You mean Christopher “that’s not the sound a man makes when he is knifed in the back” Lee?

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 Religions and cultural items like that don’t generally get ‘superceded’ by new inventions (as happens with technology), instead they general adapt and change to the needs of the culture that uses them.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.

As many other people have said humans do not have same physical reactions to emotions. There’s some similarity for certain emotions (disgust seems to be the one that gets the most evidence) but there’s a lot of variety of how very basic emotions are expressed across the world. This study is a good example showing how Western subjects look to how the muscles and movements of the face show emotions, but East Asian subjects looked small movements of the eyes to identify emotions and their intensity.

Tbh, a stoned discovery that I still enjoy is chocolate chip cookies dipped in hummus.

But he didn’t say “this shower thought is the allegory of the cave” did he? He suggested a relationship between them by encouraging the op to familiarise themselves with the allegory of the cave. More of “if you liked this, you’ll love that” than “this is that”.

Its not that being smart is bad necessarily, but neither is it automatically good. I would never wish myself dumber, and maybe being smarter would be helpful… But most of my problems on life aren’t linked to a limited intelligence.

Obviously, it depends on your definition of intelligence (itself a complicated issue) but if the button would just give me better IQ score type intelligence I don’t think it’d help much. I’m plenty smart for my day to day life, job, relationships etc. The internal problems that prevent me achieving things are to do with focus and discipline / time management. And the main actual barriers are social or economic.

So sure, if the button made me so smart that I could somehow just see some novel solution that I could then market for money, so I could afford the life coach who would help me actually achieve the goals I want, then yeah smart me up! But being given a bunch of money would be a more direct solution. And a button that that improved my ability to actualise the plans I’m already smart enough to create would be muchore appealing!

Tldr: lemmy is full of people who are smart enough that not being smarter isn’t the main barrier I’m their life.

Does it do emoji predictions? I’ve got a few relationships that use a lot of emoji in chats, and the ability tomjusy type ‘salute’, ‘sad’, ‘kiss’ etc and get the emoji without scrolling through a library is what’s keeping me on Swiftkey.

That’s interesting. How do they say it out loud? If 6am / 6:00 / 0600 is said “oh six hundred”, is 0000 “oh oh hundred”? “oh zero hundred”? “zero thousand”? “quadruple oh”?

No idea why you’re getting downvoted. Most of the time I’ve rented an Airbnb is because I’m looking for a homelike environment, kitchen, lounge, etc. Depending on what country I’m in sometimes it’s cheaper to stay in a hotel, sometimes it’s cheaper to stay in an airbnb. But they’re very different experiences, so it depends what you’re looking for.

We’d get non religious holidays developing / being promoted to sell a bunch of shit. Some people classify halloween as a “religious holiday” because of its roots as All Saints Day eve, but it’s pretty clearly a nonreligious “dress-up / horror” holiday nowadays.

If there was no Christmas there would be some generic winter cosiness holiday (as xmas/ December actually is for most Western countries). I live in France and there’s loads of “Christmas” junk but it’s 99% non religious. Even compared to the UK, where some people complain about “Christmas loosing its roots”, it’s noticeable to me how few of the decorations or cards have any religious imagery (even pretty neutral things like stars or angels). There loads of snow and winter animals, no wise men/shepherds, let alone ‘baby jesus’. France is officially opposed to religious holidays because they’re a “secular state” but they keep a winter and spring public holdiays that are at the same time as Christmas and around Easter. But other public days off are just other non religious events (national holidays like Bastille day, workers rights on may day, etc.)

And in seasons like summer that didn’t have big religious holidays (or not popular ones anyway), there’s loads of secular sources of themes / merchandising. The Olympics and World Cup (or whatever sports your country is into) always end up filling the supermarkets with loads of cheap junk and create a shared topic to “being people together”.

