My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don’t really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

Not a paleontologist, but I think it’s a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

I’m pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can’t.

And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like

Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS’s (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.

There’s also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of “OS lineage.” The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn’t copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won’t apply to Arch (hence the meme, “I use Arch btw”)

Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various “flavors,” which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu

Did you go to college/what was your experience with college?

CV’s are expected to be wall-of-text and as long as you can make it. They can easily go for 6+ pages. You are probably thinking about resumes

Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don’t need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don’t fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.

Dr. Stone. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re into STEM, it’s probably the closest you’ll get to media accurately portraying science and technology.

It also puts into perspective just how much knowledge, expertise, and experience went into basically everything that we take for granted today. Makes you at least a bit hopeful for the future of humanity

Yup, story goes that the publisher thought it was too scary for children, so Neil Gaiman, the author, told the publisher to read it to her daughter. The daughter said it wasn’t scary, and so it was published as a children’s book. Years later, the daughter said that she was actually scared but lied about it because she wanted to know the ending

Coraline. The book is significantly creepier than the movie and manages to perfectly strike the uncanny valley

If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need

Desktop. Gaming laptops end up being the worst of both worlds when it comes to power and portability. Weaker than a desktop, heavier and bulkier than a laptop. Makes it hard to game, and hard to carry.

And as a consequence, quantum bogo sort

Not an expert, but my understanding is that the multiverse (at least, what we today associate as the multiverse) came about due to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, quantum physicists had an observation - particles were moving as though they were being pushed by an invisible wave, and they would pick a random position based on that wave when observed.

The most prevalent explanation for this behavior is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the particle is the invisible wave, and the wave collapses into a particle when it is measured. But another common interpretation is the many worlds interpretation, which states that the invisible wave is just a statistical probability of where the particle is. And the reason why the particle seems to pick a random point on the wave when observed is actually because the particle creates branching timelines, and we can only observe what happens in our own timelines. Hence, it seems random to us.

I speculate that the idea of multiple parallel timelines, each slightly different, was probably pretty popular with scifi writers, especially since it’s an easy way to portray “what if” scenarios in their stories, and so the concept became popular because of that

This answer might be somewhat unusual, but honestly? I would continue working. I like to keep busy, and I feel like I would get bored quickly. Sure, a break might be nice for me to catch up with personal projects, but in the long term, I would like to work.

I suppose it also helps that I’m a rare case where I enjoy the work that I do

Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture

I’m not necessarily sure if that can be correct, depending on the definition. If you are defining a disease or disorder as being abnormal, then perhaps it may have a case there. But many diseases and disorders are defined by whether or not a trait disrupts quality of life. A person may be abnormal, but it doesn’t affect how they live. Therefore, no disease. With this definition, many people can be normal

Desktop, laptop, phone.

Desktop for heavy workloads and work when at home

Laptop for work when at work

Phone is useless for any sort of meaningful work and is used for Slack and/or browsing memes.

It’s not necessarily even that phones are too weak for work, it’s that it’s god-awful to try to get any work done on a phone when the only input method you have is touchscreen.

To my knowledge, a similar study has never been repeated with other biomes. Which is a shame, since I can almost guarantee that a similar diel cycle exists in virtually every biome.

Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.

So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn’t get much follow-up.

Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it’s because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they’re foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I’ll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn’t like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.

Yeah, crepuscular animals are weird. They have circadian rhythms (the circadian clock is incredibly well conserved across vertebrates and to a lesser extent, across invertebrates), but I’m not actually entirely sure how their circadian clock work to get them to wake up at dawn/dusk