solanaceous

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Isn’t she old enough? She turns 35 in October.

I'm not sure I'd call Rimworld "small", though I guess it is a relatively indie studio. It's a popular game with a lot of content.

For "small" games, I'd recommend also Nova Drift. It's sort of asteroids + path of exile + a slight roguelite element.

In this essay I will

This is awesome, and also bordering on dwarven !!SCIENCE!!

This reminds me of an old joke:

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, pub, Irish bar, drinks, beer, wine, whiskey, cocktails, liquor.

But since then the situation has gotten a lot shittier.

Sure, it’s hard to say whether a computer program can “know” anything or what that even means. But the paper isn’t arguing that. It assumes very little about how how LLMs actually work, and it defines “hallucination” as “not giving the right answer” with no option for the machine to answer “I don’t know”. Then the proof follows basically from the fact that the LLM-or-whatever can’t know everything.

The result is not very surprising, and saying that it means hallucination is inevitable is an oversell. It’s possible that hallucinations, or at least wrong answers, are inevitable for different reasons though.

Or just let the mother-to-be charge her insurance at hospital rates for all the blood transfusions and other health care she's giving the fetus.

(As a bit of completely unwarranted pedantry — and I'm not a lawyer — most crimes in the US and other common law countries have a mental component (mens rea). This means that e.g. to be guilty of manslaughter you must have chosen to do something willfully harmful or at least unacceptably dangerous, such as attacking someone or driving drunk. So fetuses and babies cannot be guilty of those crimes. Of course, the "charge your insurance" thing probably doesn't work either.)

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a flask of acid, is a good guy with a flask of acid?

Or maybe the good guy's flask should have a buffering agent?

Yes, but it doesn’t matter, these people don’t read the Bible.

They do read the Bible though, at least in my experience. I've gone to a number of different churches, Evangelical and otherwise, and the Evangelical or otherwise Calvinist folks were the ones that read the Bible the most and in the most detail — but perhaps also the ones who came to horrible conclusions the most often. Like that you should shine the light of Christ into the world by blocking women for promotion at your job, because 1 Tim 2:12 says that Paul does not permit them to have authority over men. (Real example, if possibly the worst one I've seen.) Maybe my experience is not representative, but I don't think the problem is primarily that Evangelicals don't read the Bible.

I have a long theory about some of the ways that Evangelicalism distorts Scripture, but one root of the issue is that (IMHO) Scripture was written by humans, reflects the biases of the authors and their societies, and has a lot of horrible things in it. If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that's been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.

For them, it’s just an excuse to do whatever it is they’re doing.

For sure. People don't want to repent. They want to find justifications for what they were already doing, or planning to do.

I think the point might be reasonably condensed to:

• Africa is big and diverse, and its internal geographic barriers (particularly the Sahara) are more significant than the ones dividing it from Europe and from southwest Asia.
• Some parts of Africa have thousands of years of written or otherwise well-documented history, and each part has seen several waves of significant change, including colonization from other areas of Africa (e.g. by Egypt or Mali), from Europe (e.g. by Rome), and from southwest Asia (e.g. by the Umayyads); and colonization of other areas (e.g. of the Iberian peninsula by Morocco).
• For some parts of Africa, the latest round of European colonization is arguably less significant than previous changes.
• Thus, for serious discussions of history, "pre-colonial Africa" is not a useful division to make: you won't be able to say anything meaningful without more precisely specifying the time and region (e.g. "medieval west Africa").
• This isn't fixed by changing to "pre-European Africa".
• Both "pre-colonial Africa" and "pre-European Africa" additionally suck because, instead of using a more relevant division, you are using a less-relevant Eurocentric term.

Follow-on serious answer: there are also electric rays, which are known as torpedos. According to Wikipedia, this is from the Latin torpidus meaning “paralyzed” or “numb” (the same root as the English “torpid”). The weapon is named after the fish. Edit: some of these live in the Mediterranean, and that Latin name predates understanding electricity; they were also known to Hippocrates who called them narke with a similar meaning in Greek.

IIRC some of the other pre-electricity names for electric fish are based on their ability to numb, paralyze or stun people and other creatures.