Another French holiday is the midsummer “fête de musique” which was created by the government decades ago to replace the dangerous (notionally Christian but clearly pagan) “fête de Saint Jean” where people built big bonfires and young men tried to jump over them (leading to lots of injuries!). Now all cities and towns and even small villages will organise some concerts or live music evenings.

Tldr : if companies weren’t promoting religious holidays, they’d just find other holidays to sell stuff.

Hamas are awful, and murdering the innocent is always vile. The problem is that both sides have an endless “but they started it!” going on. Hamas terrorists kidnapping and murdering innocent people: awful. Isreali military bombing innocent people :awful. Both sides claim to be defending themselves. Both sides are making things worse for themselves and others.

But Isreali will win by slowly murdering the Palestinians. Hamas will not win by occasionally murdering Israelis. Because the combined forces of almost all Western governments are onside with the Isreali government.

So, illegal terrorist acts are rightly called out, and funding to Palestine stopped until it can be proven the money won’t go to Hamas. But, even when the UN or indvidual countries call out Isreal for war crimes or illegal actions, they don’t stop funding their military. Per capita, Isreal spends more on its military than the USA (Israel (~$2770), United States (~$2405) with the USA providing 20% of Isreal military spending. So it’s an extremely lopsided bothsidesbad situation.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/

I work with a lot of nonnative English speakers, and someone sent out an invite to a meeting on Thueisday and my brain melted.

I think you’re right that (at least for good quality voice acting) we’ll need an input source, but then it can be adapted to sound like the desired voice. Which will be great for keeping characters sounding the same, or having one person ‘voicing’ a whole team of characters.

But I think good voice acting is hard, and a lot of stuff is very subtle, so I don’t think it’ll be as easy as “the sound designer” records all the voices, unless they are also a good actor. If i read out a Shakespeare monologue and then use AI to make it sound like Patrick Stewart or Christian Bale, that won’t make it sound very good. Because I won’t emote and pace the text in the way that they would.

But for simpler stuff (narrating a nonfiction book) or stuff where the quality doesn’t matter that much (lots of cheaper voice acting on shows and games doesn’t seem like it would be hard to replace with an AI) the tech will be amazing.

But we’re so tuned into human communication and voice, that I think it a lot of it will be passable but underwhelmingly mediocre for a long time. Even Carrie Fishers lines in the last Star Wars movie sounded flat and fake, even though they were actually delivered by her, because they were used out of context, so the timing and emphasis and pace all sounded off.

That’s not quite right. is the “big island” and the political grouping of England, Wales and Scotland (plus islands). “little Britain” has been used historically to name the island that Ireland/Norther Ireland is on, but that would be pretty controversial now…

The United Kingdom is the three countries of Great Britain, combined with Northern Ireland. And it’s the “official” country / nation, has a seat of the UN security council etc. But NI, Wales and Scotland are all countries, and in many peoples they’re nations too (depending on how you define such things).

Back in 2019, after I experienced a traumatic hallucination (where I had this vivid, nightmare-like vision that Disney brought JJ Abrams back to make 9th star wars movie) I reread the Zahn trilogy.

Sure, as an adult it was maybe less awesome than the first time I read it, but I really, really enjoyed it. It was such a palate cleansing experience, it really helped me get over that nightmare. A story that continued the plot, characters and setting of the original trilogy in interesting ways that made sense to the world and people already established, had a plausible scope and threat level that was menacing but didn’t undo the achievements of Luke & the Rebellion, and opened doors to a wider galaxy. I hope if Disney ever get round to finishing the sequel trilogy they take some cues from Zahn’s approach.

Really nice to read comments like this. I feel the TLJ debate has a tendency to “deal in absolutes”. Personally i enjoyed it more than TFA, and defintely liked where I felt it was setting up the rest of the series… But it had a bunch of flaws, and some of the hate was understandable, even if unnecesssrily vitriolic. And despite some of the stupidness, I’m still content with it as the final film in the Star Wars octology. An optimistic note of hope in the face of adversity, we don’t really need to see how it all pans out…