Really gives the impression of that feeling you get when a school project is due soon but you have no idea what to do and don’t particularly care to do it but know you have to do something if you don’t want to get a 0.

Because our brains interpret colours and shading relative to their surroundings. That specific blue is on the opposite side of the colour wheel from red, so that relative lack of blue can be interpreted by our brains as red.

Remember that white is all colours present, so white next to white will have more red than white next to blue.

You’d get a similar effect if you stare at a bright blue version of the can for a while and then look at a blank white page or close your eyes. The after image isn’t the same colour as the thing you were staring at, it’s the inverse of that colour.

And the reason for the questioning isn’t that they are worried about public funds but because they want all knowledge privately owned so they can sue competition instead of having to compete.

So you’re saying that that number keeps going up as I get closer and closer to the actual weekend when I install it as my daily driver?

That’s a part of it. Another part is that it looks for patterns that it can apply in other places, which is how it ends up hallucinating functions that don’t exist and things like that.

Like it can see that English has the verbs add, sort, and climb. And it will see a bunch of code that has functions like add(x, y) and sort( list ) and might conclude that there must also be a climb( thing ) function because that follows the pattern of functions being verb( objects ). It didn’t know what code is or even verbs for that matter. It could generate text explaining them because such explanations are definitely part of its training, but it understands it in the same way a dictionary understands words or an encyclopedia understands the concepts contained within.

Yeah, one that I always think of is the see-saw one where a sky diver’s parachute failed so he aimed for a see-saw with a girl sitting on one end which resulted in the girl launched shot upwards and then landing safely on top of a building.

Their first test used basically a metal plank on a fulcrum and the forces did more to bend the plank than they did to launch the girl and she didn’t get high enough.

Their second attempt used a see-saw that was built using suspension bridge tech to essentially make it instructable, resulting in fatal forces from the launch. At this point, they called it busted.

But I see two unrealistic extremes where reality would exist somewhere in the middle where see-saws are designed to not break easily but not to the point of being indestructible and there might be a sweet spot where the forces are high enough to launch girl several stories up but not high enough that she dies from the forces.

Also, for the bull in a china shop one, I’m guessing that saying resulted from a bull ending up inside a china shop during a running of the bulls event, where stress would be high and there wouldn’t be an easy and obvious path out on the other side, plus maybe a shopkeeper suddenly trying to get it out in a panic. I think that would get the expected result, especially after a few shelves have broken and each step makes more broken sounds.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pizza place sell small pizzas for a decent value. They price them to not sell. I’m guessing because they aren’t as predictable for the amount of volume you might need.

It wouldn’t have been cheaper to go for bigger (ignoring deals), but it wouldn’t have been much more and you’d have leftover pizza for lunch the next day.

A preemptive strike is still suicide even if it’s done because early detection capabilities are reduced or lost. And a first strike against someone without early detection capabilities still isn’t a guaranteed win when the subs are still hidden and the doomsday device is still armed.

IMO a fumbled and later recovered launch is different from the enshitification of video games like P2W, MTX in general, lootboxes, releasing what should be patches as paid DLC, invasive DRM and anti-cheat. I’d file all of those under bad design, while a bad launch is more of a bad execution. There can be overlap, like if they fully intended for early players to fill the role of beta testers.

The way I approach it is I try to avoid the bad design stuff entirely but just avoid buying new games at release and definitely never pre-order. I’ll also support games in early release if I really like the concept and want to give them a better chance at being able to pull it off, but I go into those with the understanding that it’s not complete right now and there’s a chance it never will be. But I don’t see any reason to hold anything against the games that have messy launches but later recover.

Though I’ve learned to not jump on the hype train and that makes it much easier to not take any of this stuff personally.

I’ve also been avoiding playing games that involve some third party launcher or login. I’m not perfectly consistent with this and have bought some games before realizing they had this, but even steam games can be subject to a company deciding they don’t want to support their game anymore (which IMO is fair) and just killing the game off entirely, which isn’t fair. I’d like to see a requirement that other steps be taken to keep it going without their active support. Like opening the source and relinquishing all copyrights on that code. If they want to keep parts of it, then pull it out into a library that they continue to maintain.

Putting all the eggs in the solar basket has risks, too. Like a large volcano eruption that reduces the amount of light that reaches the surface for a few years would be a double whammy, affecting food production as well as electricity production (which we’d need to rely on to try to offset the food losses). If we’re instead facing brownouts or full blackouts, that’s a recipe for a complete loss of stability. I suspect less solar energy reaching the surface would also reduce total wind energy (less localized heating would mean lower pressure differentials, but I could be missing other significant parts of this equation).

I’d be most comfortable with a nice mix of energy sources combined with mothballing instead of decommissioning some capacity as renewables are able to take over more and more of the day to day energy needs so that we’re prepared to deal with an emergency like that.

I’d also like to see more food production moved to vertical farms that can be powered by electricity rather than relying entirely on the sun and weather. But I do understand that the scale of food production would make doing that with a significant portion of the food supply very difficult. But with climate change (plus nutrient depletion of the soil), keeping so many eggs in the “just keep farming” basket also doesn’t seem like a great idea.

I wonder if people will soon realize that that rage they have for scalpers is just directed at the amateurs and that the upper class is full of people doing pretty much the same thing just in less obvious ways.

Your employer (if you work for a private for-profit company) pays you x for your labour and then takes the proceeds of the labour and sells it for y where y is (generally) much higher than x. A business is profitable when the sum of all y is higher than the sum of all x.

