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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • A middle school teacher asked for an analogy about something, I don’t remember what specifically, but I raised my hand and excitedly said “Oh! Like how math can help you understand music and music can help you understand math?”

    The teacher looked at me like I was a total fool and said “music has absolutely nothing to do with math, how could you possibly think that?”

    Since I was a snarky little punk, and I knew I was right, I said “have you heard about the circle of fifths? Let me tell you about it” and I proceeded to explain the mathematical beauty of music to the entire class. I even had sheet music in my bag from my piano lessons, so I pulled it out and showed it to everyone to explain the bars, tempo, and time signature, all of which are based on mathematical principles.

    She was not happy to be proven wrong in front of a class of fifth graders.




  • Human and AGI collaboration might be interesting, if ever real AI actually develops. But I wouldn’t call augmenting or probing of existing works of fiction with rehashed LLM sludge collaboration, I’d call it glorified and advanced plagiarism at worst, and low quality cliff notes at best.

    I would much rather read a work of creative fiction from a human being than to encounter autocorrect word predictions written into paragraphs. The idea that the text itself can be queried to gain additional meaning divorced from the author’s intention strikes me as unrealistic and not faithful to the person who originally crafted the words.

    Though I’m obviously biased against LLMs being used for this kind of thing, from lots of experience seeing how crappy they are.



  • Most BO comes from the bacteria that grows on the armpit hair after sweating, so while he’d probably have issues with the “manliness” of this suggestion, if he just shaves his armpit hair it’ll take a bit longer for the BO to develop. As long as he’s showering regularly, that is…

    But it’d probably be better to just tell him that cleanliness and showing that you have personal hygiene (by washing regularly and using deodorant) is most definitely manly. Having BO doesn’t make him manly, cause I’ve got news for him: women have BO too.




  • Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

    Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

    In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron


  • Since this community is for any kind of question, I’ll answer, but I get the vague sense that you don’t really want a genuine answer, based on the inherent bias you included in the question (calling someone older than 20 a hag is pretty uncool, for example).

    But here goes: people have different tastes. Different things turn on different people, and your lack of experience being aroused by older women says nothing about the legitimacy of those who are. Also being 21 for example, is still considered very young by most people. Your question presumes that everybody in the world must only be attracted to very young women, and frankly that’s a bit strange and just not how the world works.

    Try to put yourself in some other people’s shoes, and I think this question would answer itself. Your sexual preferences are not everyone’s preferences.



  • I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

    But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

    If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.


  • No, those stalls are reserved for people who actually need them. They’re not for your comfort or convenience, they’re a basic necessity for people who have very different daily lives than you.

    Even if all the other stalls are occupied, you should still pretend that the handicap stall is also occupied, even if it isn’t. There’s always the possibility that someone who needs it will arrive after you’ve gone in. You don’t park in handicap parking spaces, do you? Same deal, just one is based more on the honor system and basic human decency, and the other could get you a ticket.


  • Bernie has compromised on some issues, like a good politician should. Nearly everybody else has compromised their integrity and the offices they hold with corrupt behavior. There’s a huge difference.

    Effective politics/government doesn’t exist without compromise. America was founded on compromises, some of which were morally reprehensible, some of which were just about the structure of the nation and its government. A huge caveat of course, is that compromise only works when there are at least two groups equally willing to concede something big enough to reach a resolution.

    Without the ability to compromise all we’re left with is tyranny.


  • It took a few years to fine-tune the exact amount, sometimes he’d finish the bowl too early and whine the next morning, sometimes there’d be too much leftover and he’d whine because he wanted a fresh bowl. I finally landed on the exact amount where he always has enough when he wants it, but there’s never any extra. It’s second nature by now so I don’t remember the exact amount, but it’s somewhere just over half a cup of dry food.