Lovable Sidekick

I don’t think it’s weird at all. Being attached to physical objects is a totally normal part of being human. The comfort of familiarity is natural and nothing to be worried about. The personal example I can think of right away is that when a wallet wears out and I transfer my driver’s license etc to a new one, I’m aware of the same feeling of attachment. Throwing out the old one feels like a small betrayal. I think feelings like that are completely natural. In fact my childhood cuddle toy - a stuffed dog named “Poody” is still up on a bookshelf over my desk. I hardly ever think about him but he’s always up there, kind of watching over me.

Makes sense on the surface, but people have reacted exactly the same way the whole transgender concept. “You can be in touch with your feminine side but your still male” or whatever.

Are you saying hormone injections or other medical measures are necessary for you to consider someone transgender? I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t agree with that. Correspondingly why would that be required to be transracial? You’re right that hormone differences aren’t involved in race, but how does that invalidate the whole concept? TBH it sounds the same as the anti-trans argument, “it just doesn’t make sense.” I mean I can see people reacting like, “If we allow this then it would be easy to abuse.” Well maybe, but that seems like another issue. I’m just now dipping into this and trying to understand it.

I don’t know anything about this issue but apparently the presumption here is that your view is the right view and you’re just asking how to splain it to the person. My question is about the “I’ve already blocked this person” part. Instead could you possibly just limit your conversation to other subjects? It keeps looking like we’re all getting more and more isolated from each other as we develop extreme aversions to anyone not having our exact POV about everything, so we shove them out of our world. It reminds me of survivalist bunker mentality.

Came here to also question this. “To the naked eye the pollution is not visible.” Is that because we’re just looking at heat in an IR camera? I know everybody hates Elon Musk but we also hate misinformation and love truth, right? I mean, cuz we are the good guys… riiiight?

Election officials: “Nonsense! If an excess of voters show up we will be happy to provide waxed paper and ballpoint pens for them to vote with.”

I didn’t read it, nor did I claim to have. It comes down to whether it’s more reasonable to have confidence in a study by a Harvard academic or the dismissive comments of a social media rando. Now go ahead and have the last word so you can give yourself internet victory points, woo-hoo! IDGAF.

Chenoweth didn’t “assert” anything, she looked at hundreds of campaigns over the last century and reported results. Her work is linked in the article - you’re welcome to critique her methodology after reading it. Null hypothesis my ass.

That second part is especially encouraging.

I literally just learned about the glymphatic system earlier today. Apparently it’s only been known for the last couple decades, so it hasn’t been studied all that much compared to other brain topics. This video talks about how it flushes out waste products through our cerebrospinal fluid, and ways to make this work better. Main things are exercise and hydration, but there’s lots of other interesting info. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBA8_c6HLR0

He should have shown up on Buffy - Leonard and Spike would have gotten along great!

I know everybody hates AI but to me it’s weird to treat artificially generated nudity differently from if somebody painted a naked body with a real person’s face on it - which I assume would be legally protected freedom of expression.

Sounds to me like you just haven’t had enough practice, given that you aren’t interested in driving and haven’t don it much. If you can find people to drive you around or don’t mind taking buses and paying for Uber etc, not driving will probably be no more than a minor inconvenience - depending on where you live and how easy it is to get around without a car. Could influence your decisions about where to live and where to work, and having appointments could occasionally suck, but again it depends on your environment.

When ads get in the way I simply don’t watch the videos. It’s not like anybody ever really needs to watch any particular video.

Buffy has entered the chat.

Side note: I’ve been told that recruiters for investment firms like candidates who play MtG because it encourages lateral thinking.

If somebody says it costs $5000/mo, how could they say it in a different way that you would define as “transparent” - do you want receipts?

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

If you believe he’s spending $5k/mo to run the server, even if you send him $20 and he blows it on blackjack and hookers, it means he has to spend $20 of his bj/h money on the server. So I don’t really see an issue. Does that make sense?

The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven’t even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the “server” is a hive of users’ computers all sharing the load? I’m a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?

Don’t dual boot, flatten and rebuild.

“B-but my gaaaaaamez!!!”