Normally: awfully darned funny. When sleep deprived: hardly funny at all.

By “ravioli bowl,” do you mean it currently has ravioli in it? If so, put it in the microwave for increments of like 30 seconds.

My wife had a procedure under general - one where they had her legs pulled away back after she was out. She woke up during it to the point where she could hear them talking, but she couldn’t say anything. She told the doctor at the follow-up that she heard them talking and he said lots of people think that, but it’s just hallucinations from the drugs. She said, “One of the things you talked about was your kid’s soccer game,” and he got an “Oh shit” expression and moved the conversation to something else.

Why did he do that, you might ask? Because another thing they did was make fun of my wife in the position she was in. Extremely unprofessional, and she could have made a stink about it, but she just indirectly let him know she heard it.

It feels like there’s few pranks these days that don’t end up being cruel. We have enough horrifyingly outrageous things in the news, that if the prank is trying to make us think something horrible happened that didn’t, we sure don’t need that. On the other hand, if it’s trying to make us think that something good happened, but it didn’t, then that’s a really perverse cruelty.

Being 60+ is finally getting to the end game and wanting to do the side quests you skipped, but sometimes you still have to grind for resources.

I’m case you’re wondering:

Chekhov’s gun (or Chekhov’s rifle; Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot. All elements must eventually come into play at some point in the story. Some authors, such as Hemingway, do not agree with this principle.

Probably so

Didn’t they just elect a fairly liberal president?

I’ve thought for many years that the first true cybernetics will be artificial eyes. If they can get self contained optic systems that fit into the eyeball space, it should be trivial to allow them to see a much wider spectrum, plus macro and telephoto. That would be cool. A computer interface for them would be awesome, but I’d have trust issues with that as well.

This thread makes me so sad about the future. Here we have a bunch of folks who are absolutely convinced that a real image is AI generated, some even after being shown that it predates AI image generators. But we live in a time when there are a giant number of real images online, the only AI generated images are very recent, and most of those have things like extra fingers. What’s it going to be like in twenty years, when image generators are so much better and there are so many more generated images? Having a photo of something will prove nothing.

I always try to explain to people that the key is the last two letters: language model. An LLM is a model of what a conversation should look like. Ask it a question and it’s intended to give you a response that looks like the right kind of thing. So if you ask it for a mathematical proof, it will give you one, but unless the thing you’re asking has the same proof written the same way in lots of places online, what it gives you won’t be correct, and probably won’t actually make sense mathematically, but it will look like the right kind of thing.

So likewise, if you ask it for relationship advice, it’s going to give you something that looks legit, but you’re an idiot if you get your relationship advice from an LLM.

I wonder what fraction of Bitcoin mining energy comes from renewable sources. I bet it’s teeny tiny.

The women in my life also say that it depends a bit on where. For instance, most just don’t want to be hit on at the gym.

Which is why so many women hate talking to men they don’t know: there’s so often that request for a date after even the most innocuous small talk.

This is a very cool and interesting list. Interesting enough to read from top to bottom, but in bite-sized chunks for people with limited time or short attention spans. Thanks for sharing!

The BBC and Reuters have both gone way, way downhill in recent years, but the concept is reasonably valid. AP and NPR are still good. Aljazeera is actually pretty decent for US news, though I’m not sure if that’s true for US news related to the middle east.

Reportedly he has a very worth of $50M. If that was just in investments getting 4 percent a year, that would be $2M annually for doing nothing. Kind of gross to stoop to that level for money when you have so much.

Courting the same demographic

No, some whoppers end up with the inside not all whipped and crunchy, but a little chewy. They’re great.

I like the answer by some philosopher that we have a sense of object permanence. If your neighbor replaced different parts of his house over several years until they all were replaced, you’d likely say it was the same house because at every point in time, it was there. But if one day he knocked the whole things down and rebuilt it exactly the same as it had been, you’d say it was a different house because there was that moment when it wasn’t there.