loobkoob

I don’t hate the idea of midichlorians, honestly. Or rather, I do hate them but I think that’s the point - to show that the jedi have kind of lost their way, are judging everything by “midichlorian counts” and tried to standardise and automate the process as much as possible rather than properly considering the human element and doing things on a case-by-case basis. If it’s not the point then, well… it should be.

I think there are some decent ideas in the prequel trilogy, I just think the execution was pretty bad.

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

Let me know what you think when you’ve listened!

Their song “Shut Up And Let Me Go” was fairly successful, too, so they weren’t quite a one-hit wonder.

I actually quite enjoy their 2018 album “The Black Light”, even if it wasn’t that well received. It’s kind of a stripped back indie dance record, and it’s fine. But they did an alternate version called the “Manchester Version” that had a much more raw, indie rock sound to it that I dig. It’s no masterpiece by any means, but it’s something I’m happy to put on every now and then.

Unfortunately for her, too. She might be successful, but she seems fucking miserable all the time.

I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• “I want something more friendly than that”
• “less professional”
• “more wonky”
• “less rounded”
• “less uncomfortable”

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

You can just say “well they’re stupid that’s what you get” or you can ask yourself why aren’t we getting these people on board while some greasy billionaire can?

I don’t necessarily like to just dismiss people as stupid, but a lack of education and the ability to understand complex issues is both a big issue for these people and a reason why the greasy billionaires can get them on board. Convincing someone that them paying some of their money into a union will actually result in better working conditions and more money for them - rather than just being poorer - is a lot harder and takes more understanding on their part than someone convincing them there’s less money to go around because there are more immigrants, for instance.

On top of that, people like to be able to absolve themselves of personal responsibility if they are given the option to. That’s not exclusive to right-wing people, but when that’s coupled with people wanting simple “explanations” because they don’t understand more complex systems with all their consequences, knock-on effects, etc, it makes it easy for right-wing politicians and media to offer simple scapegoats and get people on board.

To use the immigrants example again: not only is it not your average right-wing voter’s fault in any way - it’s the immigrants’ fault - but also, they don’t personally need to do anything to fix the issue, they just need to let the right-wing politicians get into power and it’ll all be solved for them. It’s all very comforting for them - much more so than being told it’s going to take ten years and some work on their part to improve things.

Those underlying issues are what left-wing people are trying to resolve already, though - wealth inequality, poor mental health, too much power in the hands of corporations and the mega-rich, removing outrage politics, etc.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

That quote is immediately followed by:

The truth hit me just as the house lights were starting to dim

so he doesn’t still think 222 minutes is the same as 2:22, at least!

Those are the best kinds of compliments in general, I think, whether it’s a parent complimenting their child, someone flirting, a platonic compliment, or whatever else! Compliment things that are within their control and that they can feel pride over and it feels a lot more meaningful.

As someone who doesn’t care for card games or poker: yes, it’s really that good!

The police didn’t actually arrest him, and I think the headline is a little misleading. Falter had been walking directly against the protest (and not attempting to cross the road like he claimed). The police stopped him and offered to escort him to his destination via a route that avoided the march. Falter refused and tried to push through the police officers and cross the protest march. The officers prevented him and told him he was free to go in the opposite direction, or that they would escort him past the protest, but that if he tried to go the way he was they would have to arrest him. It was clear they didn’t want to arrest him, and the officer offered probably a dozen times over the course of the ~15-minute interaction to escort him via a different route.

I think the officer did a good job of de-escalating, personally, and was incredibly patient in the face of Falter’s obnoxious, disingenuous antagonism. It’s a shame that there’s a single soundbite that, when stripped of context, portrays the officer poorly, but I think it’s clear to anyone watching the full video that the officer had no anti-semitic intent and handled the situation well.

The officer mentioned in the full video that Falter had been walking directly against the protest and wasn’t just trying to cross the road like he claimed. Which, “openly Jewish” or not, is a good reason to stop him, I think - for his own safety and the safety of the people in the march. And coupled with the fact that he very visibly is Jewish, it makes his actions seem a lot like a counter-protest - something the police generally try to limit or contain regardless of the protest subject.

