There’s not much fanservice in Dungeon Meshi. I would say it’s exactly like how you would expect it to turn out if you just played DnD and then hired someone to animate it. Complete with the player stupidity and boss cheesing.

The series does take time to build up - it starts off feeling like a generic gimmick anime, but the story and lore gets deeper the more you watch. And the gimmick (eating monsters) ends up becoming a lot deeper than you would expect. (I’ll talk about it more below.) The storytelling is, in hindsight, extremely efficient, but the writers just never draw attention to the info that you’re supposed to remember. So I think it’s one of those series where you really have to rewatch afterward in order to pick up all the lore tidbits that the characters just toss around.

Speaking of lore, I would say that the worldbuilding is one of the most extremely detailed that I’ve seen in any media, where it touches on really mature topics like implicit (and explicit) racism, tribal tensions, political feuds, cultural differences. And every little thing must have an explanation. And there’s actually different races of humans in this world, each with their own nation and culture. I think it all ties back in to the core theme of the series, which is that eating is so fundamental to life that it influences human culture. And, inversely, that because eating is the one universal constant across all cultures, it is the one thing that can unite people. Over the series, you stop seeing “eating monsters” as a gimmick and it starts becoming more like a thesis. Like, “yeah, of course it would be a show about eating. What else could be so fundamental to discussing the human experience?”

Touching on the typical icks with anime (oversexualization, often with minors, harem, OP main characters, etc.): the series actually avoids all of the typical anime pitfalls. There’s no sexualization. Characters don’t talk or hint about sex at all. No revealing clothing, and all characters dress appropriately for their job/environment. There is one single scene where one character tries teaching another character about sex (giving the “birds and the bees” talk), but it’s not sexual in nature and IMO it is really meant to highlight a common implicit bias in this world (the character receiving the talk is actually a grown adult, but due to his race, gets infantilized frequently). Speaking of grown adults, every character in the show appears, acts, and is a fully grown adult. And as for power scaling, the main characters don’t have any OP skills and never learn any OP skills. They’re just a standard party of adventurers, and it’s made clear that the only reason they’re successful is because of the party’s deep understanding of monster biology and dungeon ecology and their willingness to use creative solutions to difficult problems (aka: cheesing every boss).

As a complete side note, I think it has one of the best and most accurate representations of autism that I’ve seen. I’ll leave it vague, but there are several characters that are strongly autism-coded, and the writers really went above and beyond to show how autism is interpreted differently by others when the person in question is a male or female.

Overall, I’d say I highly recommend the anime. It instantly became one of the best animes that I’ve watched, and it’s an anime that can be enjoyed casually, or analyzed for lore to hell and back, or analyzed for its literary merit. (If it wasn’t clear, I’m part of the 3rd group. I really enjoyed how coherent its thematic messaging is and how skilfully it tells its story)

OnlyOffice. Good compatibility with MS Office, and UI is basically equivalent

As someone who used to be in a (casual) orchestra, I can tell you that the musicians can interpret the conductor because they’ve rehearsed it extensively beforehand. The conductor is really just there is remind the musicians to do the things that they’ve practiced beforehand.

As for the baton’s movements, that’s meant to indicate the speed that the music is played at. Nobody can keep perfect rhythm, and in a large orchestra, the echoes and travel speed of sound becomes especially disorienting. It will start to sound like you are playing off-time from the rest of the orchestra. In those cases, everyone has to ignore the sound of their music and only use the conductor to figure out where in the song they are, and they just have to trust that it’ll sound correct to the audience

Hot cheetos tastes like cardboard to me. I’ve started preferring regular cheetos over hot cheetos because at least it has flavor. That should probably answer your question.

I don’t dump hot sauce on everything, that’s like asking if someone with a sweet tooth dumps sugar onto everything. Also, there are different types of hot sauce that have different levels of spice. You don’t need to drown food in hot sauce, you just need to buy a spicier hot sauce and continue adding the same amount of hot sauce.

Interesting thing to note, your sense of taste and your physiological response to spice are two different things. There are (many) times where I eat something “spicy,” and I’ll sweat. But I don’t taste the spice.

If there’s something you can buy, it’s both less hassle and higher quality to just buy it rather than to try to print it yourself. A 3d printer really shines when there’s something that you want that you can’t buy. Custom parts, repaor parts, things of that nature. Unfortunately, that also means that the things that you print aren’t likely to be something that you can plan for ahead of time

“explore and recombine” isn’t really the words I would use to describe generative AI. Remember that it is a deterministic algorithm, so it can’t really “explore.” I think it would be more accurate to say that it interpolates patterns from its training data.

