Soap does destroy some bacteria, and a not insignificant portion. By destroying those fatty bonds the cellular membranes of many bacteria are destroyed, and many viruses denatured and rendered inert.

The removal is the primary action though, you are correct. Not all bacteria are destroyed by soap, which is why the leather, scrub, and scrub while rinsing steps are important to hand washing, since that mechanical action is what removes everything.

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/why-soap-works/

Certainly. I’m not saying soap is bad by any means. It’s a tool for bathing just like any other. Not using soap to wash your body doesn’t imply unhygienic anymore than not using a scrub brush makes you unhygienic.

What matters is that you wash regularly, get rid of grime, dirt, excess oils and dead skin buildup.
There’s many paths to hygiene. For most people, the one with soap is the easiest and the only downside is “now moisturize”.

Persistent advertising from cleaning product companies since the 50s have heavily pushed a level of cleaning and perfuming well beyond what’s actually necessary for hygiene.
My body wash company would like me to use a silver dollar sized portion. I get better results from a dime sized portion and a moderate firmness silicone brush.

You’re taking “it’s possible to be clean after bathing without soap” as a way stronger statement than it is.
Do you think I’m saying soap is bad?
No one is talking about hygienic hand washing practices for medicine, food prep, after defecation, or after being coated in tough substances.
We’re in a giant pile of people talking about routing bathing to prevent body odor and the skin issues caused by poor bodily hygiene.
Washing with running water and a scrubbing action is sufficient for that purpose for many people. Bathing without soap is not a guarantee that you will have BO, a rash, skin lesions, or acne.

The Africa point isn’t really the gotcha you think it is. Soap working better faster doesn’t mean that a lack of soap doesn’t work. As you said, when they didn’t have soap they still washed. People are generally interested in being clean, and pragmatic. They’ll clean themselves, and if something helps them get cleaner faster, they’ll use it.

And yup, that passage does document that the Roman empire eschewed soap for personal hygiene until roughly year zero.

The primary action that soap has for fighting bacteria is breaking down oils and making it easier for debris and bacteria to be removed. Less food for the bacteria, and faster removal.
Bacteria will be destroyed by this process, but that’s coincidental to why soap works and provides benefit.
It’s why we don’t tell people to wash their hands by squirting soap on them, spreading it around and then rinsing it off. The critical step is the mechanical action that facilitates removal of debris with running water.

Yes, soap is necessary for hand washing because we need to maximize bacteria removal after defecation or before preparing foods or medical activities.

In the context of bathing however, you don’t need to sterilize your torso. You will also be rinsing your body far longer than you’re typically going to be washing your hands, which when combined with scrubbing results in a clean torso.

I’m not one of those people who’s opposed to using soap or anything, but that’s not the same as recognizing that it’s possible to wash and be clean without it.

Did I say pure luxury, or did I say it makes it easier?

I did forget that something is obviously 100% vital and indispensable or entirely worthless and void of functionality.

Early soaps were used for the preparation of textiles rather than personal hygiene.
As early as we invented soap, we actually had the notion that festering in your own rancid body oils is bad far, far earlier. As such, we had ways of dealing with that well before we had soap and people didn’t just immediately switch.

So go ahead and use soap. I certainly do. But if you’re looking to have your mind blown, take a shower and just scrub your skin with a brush, loofah or the palm of your hand and be amazed when you still get clean. If you’re really grimey, you can do what the Romans did and rub yourself with olive oil and scrape it off with a scraper before doing that.

Phrasing it like that is weird, but you don’t actually need soap. It just makes the oils and grime come off easier, so without it you just need to scrub more diligently.

If you’re cleaning yourself properly your skin is gonna be the same cleanliness afterwards either way. Cheap soap will dry your skin though, so use decent soap.

Cleaning regularly and effectively is the key, not the specifics. Soap just lowers the bar for effectiveness, and maybe adds “and also moisturize”.

A lot of it is also casting a wide net, and relying on people remembering your accuracy more than your inaccuracy.
“I’m getting the feeling that there was someone you were close with who’s no longer in your life, and that their departure happened in the fall or winter, or around then.”

Everyone has someone die or lose touch, and the given timeframe is nearly the entire year. The person will likely tell you the hit, and then you can build on it by agreeing with the detail they shared.

And even then, it’s not a piece of paper that you can just accept like a death coupon. It has to be signed and not contentious, and things need to line up very correctly.
My Dad had a DNR in his legal name, but the nursing staff and his room all used the common shortening of that name. Because the names didn’t line up when things went bad and there was no one with authority to clarify they, correctly, operated under the assumption that they did not have an order.

