I would have sworn it was an article from this election cycle, but hey, that’s the brain for you…not nearly as reliable as we’d like to believe.

I wish I remembered where I read it so I could attribute it, but I saw someone describe Trump not as a liar but as a bullshitter. It’s not that he lies. It’s that he has no regard, one way or another, for whether what he is saying is a lie or not. He simply has a thought and recites it. It’s so effortless for him to lie because, from his perspective, it’s the same as telling the truth. If this is true, the pattern you’ve identified could be merely chance based on the probability that any random thought a person has is more likely to be wrong than right when they are incapable of learning new information.

I didn’t feel like I was doing it justice, so I found the sauce…from fucking 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar

I got my first PC in the mid 90s. 1st task was to take it apart, but after that, I first learned about the internet through friends, and we had a few computers at school in the library or the BASIC programming classrooms. My primary uses were the Blizzard chat rooms and playing OC starcraft with my friends (though we’d usually just get together at someone’s house and LAN for that.) I had AOL for a while, but couldn’t really afford it and neither could my parent. There was a thing called netZero I used for quite a while…it was free dial-up internet that displayed an ad banner on your desktop, but it wasn’t very intrusive, especially if you had a crazy high resolution (crazy high at the time being > 480x768). My primary uses were picking 2-3 mp3s to download overnight while I slept so nobody would pick up the phone and disconnect the internet, sharing dangerous and stupid amounts of personal info to basically anyone on IRC that asked (a/s/l anyone?), playing around with kitchy little hacker tools (one of my favorites allowed you to attach a malicious executable to your picture you’d send to people that would allow to do goofy shit like open their cd rom or flip their screen upside down). My mom’s only complaint about the internet was when she couldn’t use the phone (so I mostly browsed late at night). It was harder to find things, and there wasn’t much content…what was out there was just text since even images took 10s of seconds to download sometimes. Security and parental controls (beyond fear mongering) were practically non-existant and even when someone’s parents were competent enough to try and lock it down, most of the pare tal controls could be overridden with the local admin account, which we all knew the passwords to because we had install the stuff our parents wanted on the computer anyway.

Good question, thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Animals don’t taste the same way we do. For example, cats don’t have the receptors for tasting sweet things…so they can barely detect sweetness at all.

Dogs only have 25% as many taste buds as humans, so most things have a very mutes taste for them. Plus, every dog I’ve ever had absolutely LOVED cat shit covered in kitty litter, so I never put much faith in their sense of taste.

Yeah, they’ll have flavors they like more or less, just like us, but even we can’t trust our sense of taste as a metric for nutrition…if we could, we’d all be addicted to brocolli and spinach instead of processes foods and sugar.

That was a wild fitness class…

Often, yes, there just aren’t enough union shops anymore.

He’s being oppressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Even Krusty’s dad eventually loved him.

Absolutely. I’ve gotten myself spun up about determinism before and eventually decided that I’m going to believe in free will for the time being. Much like theism is for many, the idea of free will is kinda comforting for me and it helps me cope with reality to feel like I (and everyone else) has agency. Plus, if I’m wrong it doesn’t really matter and I never could have been right at this point in my life anyway.

But we never could have designed it any other way (assuming no free will)

High humidity can cause them to go off as well. Used to use a cool air humidifier in our kids’ room at night and had to stop because it would eventually set the alarm off.

That’s my biggest problem with the whole “burn it all down” mindset so many people espouse on this platform. If we burn down society, we aren’t gonna magically have a utopia. We’re still, at best, the same as folks during the so-called dark ages. Likely, we still basically tribal hunter-gatherers, and the only reason we have any semblance of modern life is because we put so much work into maintaining and improving it generation by generation.

And “Free speech absolutist”

Less good than helping the shooter before they went over the Rubicon…I think that’s the point.

LLMs are not general AI. They are not intelligent. They aren’t sentient. They don’t even really understand what they’re spitting out. They can’t even reliably do the 1 thing computers are typically very good at (computational math) because they are just putting sequences of nonsense (to them) characters together in the most likely order based on their training model.

When LLMs feel sentient or intelligent, that’s your brain playing a trick on you. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns and group things together based on those patterns. LLMs are human-speech prediction engines, so it’s tempting and natural to group them with the thing they’re emulating.

““Happiness isn’t having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” - Michael Scott” -Ulvain

Yeah, as long as we have Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Shkrelis in the world, we’ll always need a public entity strong enough to act as a counterbalance. I can’t imagine an entity other than “government” to do that.

The last thing I want is a visit from the privately-owned police department to interrogate me about using an ad blocker.

I’ve never had a snake, though I did help take care of one we had in our HS biology classroom. I know feeding them frozen mice is common, and some people thaw them in the microwave, but it makes sense a snake this large would need something more substantive than a mouse.

Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.

I wonder if someone just dethawed a mouse in there and the snake can smell it or if the snake has watched that happen enough times that it thinks the microwave is some sort of mouse vending machine