I tried but for some reason they keep cavorting in the sun and water all day.

Maybe they are trying to teach me a lesson.

I think that’s likely, but there are other weird things. like, why is just this one chair model? Why is there a kawaii version that gets it’s own category? It almost seems like it would be more expensive to get the logos on the cushions than to set up the entire rest of the company. Why bother? What special value does “PDZO” add to this particular model of gaming chair? To anybody. I just don’t get why it exists.

Blew the whole budget on Technology cloth and couldn’t afford Technology iron for the frame I guess.

That whole site is like a weird art installation of a company page. Why are the two categories “Adults” and “Girls”? Why is the one “Girl” product also listed in “Adult” with the four other chairs they sell? Why does the tab name switch to “Come back ⚡”? I feel like I should be looking for enigmatic clues to an internet murder.

I’ve never seen it, but I read enough about it to dissuade me from even starting. Very disappointing. But my point was less about which media companies are preferable and more that american companies are racing to consolidate during this period of pro-big business government. It’s more blatant under Trump but it’s been going on for a while.

It’s a tradeoff, but I kind of like it. For me, it’s made me realize how much I pre-judge comments based on their vote ratios instead of on their content, which is more than I’d realized. I think it’s a mechanic that contributes to the group-thinkiness of a platform. Upvotes do too, but I think downvotes specifically are kind of a contextless “shame button” that don’t contribute as much as a critical comment, but do tend to bias new arrivals to a downvoted comment against it before they’re able to judge for themselves.

In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names: , , , and .

Dang I had WB-Discovery being acquired by Skydance-Paramount before being acquired by Disney in the semifinals. Gonna have to redo my whole bracket now.

I have the same quest and I’ve talked to every villager I can find and while some of them respond positively to the “want to play D&D?” prompt, none of us have been able to solve the scheduling minigame 😔

For me, not writing things off as failures just because I didn’t stick with them has helped. I will pick back up with tactics that have failed over and over again, because eventually the doing of them will become habitual. There’s no real trick to it, it’s just that it takes a long, long time for behaviors to embed and become habits. I now have a fairly robust writing habit because I just keep writing as ideas come to me, even if they’re stupid or poorly formed or hard to translate into text, I’ll still find myself more inclined to sit down and scratch out a sentence or a paragraph or sometimes several paragraphs instead of just letting the thought slip by, and I think it’s because I keep doing it even though I don’t know that it’s “working” in that I don’t have any novels finished or even any stories that work as narrative fiction, just snippets and character workups and slice-of-life bits that may, one day, be a coherent story that people will be able to understand and want to read. I don’t even really enjoy writing, I find it tedious and difficult in a not-fun way. But I keep doing it because I want to be good at it and I like telling stories, and being a better writer helps me with that so I do find some joy in it, but the mechanical act of writing feels like brushing my teeth. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t especially enjoy it or even find it interesting most of the time.

I think there are a few different types of feelings that get lumped together into “wanting”, and I think it’s useful to disentangle them. I don’t “want” to write in the same way I want to smoke or watch TV or ride a roller coaster, but I do want to be a better writer in a different, less impulsive way, so I make myself write even though it feels kind of like brushing my teeth, or playing scales, or doing multiplication tables. It’s hard, often boring and rarely gratifying to look back at what I’ve written. But I want to be better at it so I just grit my teeth and do it anyway, and it does get easier to do the more you do it, in my experience.

And it is really hard. I have a ton of other, arguably more important things that I still haven’t been able to ingrain as a habit. To pick one because I’ve had it on my mind this morning: I have a really hard time being consistent with hygiene and skincare, even though I “want” to do it, I still go through periods where I neglect it and I haven’t found a consistent way to stay on that horse. I think the only thing to do is just to grit your teeth and start doing it again, knowing that it’s gonna suck for a while, and hoping that it might eventually suck less. And give yourself unlimited grace for failing. You can’t un-fail after failing, you can either try again or stop trying.

Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn’t as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/

I met my partner when we were both in our early 20s and we clicked very quickly. Growing up and through my teens I assumed I would never settle down into a long-term relationship. I didn’t really have a good idea of what a long-term relationship would even be like for me; I certainly didn’t want to wind up in the mutually-resigned tolerance that my parents evolved into. Then for a while after we got together I (fortunately privately) assumed that we were too young and it was too good to last and that things would eventually fall apart but (so far) we’ve just never gotten tired of being around each other. We’ve had a few rough eras, actually in one of the scrabble periods now, financially, but as for the relationship itself we’ve been together almost 20 years now and going stronger than ever. Still rather in awe that it worked out this way when I think back on it. Feels very lucky.

Not “too scared to say online” but… I think it’s less a question of if we’ll ever develop a sentient AI, and more a question of whether we’ll recognize them as sentient before or after the war of independence. To be clear, I don’t think we’re there yet, but assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out first, I think it’s inevitable in the long run.

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I’m feeling splenetic just thinking about it.

I had no idea that ottoman had a color.

Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

Never is a long word, but I have a bunch of poems and short stories and other errata that I think seems unlikely to ever see the light of publication. I have submitted poems to journals and other publications (never successfully published though), but the vast majority of my writing is compost that I’ll turn over every few months and see if I want to revisit it. Occasionally I’ll tweak things here and there or, more likely, reading an old thing will inspire a new thing that gets added to the pile. Maybe I’ll get something published someday. Maybe I’ll be a modern Emily Dickinson and get famous posthumously. Or maybe, like most poets, I’ll fade unremarkably and unremarked-upon into the wash of history. I’m content with any of these outcomes.

It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.

Yep, I think the accepted English pronunciation of “Euler” is as a homophone of “oiler”, so the award would be “the oilies”. I never heard the name out loud as a kid so I pronounced it “you’-ler” until well into adulthood, until someone made a big deal about me not pronouncing it correctly. I remember the occasion very clearly 🙃

We can call it the Euler Award for Excessive Achievement in Science. Or the Eulies if you’re in the industry. And we can make a big deal about it if anyone pronounces it “the yoolies”