And they couldn’t find an actor of Russian ancestry to play the Kurgan… but they did have an actor of Russian ancestry play another famous fantasy Spaniard swordsman—Inigo Montoya—a year later. And they cast Connery as a Russian in The Hunt for Red October a few years after that. (And meanwhile, the actor of Spanish ancestry who would have been appropriate for the role of Ramirez in Highlander—Ricardo Montalban—was cast as a man of Indian/Sikh ancestry in The Wrath of Khan.)

I don’t think casting actors of appropriate ethnicities for their roles became a big factor in Hollywood until the 90s.

Connery, Brown, Montalban, and Patinkin all did great in their roles, though.

I haven’t driven in over 20 years—my current personal transportation is a pair of freeskates.

I believe that an out-of-the-box lemmy instance will remove deleted content from federated instances automatically.

My point is just that site maintainers can modify the software to do whatever they want, or run software that implements ActivityPub but whose functionality is completely different from that of lemmy.

As another commenter has said, this is likely just a feature of the interface and not a reflection of what other users see.

But you should keep in mind that, due to the nature of federation, your posts are copied to all other instances that are federated with yours—which in theory includes not just lemmy instances but any software implementing the ActivityPub protocol. Whether those instances actually remove posts you’ve marked as deleted is up to their discretion.

It seems like this is generally compatible with the free energy principle: the idea that the part of the brain this preprint refers to as the “outer brain”—the part that processes raw sense perceptions in parallel—maintains a predictive running model of the self and its environment, and only passes to the consciousness (what the paper calls the “inner brain”) the most salient discrepancies between its model and its perceptions. So the “inner brain” is only concerned with the differential between prediction and perception, which (depending on the accuracy of the model) has a much lower bit rate than raw perception.

There would be an immediate ceasefire, so the military contractors running the modern military could buy access to magical tech and design new weapons to sell to third parties.

If you’re referring to the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, I think DeWitt just made a mess of Everett’s original, much stronger “relative-state” formulation. But in either case, the apparent branching is caused by quantum events, while the alternate timelines we imagine as possible outcomes of prior decisions are more often due to our inability to perceive all the (non-quantum) conditions that led to those outcomes not happening.

That depends—are you a bird?

From predictions that would differentiate between competing models.

I’d say it’s equally important to figure out what to observe—to arrange experiments that reveal information you don’t yet know, instead of just confirming what you do.

Make the Pope announce his conversion to Buddhism (and declare it an infallible doctrine of faith, ex cathedra).

I imagine a continual running Gollum/Sméagol dialogue between the domesticated dog personality and the suppressed wolf personality.

Robert’); DROP TABLE Students;

Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

Seems like they could have avoided this by having the Sandy Hook families join the bid with an arbitrarily high dollar amount—which they’d immediately get back as creditors.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

My understanding of quantum algorithms is that they set up parallel computations in such a way that incorrect solutions cancel out and correct ones reinforce each other. They indicate the existence of multiple universes to the same extent that the double slit experiment does.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.