I’ve been using this guy’s one for years. It’s called stretch video

https://gist.github.com/arpruss/74abc1bc95ae08e543b9b74f15a23b07

It’s not often I have to use it but if you ever watch something online where the uploader has messed up the aspect ratio you can just fix it just like that, no need to download and reencode or anything I love it.

Right but I mean, the more classic examples of professions to be made in to doll form tend to more easily liken themselves to simplistic representations that you can convey to children as a toy and have them roughly understand and imagine doing. A doctor, an army guy, maybe a mechanic, a police officer, a scientist they’re all pretty visual, they have uniforms or attire strongly associated with the work itself and plenty of props to package with them for the kid to interact with to emulate doing that job. The therapist kinda wears just whatever and their job primarily involves talking so it just doesn’t seem an obvious choice for a doll for children’s entertainment at all.

So I know the joke with spelling but also, Barbie therapist!? WTF? How does that work as a play toy? The concepts seem like they’d be so confusing and boring for a child. I gather it was to send a “you can be anything when you grow up” message, but it’d be about as exciting as a toy as a Barbie accountant. That’s just weird.

No shade on you man, you were young, just wondering if any who isn’t being scammed ever chooses to use that service or of it’s basically dedicated entirely to facilitating scams.

Ah I see my confusion now

His “water fuel cell” was later examined by three expert witnesses in court who found that there “was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis.”

I initially took it to mean they’d examined the fuel cell in the vehicle but the way that’s written it’s not necessarily the case so it was probably a separate demo prototype to the buggy.

Yeh, I can send money from bank to bank internationally already. The banks use the SWIFT system.

Haha I never knew there was a real person attached to that myth. I was hearing about that as a big conspiracy theory from teachers when I was kid all the way here in Australia.

That’s interesting he did produce an actual machine that could move though. I was reading the Wikipedia about him and they don’t go in to that exactly. They point out that his design and vehicle were just using conventional electrolysis and thus couldn’t work as claimed, but it still moved. What was the catch then? It uses a battery to do the electrolysis, does it just use up all the battery to inefficienly split out the hydrogen using more energy than gained from the hydrogen in the process? Making it a really weird electric car?

Is Western Union used for anything other than scams? What’s it for legitimately? Can’t you just send money via your bank?

You’re unsurprisingly getting a lot of replies along these lines, taking issue with this strange and unfounded blanket statement about an entire country and you’re replying back to them with similar riffs on the theme that those commenters are being disingenuous and masking a kind of widely known understanding that the reason people visit there is for the sex industry.

I have to say I think you might have gotten the wrong idea there. There’s a kernel of truth to it in that yes, it is known to be a place where sex tourism occurs so you could say it was famous for it, but I also don’t think that that’s like, their thing. Other commenters have tried to persuade you of this by pointing out compelling reasons one might go there other than for sex tourism but you seem unwilling to believe them because of this idea you’ve latched on to that they’re being deliberately naive. I think it might help just to point out that, at least amongst Australians, this is a very mainstream holiday destination, like it’s not a place where anyone would raise their eyebrows to hear you were going there. You could happily discuss this at any workplace and say you’re going to Thailand for a holiday and you’d probably get a lot people saying how much they love the place and asking which part you’re going to. I’d be surprised to learn if somehow all or even most of these people, sometimes families with children, had all gone there for a shag and also that this practice was so widely known that it was somehow a reasonable, immediate assumption to make about why they’d chosen Thailand and yet they also decided to broadcast this intention to everyone they know.

While I don’t know the stats, I would guess that a lot of the world’s sex tourism probably occurs there, so I imagine that’s where you got the idea that that’s THE reason to go there but it’s also just a place where a lot of tourism generally happens.

The text is clearly human made, and altogether the whole thing is funny. The tool for creating the images in this context doesn’t really impact upon the quality of the work as a whole given the low standards and the fact that it’s literally a joke, and furthermore is pretty unlikely to have put anyone out of a job. I can’t imagine anyone is making a profit out of this so even the murky topic of copyright for the training data used by the model is at the very least less bad even if not completely abrogated.

If they’d done this with stolen images from the web and Photoshop I don’t think there’d be a lot accusations of ‘Photoshop slop’ because they didn’t create costumes and props and do a shoot on location and went with the ‘lazy’ option instead.

There are many things to be worried about with the popular availability of generative AI tools and the torrent of slop that’s being pushed out of them but this really seems not to be one worth worrying about or even having contempt for.

It was pretty impressive, I remembered wondering if that was something Americans got to do that we didn’t in Australia. Seems like other than a few localised experiments in some states it was fiction even for the yanks at the time. I must say I actually still think it’s pretty dope doing that. I liked the little remote controlled fireplace screensaver too. Seemed very cosy.

This is obviously funny for the intended punchline but it’s such a good satire of the most bullshit ‘lifehacks’, like, presumably the non-joke version would be something like allow yourself 30 minutes or 1 hour every morning and that’s already laughable to begin with and amounts to “have more time” as the ‘hack’. Gee thanks guys I’d never have thought of that.

What turned out to be the problem application?

I was unbothered by it as well, at least intestinally, the physical pain of something hot enough was certainly something I could experience and dislike at the extreme end but my stomach and bowels would have been fine. That it until about the past 5 years or so when my stomach suddenly decided it couldn’t handle all kind of things that were never a problem before and now I totally get what people were talking about. It’s pretty sad, I miss being able to reliably tolerate highly spicy food.

Their question seems to be about buying from outside the US rather than from. They’re asking about risks involved with importing stuff there.

They’re pretty good, they definitely improve an otherwise pretty average burger. I’ve rarely had them on actual good burgers but on those occasions they were also good, but I think the trouble is that in that context it’s kind of a distraction and just a bit too much added water weight if it’s an otherwise nice hefty and generous burger. They definitely need to be cooked themselves a bit to caramelise them though otherwise not really worth bothering with.

I felt every word of this and it’s so hard and so unfair. I’m really sorry life dealt you this hand and all it’s associated costs. Did you and she part on good terms at least? If you’d been the one to wrap things up a year sooner maybe she’d have taken it hard anyway for assuming she wouldn’t be committed to you. It might be important that she knows you don’t hold any sense of blame or resentment for how it turned out.

Hope you find that happy equilibrium accepting help from your folks eventually, they want to see you well just as much as you want to be well I imagine.

Wait there’s sequels? No way.

That seems like it still counts as a love story then, or at least “romance” given that that’s primarily what it’s plot and themes revolve around. What qualifies something to be a love story if not that?

Nah, but a couple surprised me with how much they saddened me because I’d always thought it was kind of stupid to get genuinely upset about the deaths of celebrities you don’t know. Sometimes your cognitive opinions take a backseat without your permission and you just feel actually mournful about someone who has so little direct connection and who’s worldly contributions are almost always in the entertainment space. For me that was David Bowie and Trevor Moore. Both of these surprised me because it’s not like I was a hardcore David Bowie fan so it didn’t feel like that death should have hit me particularly hard and Trevor, I still can’t figure out why that’d upset me so much. I mean I loved his sketch comedy but I’d largely forgotten about him at the time, I think it might have something to do with him being so young as well as all the laughs he’d given us.