Those all sound good. Sorry that doesn’t help at all, but hey I’m rooting for you.

Could it be Bootleg?

I wanted to read more plot details to see how closely it matched your description but all the synopsis are a bit vague. I saw the TV show as a kid. Apparently there was a manga and an anime made from it as well. In this one they’re more specifically focussed upon chocolate than all confectionery generally but it sounds like that may have featured too.

That’s absolutely normal and expected. The illness is taking a toll on your body and it needs all it’s resources to fight it. Don’t take this as advice not to see a doctor if you were already going to because if you personally feel like something is wrong and out of the ordinary for you, then it’s better that you decide to go to a doctor even if you’re told that it is indeed normal for a cold because who knows if it’s not something worse or if “normal” for you is different. But in general, yes, for colds and most illnesses tiredness is very much to be expected, even to a pretty extreme degree.

Yeh it was a joke I definitely wouldn’t recommend that ANYWHERE! It’s just that the original advice to which I was responding, while actually probably quite sound, had this funny kind of old man “you kids should get outside” kind of feel to it that I was riffing off and taking to extreme for fun. I hoped the “get your hair cut” part of it would make that a bit more obvious like a grumpy dad in the 60s telling the longhairs to get off their lawn. I probably didn’t do enough to make this obvious and now it’s coming across as sincere. Woops.

Get your haircut while you’re at it, and do some national service!

That’s cool but the headline made it sound like DNA analysis was going to shed light on the experience of life at the time, like work and diet and how comfortable or conditions generally. This is more like one additional piece of evidence to support theories around ethnic demographics during a period in ancient Egypt and then a more interesting bit about burial and arthritis giving a clue to the person’s profession except the interesting bit was barely a paragraph and had nothing to do with the DNA, just more traditional archaeology.

The article mentions that. They supposedly released 2 versions, one “enhanced” to help make the relevant parts of the image easier to see, which certainly matches the description of “modified” and the other, the same footage but described as “raw” implying that it wasn’t “modified” in that way.

There are a lot of plausible and likely explanations for the Adobe metadata schema information that is in the file that don’t involve deceptively manipulating footage to hide something that was in that footage before public presentation, then again, given the circumstances and supposed rationale behind publicly presenting this footage, failing to release it with untouched unmodified metadata from the camera original source files is not a good look. Failing to then answer questions about that makes it look even worse. This is is especially true when, although there is no answer they could give that would actually totally convince everyone, there are as I said many plausible explanations they could have offered and yet they were just silent.

Ironically, as is so often the case with anything like this, depending on the interpretive lens you’re using this issue with the metadata helps confirm either assertion, that there was cover up and Epstein was murdered, or that there was no such cover up and he really did kill himself. Obviously, the fact that it’s modified lends credence to the idea they’re hiding something because one might expect that if they weren’t it’d be easy to just supply the footage with metadata more reflective of a surveillance system than Adobe software. However one could also say that, modifying metadata in a way that is undetectable should actually be relatively easy and the fact that they couldn’t be bothered to do that, or didn’t know how, or never thought of metadata being present in the first place could suggest it’s not deceptive skullduggery so much as technical incompetence and sloppiness - too sloppy for competent conspiracists. On the other hand, they could also be sloppy and incompetent conspiracists who just did an awful job. That’s not altogether unlikely either since the entire supposed suicide they potentially conspired to have people believe is a very suspicious cover story to begin with so not exactly an expertly conceived plan, more improvisational and done in a hurry which would kind of track with them botching later actions to take the heat off.

It’s likely heavily reinforced by your voting system but 2 party systems aren’t unique to that system, even in theoretically better voting systems you frequently end up with very similar results. Australia as a case in point. That said if current electoral trends continue we could be seeing the end of that here and at least our system theoretically allows that to happen.

Surprised it hasn’t been superseded meaningfully? Or surprised people are still using it instead of another better tech?

I’ve been using this guy’s one for years. It’s called stretch video

https://gist.github.com/arpruss/74abc1bc95ae08e543b9b74f15a23b07

It’s not often I have to use it but if you ever watch something online where the uploader has messed up the aspect ratio you can just fix it just like that, no need to download and reencode or anything I love it.

