The most fucked up thing is that Grok does seem to have guardrails — except they’re geared towards preventing it from being “too woke”

Alex turntine faked a terrible haircut. People who loved Alex bullshitted that it looked great because they were worried about causing upset to someone who had recently attempted suicide (an understandable anxiety, but also in my experience, having people walk on eggshells around you can make things worse). This prank may have been done to try to break the tension a little, or perhaps Alex was just enjoying the absurdist humour.

I think that Linus becoming less of an abusive asshole over the years has been a positive development, but I wouldn’t mind the return of the old for this event

It is not reliable at all, and yes, it is widely considered to be psuedoscience. Yes, this is a batshit insane scenario

It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

I think what’s really sad about Trumpism and similar surges of right wing support in other countries is that I get where it’s coming from — many of these people were already thoroughly fucked over by things they had no choice over. And then they’re so desperate for change that they vote for things that fuck them over even harder. We need more politicians like Mamdani

Edit: typo

Damn, I didn’t know this, thanks for sharing. I am not American, and I was pretty young when Hurricane Katrina happened, so context like this is new to me. More reasons to hate Bush

How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?

There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.

My friend was like that. He had a lot of friends who were girls, and the way that he handled that was by putting us all in the “friend” box (he was bi, so he did the same for guys, but given that most guys are straight, that wasn’t as necessary). It was a great method until he ended up hooking up with his best friend — it was a surprise to no-one but him. He walked around looking shellshocked for a week.

All the Finns I know are delightfully weird.

Hooking up with one of the staff? Yikes

I don’t deny that you may have dodged a bullet, but I feel like the staff of a psych ward hooking up with patients is hella fucked up. Even if both people are adults, I think consent in that context is pretty dubious.

I am enjoying saying “Log back in to continue your Oral B brushing experience” in my best “customer-service/salesperson ad lady” voice. Like the kind of tone that’s so soullessly saccharine that it gives AI vibes

If I had my wallet stolen, the worst part of it would be having to renew id and stuff. It’s a lot of faff

That would be a metal as fuck cell phone stand

I think the science comes in showing that it does actually work. Like, this is so simple of an idea that I would be skeptical of if it would work if I had had the idea by myself. I’m glad that I live in a world where, if I had thought of this and wondered “is this a good idea, or am I just being dumb for thinking something so simple could work?”, I am able to go online and find information and guides on this and other diy filters

They may not have been the ones who first thought of it, but the first people to publish research that shows that taping 4 air filters together with a fan works decently compared to other, non-DIY filters (where “worked decently” means does a good enough job that it’s worth doing if you want a filter but can’t/won’t buy or build a more complex filtering system, even if it isn’t as good as “proper” filtering systems)

(Tangent: I’m reminded of the “Cox-Zucker machine”, a random maths thing that Cox and Zucker made together because when Cox and Zucker met at university, they realised that their names, when combined in the traditional, alphabetical order, sounded “delightfully obscene”. )

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

To be fair, it is difficult to rebuild one’s understanding of the world after finding out that your previous understanding was built on fundamentally wrong ideas. Not that I’m excusing people who respond to cognitive dissonance by digging deeper into willful ignorance — after all, the reason why I know it’s hard is because I’ve done that work myself (a couple of times). I do have some sympathy though.