The police officer had the patience of a saint, honestly. He offered to escort Falter to the place he wanted to go via a different route - so as to avoid the protest - probably around a dozen times. It’s very clear Falter didn’t really have any intention of getting to his claimed destination.

If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.

There’s potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it’ll be passed into law that it’s illegal to use a vehicle that doesn’t have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.

It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism…

I’m not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it’s tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I’d rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there’s an update, and even allow the car to “refuse to boot” if it detects it’s not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.

It’s the length of the combined total working lives of an entire football stadium full of people.

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!

“It’s absurd that we live in a society where people feel the urge to tell me to greet them with ‘sallam alleykum’”.

There’s already a huge difference between what happened and your example here. Your example is “people saying you must do X” . What happens when it comes to gender is people asking, “please do not do X”.

They’re not saying you must refer to them as, for instance, she/her, but rather asking that you do not refer to them as he/him/they/them/whatever. You’re free to just not use pronouns to refer to them at all if that suits you better - you can refer to them by name instead. You’re left with plenty of options and only a handful of restrictions.

Your example, on the other hand, is completely restrictive; you must take this single course of action, and there are no alternatives.

For what it’s worth, I do think we’re in a fairly transitional stage (ha) of how we as society deal with transgenderism. I think people being made to change their pronouns in order to feel comfortable is silly. Not because those people are silly - they’re just doing what they can to feel comfortable with the restrictions society has placed on them - but because society and language are silly.

Why do we refer to people by gender at times when it’s completely irrelevant? Someone having a penis, or male hormones, or whatever other “masculine qualities”, is irrelevant 99% of the time when I refer to them as he/him. If I say, “Donald Trump? Yeah, he’s a corrupt idiot,” then why does him having a penis have any bearing on the language I use there?

And why do we have such gendered roles in society? Why can’t men just wear dresses and make-up and link the colour pink and still identify as men? Why can’t women cut their hair short and wear baggy clothes and like engineering projects and lifting weights at the gym and still identify as women? I guarantee that if we could remove all those kinds of gender associations, you’d see a lot less trans people.

People transition because who they are and what they like, and what society says they have to be (based on their gender) are at odds with each other, and it’s literally easier for them to change gender in order to be allowed to be themselves than to change society. Being trans isn’t some kind of personal failing; it’s a failure of society to accommodate people who deviate even slightly from its rigid roles and expectations.

The ideal future, such as I see it, is for there to be no trans people because no-one feels a need to transition - they can just feel comfortable and accepted as they are. But until then, you need to recognise that there’s a societal issue and stop being a part of it. It takes such a small amount of effort on your part to use the pronouns someone requests, or to avoid using pronouns at all, and it makes such a huge difference to them to be gendered properly. So just be a decent, respectful person and accommodate their wishes and stop making their life worse.

The Expanse is the first thing that came to mind for me as a counter-example when I read your first comment so I’m glad to see you mention it! It even plays on the exceptionalism idea in book/season 3 and 4 where Holden seems special because >!Miller is appearing to him!< and because >!he isn’t affected by the eye parasites!< only to explain those things away with reasoning stemming from events that already happened in previous books. And any exceptionalism that comes after that is largely due to the reputation or skills characters have built for themselves rather than because they’re “chosen ones”.

If you haven’t read the books, I really recommend them!

I’m not Canadian and I don’t know the details of the situation, so excuse me if I’m wrong on this, but I think MP pay is a complex issue. It’s easy to say “they get paid way more than the average person, of course they don’t need a pay rise” but I think it’s important to find a balance between that and paying enough that becoming an MP is an appealing option for intelligent, driven people. If they have a choice between an median salary as an MP and 15x the pay in the private sector, the most brilliant people are going to be drawn towards the private sector purely for financial reasons.

It’s also important that they’re given enough financial security that there’s no risk of their finances being used as leverage against them. Some politicians will always just be corrupt and open to bribery or “lobbying”, of course, but you don’t want politicians that don’t have their own money from other sources being put in compromised positions because of their finances. And you don’t want politicians looking for other sources of income rather than focusing on their primary job.

Like I said, I don’t know the details. Maybe Canada has already found a good balance - where it’s already appealing to the best and brightest, and where their no risk of financial issues for MPs - and MP pay rises would be unnecessary. I just thought it was worth mentioning the fact that there can be some nuance to the situation!