At one point EMS providers couldn’t even make the call, it could only be done by the medical facility. I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the case anywhere in the US though.

So, you’re correct that active emergencies take priority.

That being said, in essentially every place that has 911, both numbers connect to the same place and the only real difference is pick-up order and default response.
It’s the emergency number not simply because it’s only for emergencies but because it’s the number that’s the same everywhere that you need to know in the event of an emergency.

It should be used in any situation where it should be dealt with by someone now, and that someone isn’t you. Finding a serious crime has occurred is an emergency, even if the perpetrator is gone and the situation is stable.
A dead person, particularly a potential murder, generally needs to be handled quickly.

It’s also usually better to err on the side of 911, just in case it is an emergency that really needs the fancy features 911 often gives, like location lookups.

That is a good point.
On the flip side, they’re not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.

The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it’s only $1.59.
When there’s 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there’s a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it’s not like consumers can’t find a different one they’ll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.

Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they’re not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It’s hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you’re already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.

The time an automod hid a comment and then it was restored will be the first item in the list? Really?

I know that people like to get in a tizzy anytime anyone talks about codes of conduct in a programming environment, but this is such and absolute nothing to get hung up on.

Regardless of your feelings about the direction community organization is heading, save the energy for something actually impactful rather than just trying to stir up drama.

It looks like one comment was temporarily hidden, by an automod I’m guessing. That hardly qualifies as “running someone out”. He even continues to engage in the discussion a few comments later.

That’s called a timeshare, and they’re not a good idea. Very sketchy, almost impossible to get rid of if you don’t want it.

You have to sign up because although you bought the apartment, you’re not the only one who bought the apartment.

You buy it and then get to sign up to use it, and then you pay a fee to use it every year even if you don’t end up using it.

You don’t get to live there.

I’ve been a developer for about 15 years.

Nothing you’ve said makes me feel like you should quit.
Wanting more money is a perfectly respectable reason to want to quit, and if you think it would make you happier, go for it. Get paid.

It’s not better to be an engineer or anything. No one will mind or hold it against you if you come back and say that you were a jr dev, took a position as otherntech job, but it wasn’t for you so now your back with a new perspective and set of experiences.

Programming was once my passion. I got a lot of joy from it. I still do, and I would say that it still is a passion. But I’ve stopped really doing side projects unless it’s particularly interesting. There’s more to life than career development, and that’s okay.

Without seeing your code, I can’t know how good you actually are. Like most people, you’re probably average. Don’t beat yourself up over not knowing algorithms. No one knows those, they know the keywords and how to describe a problem and then how to pick the right one or tweak something to make it right.

The road from jr to senior is also less about technical proficiency than you would expect.
Technical competency is a must, but you’ll go further as a competent technical leader who can breakdown work, describe it, and help their teammates than as a lone high performer.

I was only okay with it because it wasn’t really a preorder. A refundable deposit to get in line didn’t feel the same, since I ended up with a good chunk of time to check reviews before deciding to commit my money, and I got the device a few days after paying.

Weird, sucks you had a rough time. I’m mostly perplexed about the network card issue, and the monitors. I haven’t had any trouble like that in more than a decade. I’ve honestly actually had more trouble with a new install of windows failing to detect hardware than Linux recently.

Well, I don’t generally expect an academic level of discourse out of image macros found on the Internet.
Usually when I see people talking about it, I do see people making clarifying comments and asking questions like you describe. Sorta like when I described how AI is an umbrella term.

I’m not sure I’d say that learning and hallucinating are personified terms. We see both of those out of any organism complex enough to have something that works like a nervous system, for example.

Well, that’s the issue at the heart of it I think.
How much should we cater our choice of words to those who know the least?

I’m not an academic, and I don’t work with AI, but I do work with computers and I know the distinction between AI and general AI.

I have a little irritation at the theme, given I work in the security industry and it’s now difficult to use the more common abbreviation for cryptography without getting Bitcoin mixed up in everything.

All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.

Weird, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that even remotely claimed.

Closest I think I’ve come is the argument that legally, AI learning systems are similar to how humans learn, namely storing information about information.

I believe they were implying that a lot of the people who say “it’s not real AI it’s just an LLM” are simply parroting what they’ve heard.

Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.
Autocorrect on your phone is a type of AI, because it compares what words you type against a database of known words, compares what you typed to those words via a “typo distance”, and adds new words to it’s database when you overrule it so it doesn’t make the same mistake.

It’s like saying a motorcycle isn’t a real vehicle because a real vehicle has two wings, a roof, and flies through the air filled with hundreds of people.