palordrolap

Oh yeah, mine has that as one of the options, but they’ve beefed it up a little. You also have to enter your date of birth and then they send a text to a pre-arranged number with a further 6-digit PIN that also has to be used.

They’re referencing this character: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Reginald_Barclay

I hate that I understand this.

Satire may have been instrumental in its own demise.

People see satire and are either smart enough to understand it - maybe even find it funny, or are offended by it. Those who are offended generally become more entrenched in their beliefs and those who aren’t either don’t see the satire for the warning it is, or do, but mostly choose not to do something about the subject.

And since people have seen what the satirised subject could be like, and they didn’t take action, the subject might take the opportunity to move a little closer to the form it took in satire.

Given this and enough time, satire and reality can become indistinguishable.

And here we are.

Star Trek’s 24th century Earth sounds like a reasonably nice place. I doubt I’d qualify for Starfleet, and wouldn’t try.

I just want to see what life is like for the average broken neurodivergent in that reality. Also, what’s at the location of my current house in that reality? Same construction? Did a version of me live there? Was it there but replaced in the intervening 350 years? etc.

Need you be reminded that German carmakers were among those who rigged cars to cheat on emissions tests?

They got caught, but it proves they’ve been willing to lie and cheat and there’s no reason to believe that they’re not still willing, even if they fixed that particular problem.

Relevant, but also not relevant at all: The North Pacific Deckpecker

Also UK here. Since it’s mostly used as the verb to mean “hit <someone> in the head”, it didn’t even occur to me to parse the question this way.

Perhaps that was a symptom of my own weak bean.

DuckDuckGo currently provides free access to four different LLMs. They say they don’t store user conversations, but I’m not sure I trust that, or that that won’t change at some point even if they don’t right now.

Most of them have the strawberry problem (or some variant where that word is explicitly patched(?)), fail basic arithmetic and apologise repeatedly and often without being able to better themselves when mistakes are pointed out. Standard LLM fare for 2024/5.

Certain molecules have “handedness”, and life on Earth is based around one of the two possible states.

Scientists experiment with the other handedness because there’s no reason it shouldn’t work that way around and it was just by chance that it happened the way it did on Earth.

The two forms are largely incompatible, and so no-one really knows what would happen if a wrong-handed life form was to escape the lab. Maybe nothing. Maybe really bad things.

Feel free to write your own apocalypse movie.

This doesn’t add much to what others have already said, but there’s a useful saying that applies extremely well to low online prices:“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

The tricky ones are the ones that are between, say, 10% off and full price. Some are legit, others are scammers hoping you’ll pick their slightly cheaper option. And you still need to figure out why the legit one is cheaper. They rarely do it out of the good of their heart.

I’m genuinely confused how my advice to minimise harm has itself caused harm. And sometimes, someone’s “best” isn’t much at all. That’d be me most days.

I should probably have put a conditional on “Look at yourself” to tie it in with the “might” in the lead sentence, though, that’s on me.

In the sense of one day you’re there, the other day you’re not, may I suggest not realising that you’re not looking after your mental health, having a total meltdown and finding yourself walking erratically up the road away from the place in a roughly homeward direction, followed by not being OK ever since?

Actually, no, I take that back. I suggest doing the polar opposite of that. Once that particular Prince Rupert’s drop pops, it’s an impossible task to put it back together again.

Also, when back looking at it, you’d begin to realise that the warning signs were there all along, so maybe everything wasn’t so sudden, or isekai, as you put it, at all.

Unrelated: I can’t not hear “he’s a guy” when I hear “isekai”.

Male loneliness is as much a symptom of the “suck it up” toxic masculinity that pervades your comment as it is the content of your comment.

Men are taught to be stoic, to rely only on themselves, to suck it up and get on with it, and for some, they’re trying desperately to conform to something that seems frighteningly easy for others. They’re expending all their energy on that unnatural - for them - attempt to conform rather than being able to simply exist as they might otherwise be.

Your instinct might be to attack me for pointing this out. That’s toxicity at play. Look at yourself.

But I haven’t made my main point yet. It’s this same toxicity and trying to “be a man” that turns men into the monsters that women fear, and so it becomes a vicious cycle of negativity breeding loneliness and on and on.

My advice would be “Do better. And if you can’t do better, do your best. And whatever you do, minimise harm.”

Some countries have only banned it on paper. Don’t ask how rich countries in the middle east get their buildings built, for example.

And then there’s always the loopholes that allow unscrupulous employers to pay employees less than minimum wage. Not quite slavery, but it’s pretty damn close.

For example: My country has a scheme whereby some unemployed people have been forced to take on work in order to qualify for, get this: their unemployment benefits. The employer won’t then take them on because then they’d have to pay them, and pay them minimum wage to boot, rather than get free workers from the government.

Shiii- I was blanking on answers (trauma response maybe), but this reminded me of the Minecraft horse I lost one time. I mean, I am, and was, a grown man playing a block game for fun, but that horse dying. Oof.

But what if: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_triangular_number

Slightly more seriously (but only slightly), what if what we see as Heisenberg uncertainty and probabilistic wave/particle weirdness is actually the result of multiple overlaid timelines caused explicitly by time travel, and if time travel wasn’t possible, the universe wouldn’t have those properties?

Objectively wrong for your part of the world maybe.

I guess my part of the world probably doesn’t have a word for the distinction because here it can mean either.

Either that or it’s a case of common parlance versus learned parlance, like, for the sake of any example, when people say “theory” but mean “hypothesis” and in learned parlance “theory” has a different meaning.

Right verb or wrong verb, it doesn’t really invalidate the point I was making. If all you do is stand by the barbecue, put things in it and flip the food occasionally while everything else magically happens around you, you’re only doing the fun bit.

What is the right word for indirect heat cooking anyway? “Smoking” in that context doesn’t necessarily imply making it hot for close-to-immediate consumption, and “cooking” seems far too general.

Likewise, “barbecuing” could mean grilling, so that’s too general as well.

When real-world horrors are too existential and complex to implement, more tangible, definite horrors must be created to make a game world a better approximation of reality.