merc

Interesting that you use the word “chord”, because guitarists and piano players have been remembering chords forever based on the position of their hands, not based on some letters and numbers. Your version isn’t more easily memorized, it’s just different.

Which is something you have to memorize.

Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions. By memorizing something else that’s equally or more obscure.

I’m guessing that in Sweden the temperature at about 2m underground is probably close to a refrigerator, right? In Canada it’s typically between 4C and 10C year round. So, as long as you can keep it dry, it’s very good for long-term storage. And, even if there’s no huge war coming, it certainly looks like the disruptions due to the Strait of Hormuz will last years at this point. We won’t even begin to see the effects of the fertilizers produced in the gulf being choked off until the harvest season comes. And if the farmers have enough fertilizer for this season, it might be next season’s crops that are hit. Living in a rich country means you probably don’t have to worry about starvation, but you might face huge prices, or a major lack of selection. People in poorer countries will probably have an even worse outcome than that. So, it’s a good idea to stock up on certain staples that you actually use before the prices start increasing.

The human-looking part is probably just a lure, like those deep-sea lantern fish. A human gets close enough to investigate and the insect pounces.

It's posts like this that just reinforce the idea that centaurs are freaky creatures. Why a six-limbed creature? Actual mammals have at most 4 limbs. What does it eat? Is the stomach a horse stomach or a human stomach? Does the human head have to eat 15 kilograms of grass per day, munching it inefficiently with its human teeth? Can it just blend it up and drink vast quantities of smoothies instead? Are the centaur's front limbs massively strong, unlike a horse, because it has to support a whole secondary torso right at the front of its body? Does the whole body have the same notoriously finnicky immune system and fragility of a horse? Where's the heart, is it in the human chest or the horse chest? If it is running hard will it be the human chest that's panting, using those tiny lungs to power an entire body? Or is there just an air tube down through the useless human chest all the way to the horse's mighty lungs? If the lungs being used are the horse ones, what's all that room in the human chest being used for?

Imagine a guy crawling along on the ground, except where his neck would be there's a second torso attached, and it goes upwards so that as the guy crawls the second torso is vertical.

You don't even have to get into the weight. Mammals have at most 4 limbs. Centaurs would have 6 limbs, and the mammal brain never evolved to handle that many.

It must be a lot of friends who don't all know each-other too. If it's a bunch of friends on one discord server, surely it's not too hard to get back on to that same server and say "my account was hacked". But, if you have dozens of friends spread across many servers, you might not even remember the servers.

Did it though? EFF says that the number of impressions their content received is why they left:

Those [2018] tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month.

Then

Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

But, I wonder what the real numbers actually are. Do we think Elon is honestly reporting real numbers to people? And, of the “impressions” that are real, how many of those are actually from bots rather than actual human users?

IMO, one of the biggest tricks Elon has managed to pull with Twitter is to convince celebrities and brands that it’s still a thriving site full of other people, leading to them sticking around because supposedly no other site gets as much traffic.

This is good for bitcoin.

Probably the only one who trained for it.

Sucks especially hard for the Canadian on board.

The models that cost 3x as much now suck. At least it used to be possible to get one that didn't suck.

But private media companies are always growing due to their immense Political power.

In the US that’s true, but is it true of other countries? It seems like it in some countries like Israel, Italy and Hungary. But, those seem to be countries that have already gone pretty fascist.

It's more the printer *companies* that are evil. Printers from the 90s and early 2000s were still pretty good. They had problems with paper jams, but that's not really surprising when you're moving a physical object around like that. The models designed for office use were really sturdy and built to handle a work environment that was still mostly based around paper. So, they expected to be used heavily. Since then, they've cheaped out on a lot of the components because printing is much less common so they're not expected to handle as much heavy work. But, more importantly, the DMCA has allowed manufacturers to load them up with DRM that refuses to use any ink that isn't sold by the printer manufacturer.