Right but I mean, the more classic examples of professions to be made in to doll form tend to more easily liken themselves to simplistic representations that you can convey to children as a toy and have them roughly understand and imagine doing. A doctor, an army guy, maybe a mechanic, a police officer, a scientist they’re all pretty visual, they have uniforms or attire strongly associated with the work itself and plenty of props to package with them for the kid to interact with to emulate doing that job. The therapist kinda wears just whatever and their job primarily involves talking so it just doesn’t seem an obvious choice for a doll for children’s entertainment at all.

So I know the joke with spelling but also, Barbie therapist!? WTF? How does that work as a play toy? The concepts seem like they’d be so confusing and boring for a child. I gather it was to send a “you can be anything when you grow up” message, but it’d be about as exciting as a toy as a Barbie accountant. That’s just weird.

No shade on you man, you were young, just wondering if any who isn’t being scammed ever chooses to use that service or of it’s basically dedicated entirely to facilitating scams.

Ah I see my confusion now

His “water fuel cell” was later examined by three expert witnesses in court who found that there “was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis.”

I initially took it to mean they’d examined the fuel cell in the vehicle but the way that’s written it’s not necessarily the case so it was probably a separate demo prototype to the buggy.

Yeh, I can send money from bank to bank internationally already. The banks use the SWIFT system.

Haha I never knew there was a real person attached to that myth. I was hearing about that as a big conspiracy theory from teachers when I was kid all the way here in Australia.

That’s interesting he did produce an actual machine that could move though. I was reading the Wikipedia about him and they don’t go in to that exactly. They point out that his design and vehicle were just using conventional electrolysis and thus couldn’t work as claimed, but it still moved. What was the catch then? It uses a battery to do the electrolysis, does it just use up all the battery to inefficienly split out the hydrogen using more energy than gained from the hydrogen in the process? Making it a really weird electric car?

Is Western Union used for anything other than scams? What’s it for legitimately? Can’t you just send money via your bank?

You’re unsurprisingly getting a lot of replies along these lines, taking issue with this strange and unfounded blanket statement about an entire country and you’re replying back to them with similar riffs on the theme that those commenters are being disingenuous and masking a kind of widely known understanding that the reason people visit there is for the sex industry.

I have to say I think you might have gotten the wrong idea there. There’s a kernel of truth to it in that yes, it is known to be a place where sex tourism occurs so you could say it was famous for it, but I also don’t think that that’s like, their thing. Other commenters have tried to persuade you of this by pointing out compelling reasons one might go there other than for sex tourism but you seem unwilling to believe them because of this idea you’ve latched on to that they’re being deliberately naive. I think it might help just to point out that, at least amongst Australians, this is a very mainstream holiday destination, like it’s not a place where anyone would raise their eyebrows to hear you were going there. You could happily discuss this at any workplace and say you’re going to Thailand for a holiday and you’d probably get a lot people saying how much they love the place and asking which part you’re going to. I’d be surprised to learn if somehow all or even most of these people, sometimes families with children, had all gone there for a shag and also that this practice was so widely known that it was somehow a reasonable, immediate assumption to make about why they’d chosen Thailand and yet they also decided to broadcast this intention to everyone they know.

While I don’t know the stats, I would guess that a lot of the world’s sex tourism probably occurs there, so I imagine that’s where you got the idea that that’s THE reason to go there but it’s also just a place where a lot of tourism generally happens.

The text is clearly human made, and altogether the whole thing is funny. The tool for creating the images in this context doesn’t really impact upon the quality of the work as a whole given the low standards and the fact that it’s literally a joke, and furthermore is pretty unlikely to have put anyone out of a job. I can’t imagine anyone is making a profit out of this so even the murky topic of copyright for the training data used by the model is at the very least less bad even if not completely abrogated.

If they’d done this with stolen images from the web and Photoshop I don’t think there’d be a lot accusations of ‘Photoshop slop’ because they didn’t create costumes and props and do a shoot on location and went with the ‘lazy’ option instead.

There are many things to be worried about with the popular availability of generative AI tools and the torrent of slop that’s being pushed out of them but this really seems not to be one worth worrying about or even having contempt for.

This is obviously funny for the intended punchline but it’s such a good satire of the most bullshit ‘lifehacks’, like, presumably the non-joke version would be something like allow yourself 30 minutes or 1 hour every morning and that’s already laughable to begin with and amounts to “have more time” as the ‘hack’. Gee thanks guys I’d never have thought of that.