning or traffic regulation.

what you are suggesting IS better than simple timers!

but it is NOT better than central coordination.

you are seriously underestimating the complexity of the problem, and your “all you need to do…” bs only shows how little you understand of the underlying issues.

do you really think nobody else has thought of what you’re proposing?

of course people have thought of this approach. it doesn’t work.

how would that even work, if there’s no indication that driving too fast was the reason for the red light?

do these actually include some sort of screen that tells the driver they were too fast and that’s why the light turned red?

I’d imagine that this “feature” would only result in more frustration, and thus more speeding, instead of less.

I’m extremely sceptical about local data being enough to properly guide traffic…

the problem is that intersections are connected.

one intersection influences others down the line, wether that is by keeping back too much traffic, thereby unnecessarily restricting flow, or by letting too much traffic flow, thus creating blockages.

you need a big picture approach, and you need historical data to estimate flow on any given day.

neither can be done with local data.

could you (slightly) improve traffic by using local traffic flow to determine signals? probably, sure.

but in large systems, on metropolitan scales, that will inevitably lead to unforseen consequences that will probably probe impossible to solve with local solutions or will need to be handles by hard coded rules (think something like “on friday this light needs to be green for 30 sec and red for 15 sec, from 8-17h, except on holidays”) which just introduces insane amounts of maintenance…

source: i used to do analysis on factory shop-floor-planning, which involves simulation of mathematically identical problems.

things like assembly of parts that are dependant on other parts, all of which have different assembly speeds and locations, thus travel times, throughout the process. it gets incredibly complex, incredibly quickly, but it’s a lot of fun to solve, despite being math heavy! one exercise we did at uni, was re-creating the master’s thesis of my professor, which was about finding the optimal locations for snow plow depots containing road salt for an entire province, so, yeah, traffic analysis is largely the same thing math-wise, with a bit of added complexity due to human behavior.

i can say, with certainty, that the data of just the local situation at any given node is not sufficient to optimize the entire system.

you are right about real-time data being important to account for things like construction. that is actually a problem, but has little to do with the local data approach you suggested and can’t be solved by that local data approach either… it’s actually (probably) easier to solve with the big data approach!

as a glorified search engine, after pretty much all search indexes were neutered on purpose…but even then it’s…mostly passable, but always untrustworthy.

yes, true, but not exactly why i used the phrasing “wrong AND incomplete”:

i wrote it that way, because without clarifying that “destruction” means many different things apart form the common interpretation of “to kill”, it’s difficult for a casual reader to know what the convention actually says.

if anyone wants to shorten the definition to fit into a dictionary, they should be more responsible in their phrasing, so that this exact problem is less likely to occur.

so i do fault merriam webster here for providing an incomplete, oversimplified definition.

maybe read the actual convention on genocide instead of relying on a dictionary then?

because the case of abducted children stated above is explicitly stated in the convention…the dictionary definition you found is simply wrong and incomplete.

how surprising! /s

but seriously, it’s almost never one (1) thing that goes wrong when some idiotic mandate gets handed down from management.

a manager that mandates use of copilot (or any tool unfit for any given job), that’s a manager that’s going to mandate a bunch of other nonsensical shit that gets in the way of work. every time.

Astrology and homeopathy doesn’t even begin to fucking compare with nazism

sooooo…ummmm…here’s the craziest thing; hold on, you’re not gonna believe this:

the nazis were SUPER into astrology, homeopathy, and similar shit!

nazi occultism is essential to nazi ideology, so not only are these concepts intimately intertwined, they form one of the pillars on which nazi iedology is built: “alternate science”

“alterantive science”, “aryan science”, or whatever else it’s called (it doesn’t actually matter, all of it is the exact same shit: NOT science), is an important part of fascist power structures in that it serves as a vehicle to legitimize the crazy racist and supremacist shit they want to believe.

phrenology, homeopathy, eugenics, and all the rest of the dogmatic bullshit played a major role in the 3rd reich by delegitimize the “jewish science”.

sound familiar? it should!

the modern equivalent is “woke science”, which, you know, is just regular science…

so, no, nazi ideology doesn’t “compare” to astrology and homeopathy: those are essential parts of nazism and the associated anti-intellectualism!

(ExtraHistory has a recent video series on the topic of nazi occultism; it’s on youtube and nebula, if you’re interested to learn more!)

Also, why do you call out astrology but not christianity?

not sure how it would play out nowadays, especially in the U.S., but in the 3rd reich the church was a significant source of resistance against nazi rule.

the reasons for that include the church having a vested interest in keeping some control over the population and it’s own propaganda, but the vast majority of resistance came from individual clergy members refusing to bow to the cruelty of the nazis, and defending their communities.

these priests resisted both directly and indirectly, rallied rebels, organized smuggling operations, provided meeting places, sheltered refugees, sabotaged, and generally made the jobs of the nazi oppressors that much harder.

many, MANY clergy members were murdered by the nazis for their resistance, and quite a few officially received martyrdom status, and a few are regarded as national heroes for their efforts!

so i’m an atheist, vehemently against the church and think that:

• it’s an institution of power and control over the poorly educated to keep them nice and distracted from the class struggle
• think the tax exempt status of churches, with little to no oversight on how that tax-free income is spent, is bullshit
• the priesthood serves as a shield for masses of sexual predators
• the indoctrination of young and vulnerable minds that haven’t had a chance to develop countermeasures to such influence is morally abhorrent
• the church has, and in some cases continues to, committed heinous crimes against humanity

…but you chose the one period in history that actually makes it kinda clear what benefits the church does provide.

like i said, i’m not a fan, and if it wasn’t the church i’m fairly confident others would have stepped up and taken on similar roles of resistance, as many indeed did at the time, and yet this is one of the few instances in which the members of the clergy were quite clearly on the right side of history for once…possibly the only time.

sooooo…yeah…unlucky example in this (very specific) context…

there’s a lot fascinating history around these two topics, highly recommend checking it out! ;)

i guess “asshole” fits

i know you probably weren’t looking for a swearword, but…well…if it fits ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and let’s be real…the people you’re referring to tend to be ignorant by choice, offensive, and generally unpleasant…

for its time? sure.

nowadays? not really…

the last major release was 11 years ago.

EA let the franchise rot for more than a decade, what does the release of the first have to do with anything??

yeah, i think it’s cracked the 1000$ mark for all content. barely any discounts, and lots of content that REALLY should be in the base game is gated behind dlc.

and i mean content that was available in previous games, that traditionally would have been in the new base game…

pirating is basically the only realistic way to play all of the content now.

and on top of that the game does have some pretty egregious performance and UX issues…

remind me: when was the last sims game released?