The purpose of religion is to replicate culture, which is made of memeplexes, which are made of memes, like your DNA has chromosomes made of individual genes.

Culture is your operating system. The narrative of the framework from which you derive your identity determines what you experience and how you think n behave. Our two main ways of learning from this world as children are play and story. Of these, story is the first cognitive technology, as it allows us to consciously structuralize the narratives from which we derive our identity.

This means culture can be engineered around the effect that specific language would have on certain archetypes of individuals that prior to monotheism, manifested in the form of pantheons and families of gods n goddesses. In the process of wrapping everyone around a core narrative, this resulted in synchronization of society.

Hence, why we have the ethos/pathos complex of Donald Trump. No, seriously, in the modern day, we have functionally weaponized religion by engineering two diametrically opposed cults of divergent political narrative. Likewise, we did this around things like the American Revolution and Jesus, but what my random word generator told me to write all this for is to talk about how we built a boat on a mountain.

Because "who would build a boat on a mountain?" IS a cognitive technology. We took kids to it to prove to them that God is real because God does not speak in the storms or earthquakes or fires but a whisper; synchronicity as Carl Jung called the phenomenon, or what is a burning bush in the Bible or white rabbit to Neo.

Y'know, kid is home alone. Ooh, gunna get into the cookies! Wham! The broom fell? Well, in a godless universe, that's just the wind, whatever, let's pick it up and get a-cookieing! But if the child knows that they are always watched and God is all powerful, they choose to resist temptation, strengthening their prefrontal cortex and making them better able to resist temptation in the future, and more.

Also, reconciliation and Karma and the world is an illusion and everything you experience is procedurally generated based on how you have and are setting your intention, the only thing you have any direct control over. It's just basic topology, folks!

Is it still viable to use Signal for privacy in 2026? It's centralized, and has had many suspicious occurrences in the past.(Unopen source server code, careless whisper exploit which is still active as far as I know, and the whole mobile coin situation.)

Thoughts?

xkcd #3235: Types of Board Game

Title text:

I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion.

Transcript:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

Source: https://xkcd.com/3235/

explainxkcd for #3235

This is an old web comic i used to read, the site is long since gone. The artist went by the name FrogPlague.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36830794

Climate change is already at work

As floods become more extreme, farmers are now taking serious hits – especially in Queensland.

In 2019, floods and sticky mud trapped and killed up to 500,000 cows.

In 2022, record-breaking floods caused a national lettuce shortage.

In 2023, floods hit banana, mango and avocado crops.

In 2025, over 100,000 cows died in outback Queensland due to flooding.

This summer, it happened again. Over 48,000 cattle are dead or missing after extreme flooding in northwest Queensland.

Rising temperatures also make life harder for the animals and plants we rely on. Heat stress is on the rise in livestock. When animals are too hot, their health can suffer and milk and meat production falls.

When floods devastated Lismore in 2022, the New South Wales town had empty supermarket shelves for months after main roads and freight lines were cut.

But farmers’ markets reopened within a week. As one farmer’s market manager told experts:

supermarket shelves were completely empty [but] we had all this produce.

Climate change is already at work

As floods become more extreme, farmers are now taking serious hits – especially in Queensland.

In 2019, floods and sticky mud trapped and killed up to 500,000 cows.

In 2022, record-breaking floods caused a national lettuce shortage.

In 2023, floods hit banana, mango and avocado crops.

In 2025, over 100,000 cows died in outback Queensland due to flooding.

This summer, it happened again. Over 48,000 cattle are dead or missing after extreme flooding in northwest Queensland.

Rising temperatures also make life harder for the animals and plants we rely on. Heat stress is on the rise in livestock. When animals are too hot, their health can suffer and milk and meat production falls.

When floods devastated Lismore in 2022, the New South Wales town had empty supermarket shelves for months after main roads and freight lines were cut.

But farmers’ markets reopened within a week. As one farmer’s market manager told experts:

supermarket shelves were completely empty [but] we had all this produce.

Bots give equal weight to scientific and non-scientific sources, potentially directing sufferers away from approved treatments and preventing them from receiving the life-saving help they need, study finds

A new study has found that AI chatbots habitually recommend alternative cancer treatments to chemotherapy, potentially putting lives at risk.

A team from the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center tested a series of widely used bots as part of their research, including xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s AI, and High-Flyer’s DeepSeek.

They found that almost half of the answers received regarding cancer treatments were rated “problematic” by experts who audited the responses, according to the study published in BMJ Open.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58860647

The CIA has been stepping up its efforts to keep up with AI advances — and has developed a particularly spy-tastic way of using chatbots.

https://archive.ph/gDajY

Crosspost from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11378730