On the contrary, IME they significantly slowed down the early game, but they removed the early-mid-game dip right after you unlock fluids and oil processing

OK, so this is an interesting question. To start, I'm a circadian researcher, specifically focusing on how bacteria can influence our circadian clocks.

It is indeed correct that most animals utilize the sky (specifically, the ambient brightness) to determine the time. But the circadian clock is incredibly entrenched. It evolved ages ago, and so by extension, virtually every single animal inherited the same circadian clock (with some modifications). Animals as distinct as fruit flies, fish, and humans have similar circadian clocks. And the circadian clock is unbelievably important, more than people give it credit for. Night and day are incredibly different environments, and every single animal needs to be able to predict and accommodate for the cold that comes at night and the UV radiation that comes during the day. And there's a plethora of other, subtle changes to the environment that we don't fully understand yet. For instance (and probably a bit unsurprising in hindsight), the population of bacteria in the air changes at day versus at night. Soil bacteria, for some reason, act differently at day versus at night. Presumably plants (which are definitely circadian) are influencing the soil bacteria in some way through their roots, but it's not entirely clear.

An interesting consequence of the importance of the circadian clock is that animals have evolved multiple, redundant ways of telling time. If you lock a person in a dark box for weeks to months (scientists have performed this experiment in the past), the circadian clock running within the person is still able to somewhat-accurately tell the time, and we can use experiments like this to tease apart how the circadian clock utilize different cues to figure out the right time. One of the more interesting cues (and the one that I research) is how our bodies use surrounding bacteria to tell the time. And it's known that eating food affects the circadian clock. Food availability, of course, is pretty circadian, especially if you eat food that is circadian. If a mouse comes out at night, then there's no point hunting for mice in the day. I'm not too knowledgeable about deep sea animals (I'm really more focused on mammals), but a quick literature search suggests that deep sea animals do have circadian clocks, inherited from the same ancient ancestors that we got ours from. The conclusions appear to be similar to what I've said above - namely, that even if there's no sky, having a functional circadian clock is necessary simply because other things, such as food, are themselves circadian.

So my answer is, presumably, that deep sea animals can already accurately tell the time, presumably by keeping track of when they last ate

Let me introduce you to Goptjaam, probably the closest "language" that fits what you mean: https://youtu.be/ze5i_e_ryTk

You misunderstand. I'm willing - excited, even - to have restaurants that charge more upfront. I'm not willing to pay double the expected tip just because the restaurant hoped to hide additional costs in the bill and hoped that the payer wouldn't see it. In case my original comment was not clear enough, that was what they tried doing. 15% gratuity tacked on in small letters at the end of the bill, and this charge was never mentioned at any point, and there was additional space to add tip (of course, with the recommended option being 15% after the 15% gratuity). The sum of the pre-included tip and the tip that I gave is equivalent to tip that I would have given had restaurant not tried this kind of shady bullshit. So I fail to see how I've done the workers of the restaurant any wrong.

I choose not to revisit that restaurant for their shady business practices, not because I was unwilling to pay a mandatory tip. Given the original post, I figured that that was clear that that was what I had meant. Clearly I was mistaken.

OOP jokes, but I've went to one or two restaurants that tried to do that in the past. I deducted the pre-included tip from the optional tip, and then never went to those restaurants again

The point, as I understand it, is that nuclear war can be technically won by nuking the enemy to smithereens and tanking their nukes as best as possible. The concern here is that because this would technically count as a victory, that it is a battle tactic that elitist assholes in the government have no doubt considered using.

Dating in South Korea is rough in general, more than other Asian countries. Apparently it's devolved into a violent culture war. On one hand, it's no wonder women are unwilling to date. On the other hand, that's going to further fuel desperation and therefore extremist sentiment in men and further the downward spiral of the culture war.

I'm not saying that the male position is right here, but I genuinely do not see a possibility that the culture war stops spiraling

Wording is funky. To clarify:

The rain smell is due to a compound called geosmin. The bacteria that produces it is Streptomyces.

When I taught microbiology lab, I would grow a petri dish of Streptomyces during one particular class and have the students smell it

I genuinely don't understand why people use it. It gives me massive motion sickness and so I figure out very quickly when games have it on by default

32 + 4 = 36

34 + 2 = 36

Am I missing something? Barring some extremely stupid math error, I don't see how I'm incorrect

Everyone has different preferences, so it can be difficult to judge what you may like or dislike. Even in gaming, there are such disparate subcommunities that one subcommunity may not even know of the existence of another. I personally prefer slow paced, artistic, single player games and I can't stand multi-player games, much less competitive ones.

