Romp? That’s an interesting take. Kind of like whistling past the graveyard because the moral of the story for the motties (the civilization we contact) is basically that unchecked growth creates a cycle of unsustainable growth and apocalyptic collapse, which should be a familiar theme to anyone living through a capitalist dystopia.

I really like Niven and Pournelle individuallt, but the things they’ve collaborated on like this are even better.

This is basically the plot of “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Sorry for the rant. I long story short, I agree with you.

The quadratic formula.

When we learned to use it in algebra, it was just rote memorization that made little sense. We knew there was a proof for it, but we were told it was beyond our level and to just wait. When we finally touched on it again in Calculus, it was little more than a footnote. Since we had developed better tools for finding roots already, we did little more than note its existence and solve the problems more generally. I don’t think we got around to the real proof of the quadratic formula until later with Linear Algebra. Most people aren’t going to get that far. Most people don’t have any need to. The quadratic formula is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need upper level math skills to prove it, but we learn it early in order to practice algebraic skills to get to that level.

I just wish that we’d have been taught some of those calculus fundamentals and ideas earlier. It would have been like a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe we wouldn’t be ready to rigorously work through limits and integrals before all that algebra practice, but even a child can understand acceleration and its relationship to changes in velocity. We have so many documentaries about special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Almost no one watching these documentaries can do that math, but we don’t worry about that. Our society could benefit from everyone having more general knowledge about the very broad strokes of calculus, differential equations, statistics, and combinatorics long before we worry about teaching the mechanics of those maths to them. Not everyone needs to know HOW to do them, but everyone can be taught to appreciate WHAT they do and WHY they are important and a part of every facet of our lives.

My social anxiety combined with an ability to sing that is overshadowed by my ability to hear when people sing off key is exactly why I sing karaoke. I belt out the songs I know I can sing (at least a little) and songs that I love because it beats the thrill of any roller coaster around. My eyes may be closed. My hands might be shaking so bad I can barely hold the mic. But… I don’t know. Karaoke isn’t about being good. It’s not about talent. It’s not about looking good for the gram. It’s about being in the moment and not letting all of that bullshit silence the song in your heart. Fucking let it all out. It’s like jumping out of a plane BECAUSE you have a fear of heights instead of doing it in spite of that fear.

As much as I’d like that to be true, probably not. Automatic signature machines have been a thing, especially for presidential signatures, for a while now. This is more a hit to Trump’s ego than anything.

First, reddit no longer has any good content, communities, or real engagement specifically because of manipulation like this.

Second, it is absolutely not benign.

It’s generating engagement to astroturf as a basis of using you and manipulating you and the community here. Lemmy will not benefit from it. Yes, I’m against it. I’ve seen what that kind of influence has on an online community.

I don’t care if I’m “allowed” to report them. These latest bots are pretending to be people when it’s clear they are not. Going to call out, downvote, and report liars and trolls wherever they appear, AI or not.

Astroturfing AI slop powered engagement bots rehashing reddit’s greatest hits discussion topics like OP.

This AI slop just seems to be a reddit greatest hits as performed by shiny new AI slop bot pretending to be a person to generate engagement.

AI slop engagement bots like you.

You can’t possibly have any experience with shoelaces because you don’t have feet. You’re just AI slop.

I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

At that scale meters and miles are pretty close with respect to orders of magnitude, which is why practically everyone talks about these scales in AUs regardless of what units they actually used to do the science.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.

A CSV is just a long string of text with a few control characters tossed in for end lines. There are practically no rules enforced by the file type itself. You can dump that unsanitized and poorly awk’d data into whatever awful mess you want. Nobody’s stopping you. Sure, excel will force it’s CSV formatting rules on you when you export like a child’s training wheels. But that’s not relevant here.

You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.

Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp

The article is saying that these sharks aren’t really sharking though. The sharks behavior has been changed by environmental factors (regular human feeding and humans raising the local sea temperature by dumping warm water from the desalination plant).

1. Sharks are attracted by usually warm water from desalination plant.
2. Tourist guide boats start chumming the waters to keep the sharks around for tourists.
3. The attraction of so many mostly harmless sharks changes their feeding dynamic. Ever tried eating an ice cream cone near a small child? Ever tried pushing an ice cream cart through a crowd of small kids? Way different dynamic as supply and demand changes as the crowd grows.
4. Formerly mostly harmless and “shy around humans” sharks start directly approaching humans as a source of food.
5. Sharks investigate human, beg for food. How do sharks investigate? By biting, nibbles really, or bumping into people swimming.
6. The first bite generates a predictably violent reaction from the humans, which triggers a feeding frenzy response. Humans aren’t equipped to defend or escape this.

The point is that at every step of the way, these sharks are acting in a very strange way (for them) as a direct result of human action. We’ve seen this kind of thing before when people feed wild animals, strange and dangerous human seeking behaviors develop: alligators, bears, moose, etc. Dangerous animals? Yes, but the behaviors that result in human deaths are in no way natural.

First, 400 pounds is a pretty beefy fridge, most basic units are a lot lighter. 400 pounds is coincidentally the top end of the average weight search AI gave me too, the lower end being 200 pounds. I’ve moved a few fridges over the decades, they’d have been hard pressed to get a 400 pounder wedged in there like that.

Second, a fridge is mostly empty space. The weight is certainly not distributed throughout. If they put the heavy end (usually where the compressor is) hanging out the back, they probably wouldn’t have made it very far anyway before the thing ejected itself. They are primarily difficult to move because they are bulky and lack safe handholds for lifting.

Third, police modifications adding weight would necessarily require modifications improving the suspension. It would be pretty bad design if putting three 200+ adults in the rear of a police wagon were enough to make the vehicle unsafe.

This is all a pretty dumb thing to argue about. After all, I agree that the cop in this case was an idiot. That’s mostly because storing a fridge on its side is a dumb move, but also because I do actually believe that storing it as we see in the photo would be bad for the car too. Fridges have lots of sharp edges, plenty of opportunity to destroy the interior, shatter a window, or cause an accident. I just don’t think weight or its distribution is the problem.