Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.

be honest was it your first instinct to check if they are?

From what I remember, on my first play-through the first thing I tried to do was explore, and when I got near the critters I was attacked. I don’t think I even knew how to use my gun, so I just ran away.

In the real world, non-evil animals are often territorial. OTOH, they’re often also curious, and if you approach slowly you can end up interacting with them without it coming to violence. But, the biters in Factorio go straight from ignoring you to attacking you with no in-between.

As for colonizing, it’s worth noting that the goal in Factorio isn’t to establish a colony, but to escape after your ship crashed.

I do like that the game subtly makes it clear that you’re causing a lot of pollution, and that basically the only reason the natives attack is because of your pollution. OTOH, it would have been better if the biter “nests” contained something like worker ants who didn’t attack you but needed to be killed to wipe out the nest. I guess you could argue that the spawner things fill that role, but they don’t seem to do anything other than pump out enemies who immediately attack. So, not really.

In Factorio you pollute, but there isn’t much evidence the native critters are intelligent. They sure don’t act intelligent. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to live in harmony with them.

Making it worse is that many games don’t punish you for things we’d consider pretty “evil”. Like, you can walk into people’s houses and search their cupboards and other containers for useful things, and it’s mostly not considered stealing. So, as long as you choose the nice dialogue option when talking to them you stay good.

A real good vs. evil choice would be one where resources are always tight, and you constantly meet people who need your help along the way. Helping them stretches your resources even more. Or, have people who are able to help you, but you have to stretch the truth about who you are or about your goals to get their support.

Fair enough, but Mary is a pretty Catholic name. Even when someone’s named after a relative (in this case her mom was a Mary), the chain generally goes back to the main Mary (who was actually Miryam).

Interestingly though, Henrietta Maria was named after her parents (Henry IV and Marie de Médicis / Maria de’ Medici), and it’s likely her mother’s name came from their Catholic faith.

So Maryland was named after Henrietta Maria who was named after Marie de Médicis who was named after the biblical Mary. (Unless she was named after another Mary)

No, it isn’t.

Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.

Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.

Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.

Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.

The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.

The 10 commandments are pretty funny, even if you ignore all the differences from the different factions.

Like, there’s a commandment against bearing false witness, which is sometimes interpreted as not lying. But, it pretty specifically isn’t against lying in the original text. The modern translation of the text is more or less: “Do not testify falsely against your neighbor”. So, it’s a specific kind of lying: giving evidence as a witness in a criminal setting. So, you’re ok to lie, just not in court. Also, you’re ok to lie as long as it isn’t concerning your neighbour. What’s a neighbour? Depends. The original jewish interpretation is that it’s a member of the same religious community. Jesus tried to expand that to say everyone was your neighbour. But, arguably the original interpretation says it’s OK to give false testimony against non-jews.

Then there’s the obsession over your neighbour’s wife and stuff. The catholic version of the 10 commandments actually devotes 2 whole commandments to it. But, what’s weird is that stealing and adultery have already been covered. This (or these) commandments are about coveting. In other words, they’re trying to control not your actions but your feelings.

IMO, one of the funniest ones is “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy”. It’s pretty vague, what does it mean to “remember” it? You’d think that the absolute bare minimum would be to remember which day of the week it is. But, if that’s the case, why would the jewish and christian sabbath days be different? I guess they forgot.

Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices

These days we think of sacrifices as things like human sacrifice. But, I would bet that at the time the sacrifices were often more like a day of the dead “Ofrenda”.

Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

There it is folks, that’s the official name of the Abrahamic god.

Yes… but no.

It wasn’t just freedom to express their religion, it was also the freedom to form governments where they could be in power, and thus impose their religious beliefs on others.

The British colonies were basically religious fundamentalist zones. For example: Maryland – land of Mary. Was intended to be a Catholic colony. Massachusetts was meant as a Puritan colony, and they strictly enforced that. A woman named Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston for the crime of being a Quaker.

AI has no concept.

LLMs are nothing more than “spicy autocomplete”.

Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn’t accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it’s annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying “we don’t want to force that on our users”.

The “and” is the really wierd part.

If they had worded it as “I pledge allegiance to the flag, to the republic for which it stands” you could think: “Ok, the flag is just a symbol of the country, you’re actually just pledging allegiance to the country.”

But, the “and” makes it clear that it’s to the country and to the flag. How can you have allegiance to a flag? It isn’t even about pledging to respect the flag, it’s “allegiance”. It’s like pledging obedience to the colour blue, or pledging fealty to the sound of applause.

Biden’s policy on facilitating the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is incredibly unpopular with voters, it isn’t even close.

So, to you, 35% approving of his policy and 55% disapproving is “incredibly unpopular” and “it isn’t even close”? Because to me, that seems mildly unpopular.

far fewer Democrats (47%) approve of how he is handling the situation

Almost half of democrats approve of how he’s handling the situation. Doesn’t sound like it’s “incredibly unpopular” to me.

Specifically, the pollsters found that across the five key states, about 40% of potential Biden voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the war

Less than half of potential Biden voters disapprove… meaning that more than half either approve or are neutral.

“It’s clear that Palestine is a critical issue in key battleground states,” said Ayah Ziyadeh, director of advocacy for AJP-Action

Gee, a lobbying group for Palestinian issues claims that Palestine is a critical issue in battleground states? What evidence is there for that?

Let’s look at what the actual top issues are:

"In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are engaged in close contests, most voters said the economy will be a major factor in deciding whom they will cast their ballot for, results from a CBS News and YouGov poll show.

In Michigan, 80% of voters say the economy is a top issue for them, followed by 77% of voters who say inflation is. Seventy-two percent of voters ranked the state of democracy as one of the issues that matter most to them. Biden currently has a narrow lead over Trump in the state.

In both Pennsylvania and Washington, 80% of voters similarly ranked the economy as one of the topics they care most about this election.

Other lower-ranked topics included candidates’ stances on gun policy, crime, the U.S.-Mexico border and abortion."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/economy-top-issue-voters-presidential-election-2024/

No mention of the middle east / Gaza.

“Several polls and focus groups have shown young people ranking the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as significantly less important to them than other issues — such as health care and the economy. This suggests that some of the coverage portraying young people as single-issue voters motivated by the Israel-Hamas war, or framing the protests as a death knell for President Joe Biden’s campaign, is overblown.”

https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/gaza-protests-young-voters-media-election-rcna151364

As for people who wouldn’t vote for Biden because of his policy on Gaza… they’re going to hand their vote to a guy who had “banning Muslims from entering the US” as a signature policy? Either they’re serious about not voting for him meaning they’re idiots and you can just ignore their opinions, or they’re not serious and they’ll eventually vote for him anyway because letting the other guy win would be infinitely worse.

What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn’t just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.

This is something that companies like Reddit see and think “Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site”.

Stack 3 of them up and…

Worth noting, this isn’t really a Google thing. It’s something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon – Twitter used to be common. It’s just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.