this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.
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Meta often means "one layer up," e.g. "metaphysics" is the way of the world that our mundane world is embedded in. A reader might remark that the book Gödel Escher Bach is "pretty meta," which might mean it breaks the 4th wall.
The opposite to meta is mesa. For instance, AI safety researchers sometimes talk about mesa-optimizers, meaning an optimizer which itself is optimised by another optimiser.
Facebook's metaverse is apparently misnamed -- seeing as it runs on computers which are in our own universe, it really ought to be called the mesaverse, and our physics are its metaphysics.
The Meta is a character in the hit internet series Red vs Blue.
Related, I always explained it as “narrative about,” as in a meta-narrative is about the narrative. Same difference as one layer up I suppose.