Poe’s Law.

The panic at the existence of additional options you don’t use and will never use is, unfortunately, strong in some people. It is what it is.

I also have an iPhone and absolutely would love a 2nd store. I’m trying to figure out how to side load as it is, so I can get a version of YouTube that can keep playing audio while the screen isn’t on. I’d love that. My mother would be in fits of panic at the thought.

I absolutely and completely agree with you. I’m just saying, my aging mother does not. Having the option, to her, would make the iPhone a far inferior product. She is not alone in her opinion.

The scuttlebutt is that buffalo as a verb was only attested very briefly in upstate New York and the Midwest for a brief period of time in the early 1900s. It never spread nationally, and definitely not internationally.

However, checking Google ngrams shows that “he buffaloed” and “was buffaloed”, (to ensure it’s being used idiomatically as a verb and not just in the famous example sentence) emerged in 1900, peaked in the 1950s, but has sustained small but constant use in published print since then. I was actually expecting the ngram to rapidly drop off and never recover… shocked to see that some people still use it as a real phrase.

Not that I’ve heard of. Now, whether Homo sapiens idaltu is a real separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens is disputed, so there’s a question as to whether the second sapiens actually differentiates us from anything… but I haven’t seen any signs of any consensus against calling ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens to date.

I actually have seen the closed garden nature of Apple be listed amongst its attractive features between laypeople. There’s no fiddly bits, everything is simplified, almost no configuration required, and the closed garden means there’s some implied quality control going on. For people for whom computers and technology is scary, the closed garden is a feature, not a bug.

Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.

Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.

Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.

But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.

Not to me. Sounds more like someone who’s been in a lot of social media arguments, has a vague understanding of the counter arguments, and is trying to solidify their answer to it.

Can piefed be accessed through voyager? I heard people talking about it as a good way to avoid all the tankies, but I couldn’t find it on the instance search within voyager.

My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.

There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing

Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.

Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.

What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!

It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.

After research, I’ve found that same information. What I haven’t figured out is what kids mean when they say it. Like, I get yeet. I know it came from a video, but when spoken it has an actual meaning, basically “I have great enthusiasm but lack finesse”, most useful when hurling things. But skibidi doesn’t seem to have a meaning? It comes from the video, but as a word it’s meaningless? So… why say it if it doesn’t convey meaning?

I’ve sung “Sweet Child o’ Mine” to my son (with minor lyric changes, she->you for instance) in a soft voice almost every night since he was born… three and a half years now.

Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.

And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.

Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.

I do teach English as a Foreign language, I used to teach computer programming (at a beginner level), and sometimes I daydream about teaching math according to principles from the essay A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, but I am unlikely to be given the leeway to try.

I feel like “passing it through a statistical model”, while absolutely true on a technical implementation level, doesn’t get to the heart of what it is doing so that people understand. It’s using the math terms, potentially deliberately to obfuscate and make it seem either simpler than it is. It’s like reducing it to “it just predicts the next word”. Technically true, but I could implement a black box next word predictor by sticking a real person in the black box and ask them to predict the next word, and it’d still meet that description.

The statistical model seems to be building some sort of conceptual grid of word relationships that approximates something very much like actually understanding what the words mean, and how the words are used semantically, with some random noise thrown into the mix at just the right amounts to generate some surprises that look very much like creativity.

Decades before LLMs were a thing, the Zompist wrote a nice essay on the Chinese room thought experiment that I think provides some useful conceptual models: http://zompist.com/searle.html

Searle’s own proposed rule (“Take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one…”) depends for its effectiveness on xenophobia. Apparently computers are as baffled at Chinese characters as most Westerners are; the implication is that all they can do is shuffle them around as wholes, or put them in boxes, or replace one with another, or at best chop them up into smaller squiggles. But pointers change everything. Shouldn’t Searle’s confidence be shaken if he encountered this rule?

If you see 马, write down horse.

If the man in the CR encountered enough such rules, could it really be maintained that he didn’t understand any Chinese?

Now, this particular rule still is, in a sense, “symbol manipulation”; it’s exchanging a Chinese symbol for an English one. But it suggests the power of pointers, which allow the computer to switch levels. It can move from analyzing Chinese brushstrokes to analyzing English words… or to anything else the programmer specifies: a manual on horse training, perhaps.

Searle is arguing from a false picture of what computers do. Computers aren’t restricted to turning 马 into “horse”; they can also relate “horse” to pictures of horses, or a database of facts about horses, or code to allow a robot to ride a horse. We may or may not be willing to describe this as semantics, but it sure as hell isn’t “syntax”.

Remember when windows said 10 would be the last version of windows, and they’d just keep sending updates from then on? That lie didn’t last long…

And they’re EoLing it this coming October! Can’t they wait until 12 at least to do that? I can’t remember the last time the end of life came before two versions had gone by. Wtf!

Mine was just all repeated digits of whatever hour. 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11 all “counted” in my mind when I was entering university, and it happened so freaking often it was really weirding me out. It seemed like anytime I glanced at a clock without other intention, it would be one of those times. There were probably times I looked at a clock normally, but of course confirmation bias reinforces things. But it really did seem far more often than you’d expect. My bet is that my inner clock was prompting me to look at those times because I got an adreneline or dopamine or something spike, so my subconscious got trained into finding it.

Dusting and cleaning does not defeat the purpose. You’re making the mistake of thinking that cleanliness is boolean… true or false. It’s not that it’ll just get dusty again, it’s that it will get more dusty, and then even more dusty, and then dustier still, and there is actually no real practical limit to how filthy a place can get. Cleaning resets the progress to a point where you can live again.

Now, there is a related cleaning story that could be called defeating the purpose that stuck in my mind. It’s a bit Luddite in nature, but does have a point. It’s a micro-story from inside the book “Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh”:

The story was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop.

But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town—so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running.

In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever.

Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones every bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

That’s an example of defeating the purpose, where the thing you do actually makes it worse. A similar “defeating the purpose” is when a bunch of companies lowers wages to save money, making it so that people can no longer afford their products, meaning that they earn less money after all.

I will say that the blow dry option doesn’t really help sufficiently after using the bidet to avoid me wanting to use TP to dry off, but it might be sufficient for lady parts after peeing. Don’t have a vagina personally, so can’t say for sure.

A paramour is an “other lover”. Para = beside, amour = love. It’s not a casual fuck buddy, it’s your cheating partner. I’m surprised to hear you say it’s unknown as a word these days? Seems like just a normal word to me, albeit one I’m happy to go without using as cheaters suck.