As for comparison to humans, you bring up an interesting point, but one that I think is somewhat oversimplified. It is true that human brains are physical systems, but just because it is physical does not mean that it is deterministic. No computer is able to come even close to modeling a mouse brain, let alone a human brain.

And sure, you could make the argument that you could strip out all extraneous neurons from a human brain to make it deterministic. Remove all the unpredictable elements: memory neurons, mirror neurons, emotional neurons. In that case, sure - you’d probably get something similar to AI. But I think the vast majority of people would then agree that this clump of neurons is no longer a human.

A human uses their entire lived experience to weigh a response. A human pulls from their childhood experience of being scared of monsters in order to make horror. An AI does not do this. It creates horror by interpolating between existing horror art to estimate what horror could be. You are not seeing an AI’s fear - you are seeing other people’s fears, reflected and filtered through the algorithm.

More importantly, a human brain is plastic, meaning that it can learn and change. If a human is told that they are wrong, they will correct themselves next time. This is not what happens with an AI. The only way that an AI can “learn” is by adding on to its training data and then retraining the algorithm. It’s not really “learning,” it’s more accurate to say that you’re deleting the old model and creating a new one that holds more training data. If this were applied to humans, it would be as if you grew an entirely new brain every single time you learned something new. Sounds inefficient? That’s because it is. Why do you think AI is using up so much electricity and resources? Prompting and generating an AI doesn’t use up much resources; it’s actually the training and retraining that uses so much resources.

To summarize: AI is a tool. It’s a pretty smart tool, but it’s a tool. It has some properties that are analogous to human brains, but lacks some properties that make it truly similar. It is in techbros’ best interests to hype up the similarities and hide the dissimilarities, because hype drives up the stock prices. That’s not to say that AI is completely useless. Just as you have said in your comment, I think it can be used to help make art, in a similar way that cameras have been used to help make art.

But in the end, when you cede the decision-making to the AI (that is, when you rely on AI for too much of your workflow), my belief is that the product is no longer yours. How can you claim that a generated artpiece is yours if you didn’t choose to paint a little easter egg in the background? If you didn’t decide to use the color purple for this object? If you didn’t accidentally paint the lips slightly skewed? Even supposing that an AI is completely human-like, the art is still not yours, because at that point, you’re basically just commissioning an artist, and you definitely don’t own art that you’ve commissioned.

To be clear, this is my stance on other tools as well, not just AI

I think there’s a bit of a misconception about what exactly AI is. Despite what techbros try to make it seem, AI is not thinking in any way. It doesn’t make decisions because it does not exist. It is not an entity. It is an algorithm.

Specifically, it is a statistical algorithm. It is designed to associate an input to an output. When you do it to billions of input-output pairs, you can then use the power of statistics to interpolate and extrapolate, so that you can guess what the output might be, given a new input that you haven’t seen before. In other words, you can perfectly replicate any AI with a big enough sheet of paper and enough time and patience.

That is why AI outputs can’t be considered novel. Inherently, it is just a tool that processes data. As an analogy, you haven’t generated any new data by taking the average of 5 numbers in excel - you have merely processed the existing data

Even if a human learns from AI-generated art, their art is still art, because a human is not a deterministic algorithm.

The problem arises when someone uses generative AI for a significant and notable portion of their workflow. At this point, this is essentially equivalent to applying a filter to someone else’s artwork and calling it new. The debate lies in that there is no clear point for when AI takes up an appropriate vs. inappropriately large portion of a person’s workflow…

Frankly, I think that’s it. When I got shots, my parents would constantly remind me of how much it would hurt and laugh at me over my fear. I’m still scared of needles nowadays, even if by all objective measures they really don’t hurt at all

Oh, I’ve got such a good one. In high school, I was in Science Olympiad (basically a science club). I was always kind of a wishy-washy member, never really a serious or particularly reliable member. But one day, the club needed designs for a new shirt, and they decided to ask the members for some designs that the members would then vote on. I decided to submit a satire shirt.

I obviously can’t share the full design for privacy reasons, but I went ahead and made it jingoistic/military themed. Fighter jets flying overhead, tanks rolling through. To make sure that people knew I was being totally serious about this clearly relevant shirt, I put a stick figure holding a science-looking flask in the corner of the shirt. And then to make sure that everyone knew that we were smart, I put the equation: “3+3=6.” All text in comic sans, of course.