Were you directing the "you" in your comment at people in Russia, China and North Korea? If so, I don't think they'll be surprised that fascism is coming for them. I understood "you" to mean people who believe that they live in free countries with a free press.

No it didn't. The US never had well funded public media.

They'd never do it. Plenty of war crimes have been done by Democratic-party run governments too. They don't want to open that door, even if Trump's warcrimes are 10x as bad and 100x as obvious.

Other countries don't have this problem because they don't have the free for all media landscape that the US does. For example, in virtually every other country there's a well funded public broadcaster. And, even when that public broadcaster isn't dominating the viewership, it's normally seen as the most trustworthy news source. So, people can watch their favourite news channel, but when they want to fact check something they know they can tune in the public broadcaster. Other countries are also not as insane as the US when it comes to defunding public education. Having a population that is able to tell fact from fiction is seen as important by most other countries, even if that means slightly higher taxes. The US sees well funded education as communism, and is trying to get rid of it, or defund it at a minimum. The US is also one of the only places with a true 2-party duopoly with no other options for voters. Even in countries where only 2 parties have a realistic chance at forming a government, there are other parties that siphon off the crazies, and/or put pressure on the mainstream parties from both left and right. I've lived in 4 other countries and have visited dozens more. The US is truly unique, and not in a good way. I'm not saying it couldn't happen somewhere else, but it's much more likely to happen in the US because of unique US dysfunction.

It seems like there’s a market for a company that will buy Teslas ultra cheap, modifies them heavily, then rebadges them like Alpine does for Renault, AMG does / did for Mercedes, Abarth for Fiat, etc. These days those are all subsidiaries of the main brand, and even before that they had a cooperative relationship with the main brand. But, I can imagine a setup where the main brand doesn’t support or approve of what the modifier company does.

They don’t support sending messages over a serial / USB / network connection to say “battery is almost dead, shut down cleanly while you can” right? As far as I can tell, that’s the one key feature that a UPS has that a portable battery doesn’t. I took a look the other day and was amazed at how little UPSes have improved in the last few decades vs. everything else battery-related. At this point, I’d expect a consumer-grade UPS to have something like a Raspberry PI attached, and run a web server. I’d expect it to not just have a serial port for signaling, but to be able to run custom BASH scripts to send messages out to any attached device warning it about being on battery and keeping it up to date on the battery status.

Some form of “AI” will always be around. It has been around nearly as long as we’ve had computers. We’ve even had AI chatbots since 1966. But, the dot com bubble is a bad comparison. If you look at a graph of Internet users over time you can barely even see the dot com crash. The Internet was a massively useful phenomenon and more and more people kept using it. The dot com crash was basically an overestimation of how quickly people were going to adopt it combined with a massive drop in the value of Internet-based ads. What’s much more likely with AI is another AI Winter where a few things stick around, but mostly AI goes back on the back burner for a few more decades.

It wasn’t the French assisting the Americans against the British. It was the French assisting a rebellion started by some British colonists against the British government. In other words, they didn’t really care about why the rebels were rebelling, they didn’t even consider them to really be anything other than British, but they were willing to fight the British government, and that was good enough for France.

For real though, the only way to deal with pervasive surveillance is to give them too much noise to surveil.

The dark spot is only an issue if you're using a laptop or something. Pen and a pad of paper is fine outside. Loose stacks of paper is obviously not ideal. Unfortunately, most of us need to work using screens these days. I have hope for the future with these smart AR glasses. With the screen on the glasses, it shouldn't be a problem to use them in bright light. And, feeling the sun on your skin is one of the best parts about being outside when the weather is good.

I don't even like Hawaiian shirts. What's the point of that collar? Why is western wear so obsessed with putting that style of collar on absolutely everything.

The same thing would work with e-ink. It works fine in super bright sunlight. Unfortunately since it physically spins little balls with electromagnets the refresh rate is very slow compared to conventional screens.

