I dunno who Tim Duncan is. I simply don’t care enough to ask my AI assistant.
But since it’s being asked: Something in between.
I’m a plain vanilla ice cream kinda guy for what it’s worth, and I don’t consider myself an ice cream snob, but the past few times I’ve had ice cream sandwiches it tasted like the ingredients would be listed something along the lines of hydrogenated deoxymethylothmeticexpialidocous #6, high fructose corn syrup, titanium dioxide, artificial flavors. No thank you.
I’ll be interested to read the other comments when I have the time/attention span.
It could just be the part of the country where I live (i.e. deeply conservative rural south), but everybody I know who identifies as a Libertarian (going to hand wave over the reality of whether the pedants and purists would agree) is basically what’s termed as “Republican-lite” or “Conservative-lite” aka right-wing.
If I tell you I’m a Libertarian, but my voting record is such that I’ve essentially only voted for Republican candidates in all prominent elections in the past decade (or sometimes more) and/or the majority of my political speech is in opposition to Democratic politicians and liberal policies, what does that suggest?
If I identify as a vegan but I like to eat meat with every meal, am I really a vegan?
If I’m being completely fair and objective, not all birds eat “bird seed” and not everyone is well-informed about the diets of various types of bird. But also, at least where I live, some parks have signs that specifically say not to feed the ducks/geese at all, and I can totally understand how that might lead people to conclude that it’s not safe to feed them.
On the other hand, I’m reminded of the time that I was at an insect exhibit when one of the educators running the booth referred to “these animals” and the woman behind me asked something like “bugs is animals?” And it still leaves me perplexed that otherwise seemingly fully functional people make it to adulthood thinking that insects are not animals.
Who am I to judge the will of Darwin’s Fury?
I used to watch The Golden Girls with my granny all the time growing up! This show was way ahead of its time.
I’m kind of curious about this, admittedly out of naivety and ignorance.
The company posted a bunch of files (images in this case) to a publicly accessible file storage bucket and apparently with guessable / iterable naming conventions and no access restrictions in place. Suddenly they decided that was an oopsie, so that somehow makes it illegal to have accessed the images? Were the “hackers” supposed to infer the intended permissions and adhere to that instead of what was actually implemented? Is the crime that the images were shared after the company changed its mind and updated the file permissions on their server?
I have doubts that any credible and serious scientific discovery would involve this degree of anthropomorphism when it comes to assigning motivation to an animal’s behavior.
But let’s say I ended up with a hecking case of brain worms who devoured the vast majority of my critical thinking skills and was able to completely ignore that first point, this still doesn’t quite compute. If you’ve ever had cats and/or dogs in your life, then you are probably also aware that each one has its own unique personality and behaviors. Even if we assume that they have human-like rationalizations and emotional capacity, does it even make sense to believe that they all uniformly perceive people in the same uniform manner?
I wouldn’t even bother. He’s probably a bill collector.
I’m not sure that red tape is what killed it for me, to be honest.
Up until about 5 years ago, there were state and federal programs (IIRC mostly in the form of tax rebates) where I live such that panels and installation were essentially 50% off. In addition, the power company paid 1-to-1 for the excess energy. The folks who were lucky enough to be able to buy solar in those days were breaking even in the 5 to 7 year range and they get grandfathered in to the power company’s 1-to-1 buy back basically forever from what I understand.
Now, there’s only the federal incentives, the power company buyback is some ridiculously low amount that it makes you wonder why they bother at all, state incentives are gone, and the cost of panels + installation has sky rocketed. We looked into it several years ago, and with all the recent changes, it was going to take 15+ years for us to break even under fairly optimal conditions. A lot can happen in 15 years and we just weren’t comfortable enough financially for it to make sense.
This morning I drove to the post office going 38 mph when the speed limit is 35. Last week I checked my phone at the social security office when the guard was distracted. Next week, who knows what depravity I may commit.
For unknown reasons, this song has been a brain worm for me for like the past month or so. I cannot explain why. Like sometimes oldies will play in a show or movie I watched, so it makes sense why I’m suddenly thinking about it. But this one? I think it just popped up on its own. And now to see it in a random comment on Lemmy — WILD.
Does grunge / alternative rock still exist as a genre in any significant way? It never even occurred to me to look if there’s still new stuff coming out in that style.
I like to listen to oldies from time to time, when I’m in the mood. However, it’s usually just a temporary phase from time to time. Though I find it funny that someone mentioned “Semi-charmed life” in another comment because that song has popped in my head a number of times in the past month or so for no discernible reason at all. Sometimes when that happens it’s because I heard a song in a movie or TV show, so that makes sense, but I don’t believe that applies to that song.
To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.
The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.
However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.
People hoping that are likely ignorant of what AI actually is. It’s incredibly unlikely that AI “ends”, at least not if/until things get really bad on a societal level to the point where our species loses its ability to produce and use technology altogether.
Blossom end rot.
Most commonly this is due to insufficient levels of calcium, which can be caused by too little available calcium in the soil, pH of the soil being out of range, or too much of other competing ions on the soil, amongst other issues.
Most often, this can be fixed with the addition of a little lime (i.e. calcium powder lime, not the fruit) added to the soil. Will take about 2 - 3 weeks to resolve if that’s the issue.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on this.
Granted, if I had a dime for every article I’ve read in the past 5 or 6 years spelling out the signs of impending economic doom, I could easily buy a tank of gas for my car.
Having barely survived the aftermath of 2008 myself, it does stress me out to realize that it could happen again and soon and worse. I’d like to think I’m better positioned to handle things now, but as they say in France, shit happens. And it’s stressful knowing that other people will have to go through what I went through and worse.
It’s also unfortunate that official data makes things sound stable(-ish), but on the ground and admittedly in my own little bubble, people are not so optimistic. Manufacturing plants have shut down, people are getting laid off left and right, budgets are getting cut to bare bones, all while prices on daily things like food and energy have spiked.
This is a variation of an idiom that goes something like “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will think it’s stupid”.
But as someone who used to raise killifish, I actually found out that there is at least one species of fish that can climb trees.
I’m sure it’s performative. I would not be surprised if the plan is to add some other reprehensible stuff to the final bill so that Democrats have to approve the terrible stuff simply to get the cuts canceled or they have to vote against it and be labeled as anti-Medicaid. Because it seems so often, that is the way it goes whenever Republicans appear to maybe be doing something good for the common folk.
Oh, that’s awful.
My uncle also had very few allies left in this world, he was just the embodiment of an asshole to pretty much everyone. My dad and aunt were the only people that would even bother to try to communicate with him. Fortunate in some way, they’d talked on the phone the day before my uncle passed, and he agreed to let my dad stop by to drop off some food the next day. Meaning, he’d been dead less than 24 hours before my dad found his body. Otherwise, it very well could have been weeks or longer.
But the house? Total loss. My uncle had become a trash hoarder. Fueled by depression, but also by his beliefs that the government was tracking him (and would go through his trash if he were to set it outside). My dad and my cousin tried to locate some family memorabilia like photos and things, but they gave up. The house was literally bulldozed and the remnants hauled away, it was in such bad shape inside and out.
I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.
But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.