blivet

They are descended from horses brought over by Europeans.

Yeah, I know they have to follow their script, so I just play along. And honestly, it’s not as if I’ve never made a stupid mistake before, like accidentally leaving something unplugged.

Historically the Republican candidates have demonstrated enviable party discipline and fallen in line after the nominee has been chosen, but Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd have shown themselves to be so duplicitous that they won’t even honor agreements made with other Republicans. The more mainstream candidates like Pence may just figure that this time around there’s nothing in it for them, that they won’t get anything from Trump in return for their endorsement, not even goodwill.

Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Trump is so unprincipled that he managed to get it exactly backwards. January 6 is the one time Pence actually stood up and did the right thing. I loathe the man, but I won’t deny him credit where it’s due. I can’t even begin to imagine the level of chaos if he had gone along with Trump and his followers and refused to certify the 2020 election results.

causes you to mistreat the people who love you

I’ve told my wife that she doesn’t have to spend time with me if I end up with dementia and I start behaving that way. Both of my parents were more or less all there well into their 90s, but you never know.

deleted by creator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Japan

Sure, but for some reason there doesn’t seem to be the same difficulty in print. I don’t recall any warnings about the use of sarcasm or irony in style guides before the internet era, and no one seemed to feel the need for anything like “/s”.

I’m old enough to have been an adult when the internet was first opened up to the general public. I remember guides to writing email that stressed that you should be careful using irony or sarcasm, that the tone was very difficult to convey. I don’t know what it could be, but there seems to be something about online communication that makes it next to impossible to use such devices.

I get the feeling that his engineering background, slight as it may be, helped him to hire competent people to run Tesla and SpaceX, and made it possible for those people to convince him not to insist on doing really stupid things.

Since he knows absolutely nothing about social media websites, not even enough to know what he doesn’t know, it’s impossible to stop him from carrying out whatever nonsensical plans happen to come to mind.

My old land line was almost the same number as an entertainment venue whose number spelled TICKETS. People would sometimes dial 1 instead of 4 (corresponding to the letter I), and get me. Usually on weekend mornings, grr, but fortunately it didn’t happen too often.

You can’t open the Model S rear doors from the inside if the car isn’t running, either. Everything else aside, when I heard that I knew I would never buy a Tesla. That is a horrifyingly stupid design decision.

I brought mine with me when I got the latest booster, and the pharmacist said that she hadn’t seen one of those in a long time.

They don’t care about factuality, and in fact have no ability to “know” if they are correct. And they don’t “care”

I suspect that most people think (maybe not even consciously) that these models answer questions by retrieving data and then writing a response which incorporates that data, rather than just generating text that may or may not contain actual facts.

It really bears repeating over and over that all these so-called AI systems do is take a prompt and output text in response to it that reads as if a human wrote it.

Same. I find that even that many is a significant distraction.

I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t miss having to scroll past endless chains of puns, recitations of song lyrics and film dialogue, or references to popular comments from years ago.

Same here. I miss having actual discussions in comment threads once in a while.

Yeah, I have an extremely unusual name. From what I can tell there are at most three other people in the world with the same name as me, and none of them lives here in the US.

Leaving aside the fun of being hassled for having a weird name when I was a kid, as an adult I am very careful about what I put online, since there is no way to hide it. If it’s in English and connected with my name, it unquestionably concerns me.

Yeah, the forum I mentioned has pretty heavy moderation, so I could have just happened to see a few comments before they were deleted.

I was thinking the same thing, that recently the tone around here has gotten more disagreeable. It might be something bigger going on, though. There is an old-style forum I visit that was quite pleasant for years, but lately I’ve been seeing surprisingly nasty comments there.