Yeah. I read Heart of Darkness long before I saw that, plus I'd watched Apocalypse Now, which is a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness. I saw a list of their influences in making the game, and I'd already seen all of the other ones too. So... it was definitely taking FPS military games in a new direction, but it wasn't anything really new overall.

Does that actually change anything beyond the firefight though?

Yeah. The story is on rails. It's not an RPG where you can choose the good path or the evil path. I can imagine feeling bad about playing the evil path in a game where you had the option not to do it. But, if you want to see the story in a linear game like that you have click the mouse in the way required to get to the next save point. Feeling superior about not finishing a game like that is like feeling superior because you read a book where the main character is an antihero, and you chose not to finish the book. Besides, it's "deep" for a modern AAA shooter video game, but not particularly deep or upsetting in terms of storytelling.

Is "““defense””" in scare quotes because his real title is Secretary of WARRRRR?

They're also saving you money. You spend $1000 on ammunition to prevent the sinking of a $1 billion ship.

The history of torpedoes is fun. The original ones were attached to a spar at the front of boats. The boat had a steam engine which they used to get up to speed to try to ambush and ram enemy capital ships. The threat these boats posed to capital ships gave rise to “torpoedo boat destroyers”, which we just call “destroyers” today.

The first kinds of torpedo boats that launched stand-alone torpedoes did use torpedo tubes, but they weren’t underwater. Underwater launching of torpedoes only started when torpedo boats evolved into U-boats (undersea boats, a.k.a. submarines). Destroyers remained torpedo boat destroyers, but now rather than hunting small, fast boats on the surface using small, fast guns, they hunted stealthy boats that were underwater with depth charges.

Except real money is used for taxes and government spending. Fake money is needed only by criminals.

Bitcoin actually has legitimate uses Ransomware.

“Expensive cartoon monkey pictures”

As someone whose mother is a conspiracy theorist… HA! You think even a tiny fraction of the bullshit she believes is true?

Also, every AI company logo looks like a butthole. Kojima did that too, right?

I know a fucking grifter when I see a grifter Sure, I agree. That doesn’t mean that he always wins when he tries to grift. There’s a well known expression “you can’t con an honest man”. I’m sure that he thought he was getting the better end of the deal. But, clearly he didn’t. You don’t have to pretend he’s some omnipotent super-being who never gets scammed. If you want to claim that Logan Paul is a genius who never gets caught in one of his own attempted scams, go for it, but… I mean… look at the guy.

Clearly, you have an agenda and simply think that someone as dumb as Logan Paul couldn’t simply have made a dumb choice. You need to come up with some kind of conspiracy theory where he did it to benefit.

Which still means he lost more than half a million dollars from a bad investment.

Just accept the reality that dumb people make dumb “investments”.

Or aliens descended from space and messed with everybody’s minds so we all think that he’s a real person. C’mon, stick to reality.

That doesn’t help that he actually paid $635,000 for it and now it’s worthless. It’s as if he took half a million dollars and just set it on fire. Being able to claim a loss on his taxes, if that’s allowed (which I’m pretty sure it isn’t), doesn’t really help with that.

It’s fun whacking a straw man, but “I don’t agree with X” doesn’t mean “X doesn’t exist”, it means “I don’t believe people should engage in X”. If someone says “I don’t agree with pushing your religious beliefs on others”, would you reply the same way?

This might work for anybody who signed up for the military after Operation Epstein Fury started, but my guess is there aren’t going to be many of those. Most of the rest probably signed up while Biden was president, and thought at worst they’d be going to war to help keep the oil industry profitable.

It has been a while since I saw it, but you’re right. I mostly remember it as drama, not comedy.

Marinading is for meats that are too tough to cook with minimal preparation. If your hunk of meat needs to be marinated before you eat it, it's not a steak.

Can I pause for a second to just admire this guy’s walk-in pantry?