To manage the deficit, the Russian government has initiated maritime gasoline imports from India

Why is India okay with fuelling Putin’s war? Should we be okay with that? Should we sanction India? It just seems like we ought to get India to be on the better side of history here, but not sure how to achieve that. It is a real shame that they don’t seem to care.

“This 👆 💯 🤯”

Fair - but humans are definitely not the only animals that do.

Evolution did not code us to avoid wood chips. There’s no “wood chip aversion” gene. It coded us to seek out potato chips.

Again, I just think this is completely wrong. Evolution definitely does not only code us to go towards things we want, it also codes us to avoid harmful things. Evolution optimizes on all fronts at once.

We risk mischaracterizing the nature of evolutionary forces by assigning to it a level of forethought it does not have.

Evolution is a concept so obviously it doesn’t have forethought, but it doesn’t need that forethought to still evolve in a given direction. Natural selection drives evolution to whatever is preferable - if that includes an aversion to incest, then natural selection will select for that trait, given enough time.

So the whole point I am making is that aversion towards incest is not rooted in primary drives but rather in the socio-primate drives.

What evidence or arguments do you have for this? Aside from what you’ve presented already, as that has not been convincing. My explanation seems consistent and simpler and occams razor would prefer it.

We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips.

I’m sorry but I find this premise completely ridiculous - obviously we don’t like how they taste because they are bad for us. Evolution isn’t only about preference, it’s also about avoiding stuff, like poison or rotten food or woodchips or whatever. I don’t think we can come to an agreement on such a premise.

It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest. Had laws against homosexuality.

I don’t think this is right. We have laws against incest, because we were programmed by evolution to think incest is bad. The causal chain is:

1. Incest lowers survival rates,
2. Evolution causes humans to find incest disgusting to increase survival rates,
3. Humans create laws to abolish incest because they find it disgusting.

Homosexuality is not like that at all, if I understand correctly (which I may not, tbf). Homosexuality may in fact be a evolutionary trait that is selected for in a certain sense, or it may just be a side-effect of other evolutionary efforts. For instance, having a homosexual uncle could be beneficial to you, as he would spend less time taking care of his own kids (obviously won’t have any) and more time taking care of you. The uncle’s genes would have no incentive to do this and evolution would not pressure the uncle to become homosexual, but your common ancestor (your grandparents on one side) would benefit as your genes would be helped along by your uncle, and so evolution could have caused homosexuality to occur ever so often, to produce one of these “helpful uncles”.

Humans may not have consciously known that incest was bad, but evolution made us think so before we were even humans. All Some animals avoid incest, it’s not just humans. We only created those laws and customs because evolution already made us believe that incest is bad. It’s pre-programmed in us, so to speak.

While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.

This seems like a strange argument, because “the primate social adaptation system” is also ultimately governed by evolution. Obviously a primate group with a social tendency towards incest would have worse survival rates than a primate group with a social aversion to incest, and that social fabric definitely is tied to evolution (unless you mean to imply that our social fabric did not arise from evolution, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying.

Also, I don’t see how this can have anything in particular to do with primates and their social constructs as incest is avoided by all animals, as far as I am aware. It is not a purely human or primate thing, incest is bad for all animals and so they have all evolved via evolution to avoid it. I’d say the Westermarck effect is just the result of that evolution - obviously humans can’t directly read genetic code, so the mind assumes that whoever you grew up with must be your close relatives, and that’s good enough of a signal in 99% of cases, so that’s what evolution went with.

You can’t really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I’m no biologist so I’m not an expert by any means, but we can’t go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.

That said, such an “ew” response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There’s nothing “inherently disgusting” about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.

And btw this isn’t restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.

First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.

Well, actually, it’s the other way around. Evolutionary speaking, there was a disavantage to inbreeding, so the “ew” evolved because of that. We think inbreeding is wrong because evolution taught us that it lowers the chance of survival for our offspring.

My instance runs on a dedicated server at hetzner, from their server auction. My price only increased like 3%, which is honestly lower than inflation given how many years we’ve been at that price point. So I’m completely fine with it. I’ve not heard of these enormous price hikes before.

I’d say you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. It’s rarely a fair comparison and it doesn’t help you much. It’s pretty pointless - there are 20-year old who have more money and success than you. It’s just how the world is, don’t fret what other people have. Think about what you have and whether you feel you have enough for yourself, personally.

As for the loneliness, that sounds like a more tangible issue. There are ways to deal with loneliness, but not any super easy ways. Being afraid of being alone is a good natural instinct - it’s your social human brain telling you to connect more with other people. Listen to your brain.

Which model are you using? My experience is that it can definitely do “standard boilerplate”. What programming language are you using?

It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.

That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.

I don’t have my own domain for my email, I just switched to Infomaniak’s domain. I then use Thunderbird with the unified inbox to view all my emails in one inbox. So I get both my gmail and infomaniak emails in Thunderbird. I didn’t bother changing all of my old accounts using the gmail to use infomaniak instead - there’s just so many accounts and it didn’t seem worth it. Primary goal for me was to stop paying Google for drive space.

The transition was pretty easy honestly, once I sat down to do it. The largest obstacle is honestly the mental one, of getting oneself to actually commit to doing it.

Can you set up cloud backup of photos from your phone, etc?

Yes, the kDrive app can be set to automatically upload pictures you take on your phone to your kDrive. I actually like it even better than on Google, cause on Google my photos never got to Google Drive, but went to Google Photos. So I didn’t automatically have them on my PC. With the kDrive app, you just choose a folder in your drive where the photos are saved, and then it saves them there, and it gets synced to your PC if you run the kDrive app there obviously.

I switched from Google (email, cloud storage, etc.) to Infomaniak in august last year. It was european, got more cloud storage for less money and though the user experience wasn’t 100% polished, it was basically 90% there. Good enough.

I couldn’t be happier with my choice now - this seems like a really good move. This looks like a similar sort of setup as Mozilla the for-profit company has with the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Good on the founder for doing this!

I suppose if you have an instance wide policy against AI moderation, then any mod using AI for moderation is going against the rules. But what anyone “should” do on their own instance is really up to them.

They don’t need to federate even, they’re probably already scraping everything.

Have these people actually ever compared the anonymous internet with the named internet? Facebook is flooded with bigots and idiots that readily spout racist and hateful words, with their full name in plain sight. Meanwhile, anonymous places like Reddit are far better moderated (yes, I know we hate on reddit here but it is much better moderated than Facebook). Same applies to most of the fediverse.

I suspect these people haven’t actually used these anonymous places on the internet much. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I’m… Very confused. Why does this guy think he can affect something about the Hagia Sophia in Turkey?