Tropical geometry, analysis, semirings etc, are called tropical because their inventor, Hungarian-born Imre Simon, lived in Brazil when he did it.

The inside of your mouth is on the outside of your body and so is the rest of your digestive tract, safely (well) isolated (unless it’s permeable) from your bloodstream. As a first approximation, our bodies are toruses. Just licking something is really not much more intimate than touching something unless it’s sugar which can be taken up right there on the spot. (At least glucose can and there’s enzymes in salvia don’t ask me for details).

All that said the Romans used lead(II) acetate as a sweetener and while definitely a bad idea, they didn’t all immediately keel over either. You’ll almost certainly be fine.

Pure water OTOH… you’ll burn your mouth because osmotic pressure tearing cell walls apart before the stuff dilutes to have a sensible amount of minerals in it. The tissue there is used to sudden violent cell death and heals quickly so no biggie, if you survived a too hot pizza you’ll survive water. Also, do eat that pizza to have enough minerals to replenish everything.

AI image generators don’t “consult” source images to generate an output.

Well, you have an artist breaking things down for an audience understanding neither the technical nor artistic aspect…

Modern AI generators are increasingly good at generating text. They still struggle a bit

I mean… SDXL still struggles a lot. The only thing you can get it to spell reliably is probably “Hooters”. There’s the one or other lora which makes it not suck completely but it’s still nowhere near actually good at generating text, the training just isn’t there. And even with that in place things like signatures are probably going to be gibberish.

While a naive (and cheaper) approach to AI generation doesn’t use layers, there are generators which do use layers,

Unless you start off training by feeding the model 3d data (say, voxels) alongside 2d projections I don’t think it’s ever going to develop a proper understanding of these kinds of things. Or, differently put: Learning object permanence (of sorts, related) is a meta-cognitive abstraction step that just won’t happen with the type of topologies we know how to engineer. It’s probably like 90% on the way towards AGI, so to get a simple topology to understand it we have to spoon-feed it permanence information alongside the (apparent) non-permanence.

Satisfactory did it earlier.

It’s quite easy to trick people with untrained eyes… for one, they have no idea what “consistent illumination” and stuff means. And something being off doesn’t mean that an AI made that mistake because humans make mistakes, too – photographs don’t, but the general problem is not just about telling realistic stuff apart but also illustrations. You’re looking specifically for mistakes that AI is likely to make, but humans are practically never going to make. And yes humans get hands wrong all the time.

Here’s a good video about what to look for and what not.

European police is very much armed. Also the UK has armed units even if your usual beat cop is limited to pepper spray and a baton or whatnot.

Elsewhere police regularly carry pistols, but are also trained in how to not use them. In my state there’s even an assault rifle (actual one) in every police car. Decades pass without anyone getting shot.

I think it’s a blend, in my example the police would bring them into custody, and then trained people work with them after that working out what happened and working with the justice department.

Nope. Police is not trained to deal with e.g. a psychotic person seeing zombies, if they try to take them into custody they’re only going to make things worse. It’s fine if police are first to the scene, but they should be trained enough to a) recognise that the person is psychotic, not actually threatening anyone b) call for backup from the people in white coats with haloperidol shots and c) shoo away bystanders. Perimeter duty. Yes, after 2 1/2 years training you’re on perimeter duty get used to it that’s your job.

The US approach to a paranoid schizophrenic scared shitless seems to be to make it worse by laying siege and throwing flashbangs.

There are many things that police aren’t needed at, like domestic issues, but there are plenty we do need them at too.

That’s probably the bulk of what beat cops are doing over here, short of investigating noise complaints on behest of the municipality and documenting traffic accidents, car thefts, maybe a break-in, whatever. Which is also why they always, and I mean always, come in male/female pairs.

House of the Dragon is definitely a good show, also, completely different show runners than GOT. The overall arc, AFAIK, is also already written it’s part of GRRM’s history of the world, they’re only filling in details. LotR is forgettable slop without grander rhyme or reason in favour of moment-to-moment engagement.

That observation is true, false, meaningless, and meaningful.

No. Consult your pineal gland.

Gen Z my sides that’s pre-boomer stuff. You’re like 100-200 years behind the curve on absurdism and you’re not even doing it well.

Have you tried not being a cabbage?

Eris help us, the zoomers are here with lame humour.

Hence why post-scarcity is the natural death point of capitalism.

Your question is essentially the same as Freudians arguing among themselves about the existence of a death drive: How could it possibly benefit the individual? If it can’t in some way benefit the individual, how can it be a drive? How does it mesh with the pleasure principle? The answer is simple: It doesn’t benefit the individual. In certain circumstances it benefits the genome, that’s why us seed-pods can, in certain circumstances, enter states in which it is pleasurable.

And all-encompassing and all-powerful, indeed, religious, as capitalism may seem right now it, too, is a seed pod. It does not have to will its abolishment to bring about the material conditions abolishing it.

Of course there’s also nothing speaking against it not making things unduly nasty for us. But that’s mere politics, not fate.

And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a “who works for who” basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.

Presumably when we’re talking off-site backups we’re talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.

Isn’t that what tapes are for.

I’m not sure how they’re doing it but in Germany all those PET bottles go into a centrally-managed recycling stream (because 25ct deposit) and I bet they have some technical norms around that kind of stuff. The bottles are all crushed to save space, incl. the caps, which at least in the case of the water bottle next to me is HDPE. Judging by the haptics the label is PET, a flimsy banderole glued (fused?) on at the seam.

Either they’re doing it chemically by breaking up the PET and then fishing out the rest from the soup (is that possible?) or what would also work I guess is shredding and mechanical sorting – the label is flimsy, the bottle always transparent, the cap never transparent. Such stuff.

bamboo or metal straws

Silicone. Silicone is the perfect straw material. Bamboo I guess works for disposable ones but I’ve never used one. Definitely too short for 1.5l bottles though.

I think that’s mostly UK and France. As in: I have an Opinel lying around here, perfectly legal to carry in any situation as long as it’s not a protest or such, it’s a French knife, lots of tradition behind it… and it’s illegal in France.

Rules in Germany are quite simple: If the blade is longer than IIRC 14cm (palm of your hand), or it is a locking blade that’s designed to be opened with one hand, you need a good reason to carry it. Like, walking on the street towards the forest with an axe over your shoulder is fine because you have a proper reason, into a mall, not so much. Butterflies and some other one-handed opening mechanisms popular with notorious people are outlawed. Fixed blades with certain features, say, guards or more than one edge, are rightly classed as bladed weapons which you generally need to keep at home. Everything else is a tool you can EDC, and the only thing you need to buy a sword is your ID to show that you’re 18.

The whole thing is about bottle caps found on beaches. I assume people just lose track of them, you might put it down on your beach towel and then something moves and a second later it’s in the sand getting buried.