That’s worth considering, but it also needs to be weighed against possibly impacting their friendship if she’s not interested. I also wouldn’t recommend saying he “really likes her” if he doesn’t already like her a lot that way, but even just “I like you” would work just as well.
Liking multiple people at once is super common. The love triangle is a trope for a reason.
If you don’t like her then don’t worry about it (other than to maybe pay attention to how you’re acting around her and avoid flirting unintentionally) but if you’re interested in her, maybe try pursuing that? Flirt with her a bit and see if she reciprocates. If she likes you, there’s a good chance she’s been flirting with you and you’ve just been oblivious.
If you’re too shy to intentionally flirt, you could ask her outright, but it’d probably be better to ask her something that hints at your interest, like “I like this girl but I can’t tell if she’s into me - what sorts of signs should I be looking for?” Should be pretty obvious what you’re both saying and asking.
Learn, understand, challenge, repeat.
Learn as much as you can about all sorts of topics, even if you don’t have specific plans for those topics
Learn enough that you don’t just know the facts, but that you actually understand why things are the way they are. You should be able to predict things you haven’t yet learned if you understand the concepts. If you don’t understand something yet, keep learning.
Learn your fundamentals: language skills, math, logic, statistics, the science of research, history, politics, basic psychology, and the physics of whatever realm you’re operating in (meaning that in today’s day and age, you should learn about both real-world physics and about how information flows on the Internet).
A lot of people don’t know how to teach themselves, so it’s probably important to point out that learning to do so effectively is a big part of thinking for yourself. Learning how information is presented, as well as what’s often left unsaid, is important. Learn how to read graphs and charts and statistics. Improve your information literacy: Learn how to find credible sources, how to judge the credibility of a source, and what “credible” actually means. It doesn’t mean infallible.
As a general rule, don’t accept a fact until you have multiple credible confirmations of it. That might not be possible, but when information comes from untrustworthy sources, remember that. Learn the difference between something that you’ve learned and accepted and something that you’ve just heard on social media a few dozen times. This is easier when you have an understanding of what you’re learning. True things fit in better with other true things.
Don’t assume things are false just because the source isn’t credible, either. Just do extra research to verify. Do your own experiments to confirm, if possible.
Sometimes you’ll realize something you’ve accepted might be wrong, possibly because it conflicts with something else that you learned. When facts don’t add up, challenge them. You’re not infallible. Replacing a fact you accepted long ago isn’t a failure; it’s a victory. Many people are incapable of doing so.
Learn to distinguish between facts, inferences, theories, and opinions. (Note that established, accepted scientific theories often fall into the “fact” category.) Facts are verifiable. Inferences are based on facts; they’re evidence-based conclusions that can help to build theories. Theories are explanations, and they can be disproven but haven’t been proven (else they would be facts). Information presented as facts can be false. Theories and inferences can be poorly formed, even if the facts are sound (and especially when they are not). “Opinion” is a word people use to defend flawed theories. If the opinion isn’t a preference, there’s a good chance it isn’t an opinion at all and is just intentional misinformation. “You can’t argue with my opinion” isn’t applicable when the “opinion” is provably false - then it’s just a failed fact, inference, or theory. And even when it is an opinion, it can still be criticized.
Learn about logical fallacies. Even if you don’t call out the person using them, try to notice them in the wild, both by people you agree with and people you disagree with. But especially by people you agree with. Learn how to notice other ways people are misled.
You can control that with a setting. In Settings - Privacy, turn on “Query in the page’s title.”
My instance has a magnifying glass as the favicon.
Giant squids are the bears of the ocean
Wouldn’t be a huge change at this point. Israel has been using AI to determine targets for drone-delivered airstrikes for over a year now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip gives a high level overview of Gospel and Lavender, and there are news articles in the references if you want to learn more.
This is at least being positioned better than the ways Lavender and Gospel were used, but I have no doubt that it will be used to commit atrocities as well.
For now, OpenAI’s models may help operators make sense of large amounts of incoming data to support faster human decision-making in high-pressure situations.
Yep, that was how they justified Gospel and Lavender, too - “a human presses the button” (even though they’re not doing anywhere near enough due diligence).
But it’s worth pointing out that the type of AI OpenAI is best known for comes from large language models (LLMs)—sometimes called large multimodal models—that are trained on massive datasets of text, images, and audio pulled from many different sources.
Yes, OpenAI is well known for this, but they’ve also created other types of AI models (e.g., Whisper). I suspect an LLM might be part of a solution they would build but that it would not be the full solution.
What else have you tried?
Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.
If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.
On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.
No, game mechanics aren’t subject to copyright law. Game mechanics can be patented in the US, so long as they’re unique and nonobvious (to someone with ordinary skill in the field).
Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering both had patents on their mechanics, for example.
And of course, patents in Japan are a completely different animal than patents in the US.
500 grams of what, though? Folgers?
The current average price per pound (454 grams) of ground coffee beans in the US was double that just a couple months ago, so spending $3.00 per pound would necessitate getting cheaper than average - and therefore, likely lower quality than average, or at least lower perceived quality than average - beans.
The sorts of beans that companies tend to stock (IME) that are perceived as higher quality aren’t the same brands that I tend to buy (generally from local roasters), but they’re comparably priced. For a 5 pound (2267 grams) bag of one of their blends (which are roughly half the price of their higher end beans), it’s similar to what you’d pay for 5 pounds of Starbucks beans - about $50-$60.
