When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.

Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.

The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.

The devil is in the details. You have to define homelessness first. Would a ban on that even be legal? And what is the state doing to prevent it and/or what are the penalties for violators? There is certainly a chance that this inches painfully close to keeping people concentrated, in a camp, which should, in a sane world, weigh heavily against such a ban. But if a ban meant anybody on the street gets put in an apartment, given medical care including therapy, and then given a chance to become a productive member of society within their means, then it wouldn’t be imprisonment. That’s the Finnish solution to the problem, which benefits from having a smaller population in the country overall and a smaller percentage of homeless people than, say, Los Angeles.

Fools! That’s exactly what was missing from creating Skynet! The workers were replaced with slop bots, now management gets replaced by slop bots too! It’s slop bots all the way down! Run for the hills!

It seems to me like you are coming to grips with the fact that statistics are nice but one mustn’t trust those one hasn’t forged personally.

I imagine there may be political or even practical reasons why they draw the line there. A lot of times lines remain fixed because they made more sense when they were drawn ages ago and now it’s just a pain in the butt to change them. Or to keep numbers comparable with those from previous years.

Unless it’s an air gapped machine run for a specific reason, nobody should run Win7 in 2026. If it’s connected to the internet, you are doing that at your own peril. Obligatory switch to Linux.

“Censorship” is probably not quite the right word here, is it? You’re thinking more along the lines of privacy. Censorship is what a government does. And that would affect the content of the internet more than anything else you come in contact with. And that is roughly the same whether you run your browser on a Win7 or Win11 machine (save maybe some more modern features the outdated browsers cannot do).

If you’re worried about the spectre of age verification, I would suggest switching to Linux and investing into a VPN.

A memory wipe would make sense. Or they go back in time, say, to punch some more dinosaurs, come back, and there is just Bob at her station and nobody bats an eye because the timeline was changed. A reverse Sela (the RomYarLin from TNG) move. Because I’d like both of these solutions, I’m very positive they’ll find a far less satisfying one.

I think you could save this one still. People knew his name before he was elected leader because he was imprisoned by his racist government. That’s not really a good thing.

Aung San Suu Kyi, for a short time while in power before she tolerated genocide on her watch, would have sort of fit in the Mandela category as well.

Strange New Worlds is en exercise of writers writing themselves into exceedingly narrow corners if in the end they want to connect to TOS. They had a descendant of Khan on the crew, half the crew dated her, yet none of that comes up when they meet the actual Khan. I wonder how they will connect that story point.

During the wedding episode, nobody sees Trelane as Trelane. They see other people he inhabits. In the daily soap ep, only Pike sees him, and he isn’t around later. So they kind of got that right, I think.

The first coherent space opera was Babylon 5 where one creative mind oversaw everything and in the end wrote all the scripts. The reboot Galactica is another example. You could tell The Expanse was all made up by these two guys. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, a Stargate possibly. But Trek and also Doctor Who all change with their changing writers and over the decades. There are periods where certain people are in charge and there is stability in story and focus. But then their tenure ends and somebody else comes in. And if it all made sense and everybody loved it the same way we’d have nothing to bitch about.

I think the problem arises mostly from trying to add subtitles to arrrr creatively acquired videos where the settings of the creator were not adhered to in the strictest sense.

I mean, I totally wouldn’t know about that myself, I just heard about it online.

Eight minutes can seem very long though.

I understand that you are inconvenienced by this chance in policy. Why do you do the research though, answer your own questions, and then come here to ask them anyway? Are you lacking the confidence in your own research or do you wish to show off what a knowledgeable cosmopolitan gamer you are?

The “I find it fucking disgusting, bro!” fraction probably isn’t here. Or if they are, they are probably smart enough not to walk into this wood chipper.

There is a strong correlation between shame people feel for having tried it before or for not being able to admit to themselves that they feel this way and then how loud they get. Pair that with religiosity or just a very conservative environment and upbringing and you get the aforementioned bros. It’s more about how they feel, how insecure they are, than about anything physically off-putting. And as somebody who once reacted poorly to being hit on by a lovely Aussie, I think it’s also the somewhat unexpected element of it. We are pattern recognisers. Heterosexual is the majority. We can easily get freaked out by something that’s different. And a lot of the LGBTQ+ folks are still not living their romance in public (if there is some and they also want to) because they avoid wood chippers society has an unfortunately abundant supply of for them.

She wrote another book on the Empire, which is also good.

This is about timelines. In the short-term it’s a win, in the medium-term it’s a threat, in the long-term it’s potentially catastrophic. They need money now.

This sort of scenario assumes that these companies will always be in a stronger position. I don’t think that’s a given. The companies that plundered all data everywhere, torrented what was available, and reluctantly bought what couldn’t be stolen to train their models are being passed on the right by companies that just look to steal or copy their stuff (e.g. China is inferencing the hell out of them). The hostility towards data centers also forces more development away from centralised servers onto local environments. At the same time, stuff is also being released as open source. I think there is a big chance that the big companies and their models today will be mentioned in the first chapter on the history of this technology but will fall by the wayside rather quickly. Their market position is underpinned by a belief that in the future they will be raking in the dough on subscription fees once they get the dirty work of being started here financed, no matter how. That’s a mighty big bet. Not only is a bubble economy a problem, there is no guarantee to protect their “IP.” It’s really like investing in very expensive tulip bulbs.

Also, we don’t fully understand this technology. A lot of the experts don’t either. Anybody who says they’re pretty sure they know where this road will take us in the next five years has ulterior motives.

A little more broad than just reunification but it chronicles a chunk of it from a GDR point of view: Katya Hoyer Beyond The Wall.

I’m an alien. I’m a legal alien.

That’s a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn’t look sexy enough. Or only when it’s hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.

The numbers 47 and 42 are sacrosanct. The former is Trek where it shows up a lot, the latter is the answer to everything. Pick a different number, ChatGPT!

I remember the day when the training wheels came off my bike and it was glorious. The feeling of success you can only feel as a child when you have mastered something you think you should do. They didn’t come off because they were no longer cool. They were never cool to begin with. And you didn’t have much say in the matter anyway.

I am willing to believe that balance bikes to proper bikes is a better learning experience, according to the boffins. That doesn’t mean though that anybody who learned on training wheels is inferior. People who learned to ride a bike like that also won the Tour de France.

I think if I was caught like this, the last thing I’d want to do is talk to the media about it. Not even under a pseudonym. But this story is probably not here to make Google feel bad and return some of the money. This is a reminder for parents everywhere to review payment and parental settings on anything their kids use online. You can be smug enough to say my 8yo doesn’t stream on Twitch or whatever because why tf would you let them anyway. But you’re deleting the credit card off of Google Play because you forgot it was there because parenting makes you forgetful at times.