That’s a really good point; social animals will get farther.

Crows, then.

What does your uid signify?

Really? Howdy! I’m an ordained priest in the Church of Bacon. I’ve performed two weddings as such, even; I didn’t get ordained for no reason. Both marriages are still holding, so I count those as wins.

I’m also an ordained Discordian priest, but that happened back in the 80’s and I don’t think I have any record of it. There may have been a number of pharmaceuticals involved.

Can you elaborate?

I’m thinking about using it as a broker for a little family-group oriented word game, because the servers that do what I need already exist and include the NIPs I’d want, and truly, Nostr servers have been the simplest, least resource demanding servers I’ve run. There are copious libraries in every language for writing clients. It seems ideal.

I’m not concerned about scaling, but I am curious about what those issues are, as I haven’t heard of any.

My thought was more “which of the things I wrote triggered such a reaction?” I’m often surprised.

My experience is that I reply to a lot of things, and post very few, and in no case do I have even a vague notion about how many comments what I write will generate. I can guess the vector magnitude of up/down votes, but never the amount of interaction, where people take time to reply.

Excellent summary. Thanks.

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll watch it.

Yeah, I was thinking more about seeing the count: my client shows the inbox unread count at the bottom. 4 is not unusual, but when I see over 12, much less 24, my first thought is: “oh, shit. What did I say??”

Once I open the inbox, it becomes clear pretty quickly, that’s true.

That, too. It’s a face of many repulsive characteristics.

Thank you. So there’s never been a Saw Whet v Elf head-to-head. I look eagerly forward to 2025’s match up; maybe it’ll happen then.

I’ve noticed, and perhaps it’s just my bias, that the heavyweights seem to be either the tiny owls, possessing maximum cuteness, and the giants. The medium sized owls seem to be at a disadvantage and don’t progress very far.

At the risk of creating a lot more work for you, maybe we need weight classes: light, middle, and heavy. Then we could have three winners. If necessary, a final round to determine the overall OOTY. But it’d be interesting and perhaps more fair to compete on level playing fields: big, powerful, apex predators competing against their own; small, cute, still apex in their niche, but competing without the “adorable” advantage.

Surely there must be enough species. I know there are, what, 4 or 5 different Scopes - there are Northern and Southern WFS, right? In the middle class are the bar Barn, Snowy, Barred, and so on. In the heavy are the GHO, Eagle, and others.

Don’t mind me; I’m just exploring the idea. It all sounds like a vast amount of effort, and maybe the aren’t enough owls to have weight classes.

My wife said I should provide the attribution; to MS’s credit (and rarely do I give MS credit for anything) they made finding the background attribution easy.

However, I didn’t only because I wasn’t so much submitting the photo itself, but the photo of the desktop as illustration about the story. I could have posted my story without the photo and it would still have communicated what I wanted. I suppose the distinction is in what the topic of the post was - the photo, or the story? For me, it was the story.

If I’d been submitting the photo for the photo’s sake, I’d have included the attribution. I probably should have, anyway.

Thanks for linking to the original, so folks can see it in all its glory, and see who the artist is.

Oh. I’m just straight up wrong about that; I thought I’d read that about it back when I first started using it regularly.

I’m just attributing it to some other tool. Bad info, sorry!

Corvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.

Say what? Which part?

There’s a NIP (or several, probably) about Lightning, but all NIPs after NIP-0 are optional. Nobody has to support, process, or transact Lightning. Nodes do no cryptocoin processing, unless they’re designed for it, and mostv aren’t. It uses cryptography, but so does Lemmy: the “s” in https is for SSL, which is cryptography.

I’ve run Nostr nodes, and I’ll probably use Nostr in my next project as the message broker for a networked game; the protocol is simple, nodes are simple, lightweight, and trivial to run, and most can be configured to federate with whichever set (or no set) of other nodes. It’s far easier to run Nostr nodes that don’t participate in the whole Lightning cryptocurrency part than it is to make them exchanges.

So, why do you say that it’s intentionally wasteful? Matrix and ActivityPub are far more wasteful, aggressively replicating data between federated servers. Even “lightweight” AP nodes are massive consumers of CPU and storage just because of how chatty they are. Nostr nodes are positively eco-friendly by comparison.

Of we’re talking points, then you’re rolling the dice. If they’ve already murdered, you’re not preventing those, so you’ve done no good. If they’re going to murder at least two more people, you should net out positive, by preventing those murders. But you can’t know they’ll murder more people; maybe their murderin’ days are over, and they’ve given it up; maybe they’ll get hit by a bus before they can kill anyone else; maybe they’ll get caught and imprisoned before they can kill again. If you murder them, but they’d never have killed again anyway, you’re pretty well net negative.

I’ve only watched through season 3, so if there are any other spoilers below, they’re purely accidental.

So: while The Good Place is somewhat ambiguous about the question of Doing the Wrong Thing for the Right Reason, I think in balance it’d weigh against you. You should have tried other things first - like tipping off the police. If all you’re trying to do is get into the Good Place, your best bet is to try and reform thre person. Even if they killed you - maybe especially if they killed you - self-sacrifice in a good cause is clearly a lot of points.

OP’s question specifically mentions a “good place” and a “bad place.” This implies some higher power or powers. If they exist; and if there is indeed an eternal afterlife; and if the difference is existing in eternally pleasure or existing in eternal torment; then you’d be a deranged fool to not care what god thinks.

Pascal’s Wager says that the rational decision is to be devout. The flaw in his logic is that there are a great many religions, and you can apply the same wager to Islam, to Buddhism, to Thelema*, and by Pascal’s own logic the only reasonable decision is to be devout to all of them at once, which is impossible.

• Thelema might be the exception here, because Satanism has very few rules that penalize you for breaking them. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” allows you to be a Mormon, if you want. The best hope for most of us is that Thelema is the One True Religion.

I know. It’s such a nice protocol, too.

I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is “yes,” in the form of Mao, but weren’t the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn’t it have affected how China’s developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.

Here’s another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?

How much power do I have?

If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that’d drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it’d have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.

Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They’re almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they’re not particularly social, and I think that’s been our greatest advantage.

Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.

Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.

30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.