Often when a company says “free coffee,” they don’t mean “free batch-brewed drip coffee,” but rather, free espresso beverages, potentially in a machine (located in the break room) that automates the whole process. I assume that’s what Intel is doing.
At $10 per pound (16 ounces) and roughly 1 ounce (28 grams) of beans per two ounce pour of espresso, that means that if each person on average drinks two per day, then that’s $1.25 for coffee per person per day.
However, logistics costs (delivering coffee to all the company’s break rooms) and operational costs (the cost of the automatic machine and repairs, at minimum; or the cost of baristas, or adding the responsibility to someone’s existing job (and thus needing more people or more hours) if just batch brewing) have to be added on top of that. Then add in the cost of milk, milk alternatives, sweeteners, cups, lids, stir sticks, etc…
Obviously if they just had free coffee grounds and let people handle the actual brewing of coffee in the break room, it would be much cheaper. But if the goal is to improve morale, having higher quality coffee that people don’t have to make themselves is going to do that better.
That’s $3.33 per employee per work day, assuming 50 5-day weeks per year. Seems a bit high to me, but not exorbitant. If the figure included things that they’re not reinstating (like free fruit) then that would make sense.
That’s fair, but he would be able to play the games in the meantime. And since hardware generally gets cheaper as time passes, if he could set aside more than the subscription fee each month to save for his own hardware, he’d be able to game in the meantime. And if he ever had to cancel it, he’d be closer to being able to buy his own hardware than he is today - meaning more time total spent gaming.
How so? The games aren’t purchased on GeForce Now and he could just cancel his subscription if they changed the service in a way he didn’t like.
Call me crazy, but if adults are on a gaming platform meant for kids causing problems, then they should probably be the ones restricted from spaces, not children.
How would you possibly do that in a way that didn’t invade the privacy of every child who wanted to explore those spaces?
Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.
By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.
there is a better open source meta search engines
I already use Searxng and have never used Kagi, but I’m curious why you say that Searxng is “better.” Are you saying that because the quality of the searches is better, because it’s open source and Kagi isn’t, or for some other reason?
I gather you’re from the US.
Yes, but also the prison abolition movement is US specific. I’m not affiliated with it, to be clear - not that I oppose it or anything, but I certainly don’t speak for any of its activists.
If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process
Then why call it abolish prisons?
Have you ever heard the quote “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” “Abolition” is a goal, an ideal - and even if it isn’t accomplished fully, working toward that end goal and considering everything necessary to get there along the way is the point.
Along those lines, I posit that if 90% of prisons are torn down or repurposed and the remaining 10% are drastically changed - holding fewer prisoners; not being privately owned and operated; focusing on rehabilitation, like learning new job skills, when possible, and otherwise simply being more humane, then the prison abolition movement would have succeeded.
But if you disagree with the name, what would you call it? “Prison Reform” is already taken and means something drastically different.
And to be clear, for some the goal is to eliminate prisons entirely. The movement isn’t monolithic. Abolishing the “prison institution” as it exists today is a pretty common goal, though, and using “prison” to mean “the prison institution” is a pretty common literary technique called “Synecdoche,” which you likely use every day.
I see now that you’re trying trying to trigger an additional emotional response. Working on association, rather than logic.
It’s a logical association, though. If the name evokes feelings of slavery, that’s a good thing, as the situation is similar enough to slavery to warrant that.
Slavery in the US is still legal (so long as the person is in prison). Black Americans are 5 times as likely to be in prison as white Americans. A black man born in 2001 has a 20% chance of being in prison at some point in his life.
The systemic oppression of black Americans is obviously because of racism, and the parallels between slavery and the prison institution aren’t accidental. For example, here’s a quote from Slavery and the U.S. Prison System:
Gary Webb’s famous investigation revealed that the CIA was operating a gun-running and drug-smuggling operation that brought guns to the Nicaraguan contras that the U.S. was using to destabilize the popular government in that country, while bringing cocaine into the U.S. and funneling it to street-level dealers with access to black inner-city neighborhoods. The history of black street gangs is part of the afterlife of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counter-intelligence program that actively sabotaged black social movement throughout the long civil rights era. Bobby Lavender, one of the founders of the Bloods in Los Angeles, explained that the COINTELPRO assassinations of black leaders, and the terrorizing of rank-and-file civil rights activists, left an organizational vacuum in many communities that youth like him filled with their “own brand of leadership.” COINTELPRO established a pattern of law enforcement interference and sabotage of black self-determination, including gang truces, from the 1970s through to the present.
Such manipulation, especially, is something I would not want to be a part of. It’s vile.
Personally, I think the systemic sabotage of black people’s livelihood, communities, and families is vile, but you’re welcome to your opinion.
If my gender doesn’t exist, doesn’t that mean that I don’t exist? And if I don’t exist, then I can’t get a passport or hold office? That sucks, but that also means I also don’t have to pay taxes and can’t be charged with a crime. Heck, you can’t even chase me! What’re you gonna do, tell the police to go after the “
manwait no,woman, wait no 🤯”?These motherfuckers just Polyphemus’d themselves, and I’m “Nobody.”
Seriously, though, denying passports to intersex people is some science-denying bullshit.
I believe this is legally supposed to take 60 days before it’s effective but read that some transphobes are already enforcing it.