Anyways, no one got the joke. My design got 1 pity vote. I don’t think anyone even believed me when I said that it was a joke, which out of everything was kind of the saddest part for me.

Do you have anything that you’re passionate about? It seems unusual that you would think there’s nothing to talk about. If not, I would consider finding a nice passion. I wouldn’t consider video games to be a passion, unless that’s something that you actively choose to do over other options

Perhaps euthanasia is cruel, but the alternative must also be considered.

My cat died from some sort of cancer. We noticed blue welts growing from her face years ago, but the vet said that they were harmless, some sort of allergic reaction. They got bigger over time, and more started to appear. Tests were done, but the vets still said that it was nothing to worry about.

Over time, her personality changed. She was never really extraverted, but she still liked attention. Over time, she started hiding from people. She only came out to eat, then went back to hide again. We never saw her walking around like she did in the past.

The night when she died, she pulled herself to visit the bedroom, then crawled back out into the living room and curled up onto the sofa and waited to die there. We knew something was wrong when we woke up the next day because she left a trail of blood that led us to her. At that point, it was already too late.

In hindsight, it was clear - she was in constant pain for years. It was why she was hiding from people, why she seemed to start avoiding attention, why she stopped doing anything that she enjoyed. That night, she knew she was going to die, and she paid everyone a final visit before resigning herself to die on the sofa. It was an undignified, likely painful and slow death, that was preceded by years of debilitating pain. If she were given the choice, would she have chosen euthanasia? I’m not sure, but it feels clear to me that she knew she was going to die and was suffering for years.

This, apparently:

And this is the second oldest:

Scientists don’t wait for mice to get cancer, then cure the cancer. That would be inefficient. They just force the mouse to get cancer instead. And cures are tested based on how quickly the mice die to the cancer with or without the drug

State, I think?

It seems the rules are different for me than for you. I brought my backpack with my laptop. I did work during breaks. Or used my phone. I just made sure all electronics were off when in the court room. And I’m pretty sure I brought my water bottle too. The one thing that the security did enforce was my pepper spray, which I had to remove and hide in a bush outside. I’m not sure if that helps at all.

One thing you can do is to leave your laptop/things in the car. You can leave the building during breaks and then just come back into the building before the session restarts. That was what most of the jury did during breaks during my time

A lock-and-key mechanism. Modeled and 3D printed a proof-of-concept, too. Was proud of it until I found out someone invented it 100 years ago

My gut instinct is that your mother may be wanting something else but doesn’t know how to put it into words. Not to say that she right, but I can definitely relate to that emotion.

Speaking as a person who is close to someone who is depressed, there is a sort of mental drain and negativity-by-diffusion associated with being near someone who is depressed, and it’s really difficult to put into words. I can know full well that depression is a clinical illness and that the other person can’t help it, but I will still get frustrated over their inability to match my energy.

If your depression and anxiety are as limiting as you say they are, it may be a good idea to talk to a therapist and get some medicine for that. Speaking from my own observations, you can definitely fight depression, but only to a small extent. Severe depression and anxiety are debilitating to the point where you will need medicine just to get close to what a regular person might feel

In a similar vein:

Get a fire ladder if you’re not living on the first floor

But seriously, learning to use a fire extinguisher needs to be emphasized more. I stopped a fire from becoming serious because I was trained to use a fire extinguisher and I put out the fire quickly. My partner didn’t know what to do and she just handed the fire extinguisher to me. If she were there alone, the building could have burnt down. Or at minimum, all of our possessions could have been damaged.

It’s easy to learn, but YOU NEED TO LEARN

The biggest advice I can give you is, you need to try to be social. It’s easy to hang out with friends in high school because everyone’s locked into the same building every weekday for 6 hours.

Once you’re an adult, you no longer have that limitation. Even college is more of a “go to class for 2 hours a day then leave afterwards” type of experience. It’s certainly liberating to not be forced to be someplace for long periods of time, but it also means that the primary reason that you hang out with your friends (ie, because they’re already there with you) is now gone. It can make for a very lonely experience.

You need to go out of your way and actively maintain your friendships. Make plans to meet up at least once a week or something. Otherwise, you won’t really get another chance to make deep friendships

My girlfriend said that her dreams got more vivid and serious once she started taking her meds