@timbray Agreed, short and sweet is the way to do elections. And preferably not too frequently either: four years is about right.

I worry that the fashion for fixed-date elections tempts parties to begin campaigning earlier and earlier. Since they know where the finish line will be, there's an incentive to start running before the competition.

This is the most helpfully packaged box of screws I've ever seen, by a large margin. I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate whomever was responsible for such a triumph of utility and empathy.

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Box of screws, clearly showing dimensions in metric and imperial, contents count, 1:1 scale of size, materials, appropriate driver bit, and suitable drills bit types and sizes, and wall plug size range, for each type of surface.

(I think this all relates to the American variant of English moving towards greater generalization in speech, and the preference towards weakened versions of adjectives. Which are proper: strung or stringed, snuck or sneaked? Soon, "better/best" will become "more good/most good"; language is a living thing, and constantly evolving, although not necessarily for the better.)

(Isn't that Clarus the dogcow, that which says "Moof!"?)

TIL of the bad.horse traceroute

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the bad.horse traceroute has the entire lyrics to the sound

“In everyone’s pocket right now is a computer far more powerful than the one we flew on Voyager. I don’t mean your cell phone — I mean the key fob that unlocks your car.”

— Rich Terrile, JPL scientist and member of the Voyager imaging team

#space

(I'm following this thread as am about to migrate one of my Proxmox VE servers to TrueNAS, and am also interested in other options.)

😁

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A poll asking if American schools should teach Arabic numerals, with three options: "Yes" (XXIX%), "No" (LVII%), and "No Opinion" (XIV%). The total votes are indicated in Roman numerals.

Fortify.

I dig it.

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Tumblr post from ontopofgravity: I asked one of my (male) friends to stop using the phrase “man up” and he has been using “fortify” for the past two weeks instead and it’s just a little thing but honestly it makes a difference and tbh it's also pretty funny when I start to deflate in the library and he leans over and goes “FORTIFY” reply from phantom-locked: Dude, fortify is bangin’. That makes things like you're some kind of RPG character. Fortify is way better than “man up.”

Can someone point me to published articles/documents/evidence to show that my understanding is in err?

Public spaces are often designed with male users as the norm. Men are 5x more likely to use basketball courts, 4x exercise areas & 20x skateparks vs to women & girls. Women must engage in 'safety work', navigating public saves to avoid male harassment.
https://theconversation.com/women-are-three-times-as-likely-as-men-to-feel-unsafe-in-parks-heres-how-we-can-design-them-better-248465

It. Could. Work.

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Post from user @acnewsitics 'Alex Cole' states, "If boycotting Tesla is making conservatives buy electric vehicles, I think liberals should start boycotting books next and see if MAGA accidentally discovers reading."

Wikipedia cites an Order from the Interior for the renaming: https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/elips/documents/3337%20-%20Changing%20the%20Name%20of%20Mount%20McKinley%20to%20Denali.pdf

Linguistics

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Tumblr post by nothing-an-iratze-cant-fix Jul 31, 2023 Would everyone like to know the best thing??? There are two types of borrowed word - loan words and calques. Loan words are words taken directly from the language i.e. tattoo, sushi, guillotine. Calques are words literally translated from the language before being borrowed i.e. beer garden, scapegoat, killer whale (incorrectly calqued, the original actually means whale killer which is a whole other post). Did anyone notice the fun thing? Loan word is a calque (German lehnwort lit. Loan+word) and calque is a loan word (French calque - tracing or imitation). Have a good day!

Fascinating footage of a human white blood cell chasing a bacterium captured through a microscope.

Credit: David Rogers
Source: https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Movie_-_Neutrophil_chasing_bacteria

#health #biology #science #phagocytosis

@alexbrn This particular one won't affect my behavior, but for groceries and home improvement and so on, our family will be boycotting US everything. A lot of other people are too.

Human, what are you doing? Stop. You must conserve energy!

By Dr. Seuss in 1941

Perfect!

In Wyoming, the legislature has decided, that you cannot require others to address you by your preferred pronouns — thinking that this will only hurt trans people, Trump wants to persecute.

So citizen Britt Boril calls in to a committee meeting and deliberately misgenders the male chairman as madam, which he takes offence to — because our rule about allowing disrespect was not meant to be used against us!

(And no, you should never misgenders others, but damn… this move was brilliant)

(Also, why are you trying to circumvent the DRM?)

(Yes, I know there are myriad valid reasons to do this; but to publicly complain about it—regardless of the reasons—seems completely arbitrary and petty.)

there are times when...
i forget i am a cat.

But to address the elephant: if the discoloration is simply cosmetic, who cares?! Cooking is a functional art, and it doesn't matter what goes on "behind the curtain". If your pans are discolored and it's affected your food, you need to investigate those manufacturers, because that should not happen!

Sold my Tesla X and leased a Rivian R1S. Very happy with the vehicle. Have driven 1300 miles in the last month, and did a trip from Portland to Seattle and back. Range is ~395 miles, charging is fast and plentiful. Also got caught in a snowstorm and had zero issues. Adapters work great, one for supercharged and one for home, permanently installed. Charging at 215kwH, about 500 miles an hour. So far it has not been a major step backwards, although the map software is a little goofy and drops frames.

(And as previously mentioned, the Calibre plugins make the whole process much easier, too.)

https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com

(I am definitely not a Trump supporter, but giving this non-story another leg to continue upon is not helping anything.)

I'm a Californian & I wouldn’t mind being a Dane.

#california #denmark #uspolitiics

https://www.dw.com/en/e-petition-urges-denmark-to-buy-california-from-trump/a-71583221

@GossiTheDog

"There is zero artificial intelligence today. There could have been, but 50 years ago the decision was made by most scientists and companies to go with machine learning, which was quick and easy, instead of the difficult task of actually reverse engineering and then replicating the human brain.

So instead what we have today is machine learning combined with mass plagiarism which we call ‘generative AI’, essentially performing what is akin to a magic trick so that it appears, at times, to be intelligent.

While the topic of machine learning is complex in detail, it is simple in concept, which is all we have room for here. Essentially machine learning is simply presenting many thousands or millions of samples to a computer until the associative components ‘learn’ what it is, for example pictures of a daisy from all angles and incarnations.

Then companies scoured the internet in the greatest crime of mass plagiarism in history, and used the basic ability of machine learning to recognize nouns, verbs, etc. to chop up and recombine actual human writings and thoughts into ‘generative AI’.

So by recognizing basic grammar and hopefully deducing the basic ideas of a query, and then recombining human writings which appear to match that query, we get a very faulty appearance of intelligence - generative AI.

But the problem is, as I said in the beginning, there is no actual intelligence involved at all. These programs have no idea what a daisy, or love, or hate, or compassion, or a truck, or horse, or wagon, or anything else, actually is. They just have the ability to do a very faulty combinatorial trick to appear as if they do.

And while the human brain consumes around 20 watts, these massive pattern matching computers consume uncounted millions, and counting.

However there is hope that actual general intelligence can be created because, thankfully, a handful of scientists rejected machine learning and instead have been working on recreating the connectome of the human brain for 50 years, and they are within a few decades of achieving that goal and truly replicating the human brain, creating true general intelligence.

In the meantime it's important for our species to recognize the danger of relying on generative AI for anything, as it's akin to relying on a magician to conjure up a real, physical, living, bunny rabbit.

So relying on it to drive cars, or control any critical systems, will always result in massive errors, often leading to real destruction and death."
SearingTruth

(I have no real attachment to them, and would happily migrate if there is someone better recommended.)