AFK BRB Chocolate

The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

It’s not like wasp nests are much less organized on the inside. Here’s an example.

There seems to be this disinformation campaign trying to spin it that the reason the US government has an issue with TikTok is because they don’t want the free expression of ideas. What’s going out on TikTok isn’t what the government cares about. It’s that the company is controlled by the Chinese government and the potential use of it for spying and major privacy violations is significant.

My wife has a chronic pain condition, and there were a bunch of years where it was just impossible for her to stand in the kitchen, so I did all the cooking for the family. I have this vivid memory of going to the grocery store after a demanding day at work, pushing my empty cart down aisle after aisle, and being so completely out of ideas that I started to cry. Even at the time I thought it was the most pathetic thing ever.

I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.

I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.

So if a group of guys came to your neighbors house and told the family that they’re going to move into it with them, you wouldn’t be for removing them, even if that meant a fight? It would be better to just let them move in because that way no one gets hurt?

And if they successfully move into your neighbor’s house, they might have eyes on your house next.

Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, a sovereign country, by force, and other countries are trying to help Ukraine fight Russia. Yes, people on both sides are dying. Ukrainians apparently overwhelmingly believe it’s worth the fight.

It does, but that’s invaluable too, and you get used to it pretty quickly. It let’s you see if there’s a space (dot), tab (arrow), line wrap (bent arrow), or whatever. Very useful if you deal with documents a lot.

It’s better to use sections or paragraphs formatted as starting on a new page. Using page breaks or lots of blank lines to get to get things paginated is how you end up with wonky formatting like blank pages.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

No, they replaced half of the sodium chloride with potassium chloride. It really is half salt. No one is being taken advantage of.

There are a lot of words on packaging that are unregulated, but “organic” isn’t one of them. If they use it, it has to mean what the FDA says it means, and that’s not the opposite of inorganic.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

At least it doesn’t say organic… since salt is an inorganic compound and that’d be straight up silly.

Except that, in food, “organic” just means no pesticides or synthetic chemicals were used in making it.

No fillers, just two ingredients: iodized sodium and potassium chloride.

They can’t call it a salt substitute because it still has salt. Some people are told to cut down on salt, so would be attracted to something that tastes salty but has less salt in it. I get why it’s funny, but it seems reasonable to me.

Agreed, and it’s sad. I mean, I work at a highly technical engineering company. Everyone has at least a BS, and this guy was probably in his 60s with 30+ years of experience. Yet here he was repeatedly farting by a woman because they had a disagreement. It shows you that age and education don’t guarantee maturity.

She wasn’t interested in suing, she just wanted him to stop farting in her doorway. I didn’t know the guy, so I started by talking to his manager, who talked to the guy. Sounds like he initially tried to deny it, but in a way that made it clear he was doing it on purpose. His boss was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be tolerated and it never happened again.

Some people are so weird and petty.

I had a female employee come to me to complain years ago. She had had a disagreement with an older male employee (thankfully not mine) some weeks prior, and since then, every time he walked by her cube, he’d pause at her doorway, fart, and then keep walking without saying anything.

She at least was aware of how absolutely ridiculous it was, but legitimately didn’t think it was something she should have to deal with. One of the stranger management issues.