If it’s a non-profit, then the difference between y and x must be put back into the business in some way, which could be an investment into an expansion of its scope or it could be a raise for some or all of the workers (payroll is not profit, it’s an expense). And that could mean just the CEO gets a raise, because some of the leeching is via different pay levels for different people that isn’t based on just the difference they are directly making to the income.

Public services can vary. If the service is profitable, then the profit goes into the budget of the government entity(s) that run it, as determined by legislature. So everyone is acting as the middleman there. If it’s not profitable, then it’s covered by taxes, at cost. There’s still varying salaries but it’s subject to government oversight, so things shouldn’t get as unbalanced as they would in the private sector, at least in theory. Though even in the public sector, there’s this assumption that promotions should come with big raises, regardless of how the workload changes, so you can still have people at the top making orders of magnitude more than people at the bottom.

I’m in Canada and don’t know anyone I can say for sure has been affected by gun violence or threats of it. I’ve personally been in a situation where I was trying to make small talk with a wannabe gangster and apparently asking about jobs can be dangerous I guess when they make money from mostly illegal shit and he threatened me until my friend came over and convinced him I’m not an under cover cop. But even that threat was a, “what if I had a piece” rather than “I’m going to shoot you”.

I only ever saw or shot bb guns until in my 30s when I did some target shooting in my friend’s back yard. He kept his guns all locked up when he wasn’t using them, ammo locked separately. Partially for the obvious safety reasons (even though he lived alone), partially because a part of the license is that police are allowed to come and inspect how you are storing your guns. I don’t know how often this is used in practice (don’t think my friend ever had it happen), but it’s a sign that the legal state of guns is very different across the border.

I can’t even think of any robberies using violence or threats of violence I have first hand or second hand knowledge of. Theft, yes, but like the “car was left unlocked and someone noticed” or “someone picked an easy to pick lock”. That last one happened to me, I figured out who it was and just told him to stop coming around and I’d leave it alone and I never saw the guy again. It might have been a bit dangerous if I wanted satisfaction from the situation, but I think there might have been an equal chance he would have just accepted the L and paid be back for the weed he stole.

Pistols require a seperate license that is much harder to get. For rifles and shotguns, you can get a license as a hunter, recreational shooter, or collector (amateur is fine but you do need to get your hunter license first before you can use it to justify a gun license). There was a gun registry but the conservatives scrapped that the last time they were in power.

For pistols, they are limited to certain professions such as police officer, military (I assume), or professional hunter/trappers who work in bear territory and aren’t necessarily carrying a rifle or shotgun ready to go if suddenly confronted by a bear. I believe there’s certain self-defense scenarios that allow them (like a proven threat that is difficult to neutralize, like with connections to organised crime).

It’s gotta be extreme because carrying anything for self-defense is generally illegal. Like if you have a pocket knife you use to open packages, that’s ok, but if you carry that same knife for self-defense purposes, it’s an illegal weapon. Some knives like switchblades or butterfly knives that can be deployed with one hand are always illegal.

I think this is a bit much, because knives that don’t fold are ok and IMO the question should be more about what scenarios one thinks it is ok to defend themselves with a weapon than having had that consideration at all. That said, the situations where someone might think a weapon is called for but isn’t are probably more common that situations where one is necessary to defend oneself. But I digress.

The pretty much ban on pistols I think is what makes the difference. In some states, the risky part of carrying a pistol is about if you use it or if you specifically shouldn’t have one (felony or something). In Canada, just carrying it runs the risk of losing it and catching charges, which means that situations where someone would use a hidden pistol in the moment are more likely to have a cool down period while they go get their gun and might realize that it’s not worth it or might not be able to find their victim again afterwards.

There is some gang activity but I think even that is way more chill here and any violence is probably more related to score settling than turf control. I get the impression that the cops are more chill about non-violent stuff here, so that could play into the equation in that the risk differential is higher if violence is involved. Or I could be wrong about that because I’m not a minority (but I suspect it’s because police violence is investigated (and not just by themselves) and dealt with more consistently here, and the lower likelihood of getting randomly shot probably allows them to be more at ease).

• capital

Yeah, ultimately the issue is probably more about an attempt to go from a completely unmanaged file system where it was just big free for all with the hope everyone would behave nicely to a more managed design that still needed to maintain backwards compatibility with the old system where there were a slew of programs that depended on a bunch of undocumented behavior.

And then at some point, games started saving inside documents. Ok, it makes sense to have game save files in a user area instead of a subfolder in the game install area, but they aren’t documents. Just make a new game saves folder or something like that, don’t just stick all my game save files in the same area, cluttering up my own organization.

Though I did solve it kinda by just making a new documents subfolder in my documents where I put my actual documents.

Funny how pictures like these reduce my nostalgia rather than increase it. I really don’t miss those monitors that were simultaneously tiny and huge. If any could handle 720p, they would have been high end. Moving them sucked, especially any that had a flat screen because they needed a lot more glass to properly refract the light.

And that tiny laptop might have been considered large for the time, too.

Edit: I do like that case, though. It’s probably lacking in air circulation and the components might not be properly grounded, but it looks decent.

Two words on completely different paths, probably headed in completely different directions, but then they smashed together and because they sound similar, one could end up inheriting the evolution of the other.

What happens to those who don’t vote?

Another animal later: “oh these ones just have very straight sticks, at least that won’t be as bad as the rocks–WTF THEY THREW IT INSIDE ME!”