So my answer is there's likely something for you somewhere, but without more information, I wouldn't know how you would begin finding that something

Democrats in the past 10 ish years have been absolutely horrendous at marketing, allowing Republicans to take up all of the media talking space, traditional or otherwise. TV, news, podcasts, social media influencers, YouTube, etc. are all generally Republican leaning.

Republicans control the talking points and co-opt anything that the Democrats say. Meanwhile, Democrats are either unable or unwilling to do the same.

Republicans' control of the media allows them to get away with way more things than the Democrats. It allows them to essentially claim that they're for the working class while simultaneously working against working class interests, especially when heard by people who don't generally follow political news. Meanwhile, Democrats get called out for relatively smaller issues, and that makes them seem elitist and uncaring of working class issues.

One major facet of the Democrats being unable to control their marketing is their unwillingness to use populist rhetoric, even though by policy stances they should be (comparatively) more closely associated with populism than the Republicans. I've heard several takes on why Harris lost the election and the one that I most agree with is that she failed to use populist rhetoric and was unable to differentiate herself from Biden. People wanted change, and Harris offered the status quo.

Remember that the vast majority of Americans don't pay attention to politics, and so voter impressions are decided by tone and messaging rather than specific policies

Most of the bras that my girlfriend gets fits on her first try, although she does tend to prefer sister sizes over her real size. If your girlfriend is having issues with bras fitting, it might be worthwhile to read up on how bra sizes are actually calculated and do a measurement yourself. Funny enough, most girls don't seem to know how the bra size system works either and they just get their sizes through trial and error, which seems like what has happened here.

The letter by itself is fundamentally meaningless. A 32D is equivalent to a 34B! And most girls severely underestimate their actual size. What would colloquially be called a B or C is actually an E

I agree with you generally, but I strongly disagree that we today cannot understand the perspective of the time. We (Americans) just elected Imperial Supreme God Emperor Trump based on the same fascist ideas that drove people to Hitler back then

A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there's inherently a bit of "trust me bro" involved in making these decisions.

A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on "trust me bro" to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that's being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.

AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there's concern that AI might be a bubble.

How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they're driven primarily by hype and "trust me bro," and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That's a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that'll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.

The implosion that happens during a pop isn't referring to any particular company, it's referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It's merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on. As investors lose hype in AI, companies will no longer feel as strong of a push to include AI in their products. At the same time, AI companies will slow down their product development due to lower funding and so they won't be able to make as big of a splash in the news when they launch a new product.

The observed effect is that one day everything is AI, and the next day, nothing is AI. Think about NFT's and cryptocurrency - most companies that dealt with NFT's and crypto survived, but we no longer hear about NFT's because they lost their hype and so lost their funding

Mint personally didn't stick with me, and I settled on Kubuntu. I felt like troubleshooting ended up being a lot more opaque and frustrating on mint than on kubuntu, and I felt like there were a lot of little accessibility features that were missing on mint.

Kubuntu (KDE in general) is more overwhelming at first, but I feel like it's much more of a "set it and forget it" experience

I practically don't read for fun. Not that I dislike reading, but it's generally rare to find books that interest me, and I simply don't have time to look for interesting books. Last I found an interesting book, I breezed through it in a couple days.

Anyways, most of my reading happens through academia, reading scientific papers and such. There's a lot of interesting scientific research going on that flies under the radar because it's not clickbaity enough for popsci websites to pick up on it. I have a feed set up on Pubmed to send me emails every day on new papers from different topics. Every day or two I glance through them and it there's something that catches my eye, I'll read it more thoroughly.

I wouldn't generally encourage people to read scientific papers, since they're really quite dense and requires a lot of practice to get good at reading, but it's an easy way to read something while being productive. And I've become increasingly convinced over time that the general population needs at least some experience with scientific literature, given how much of the science gets twisted in the game of Science Communication Telephone

So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?

If you're forced to act supportive, is that truly support?

Due to the HL Alyx retcon, Epistle 3 could still be argued as an alternate timeline semi-canon story. At least, I think of it that way