Fun for you. But tacky is bad for the environment. I’ve passed dozens of discarded Christmas trees in my neighbourhood in the past couple of weeks (and they annoyingly clog up the sidewalks). Plus all the recycling bags erroneously filled with crumpled wrapping paper, cardboard boxes, styrofoam, and bubble wrap. Yeah…

Thanks for the laugh! This comment is so underrated.

Christmas is *tacky* and that’s reason enough to loathe it.

As someone who has been looking for a programming job for a few months and has been in the industry since the 90s, I’ve never seen the job landscape so dire (thanks big tech companies for laying off tens of thousands of people all once. That wasn’t going to fuck it up for the rest of us at all). I’m not sure learning…

Yes I tip delivery people where tipping is available in the app, like Deliveroo. But where its not, I expect the employer to pay a fair wage and the do seem to (like with Ocado). This past summer I did give a struggling delivery person a bottle of water. I would have tipped if that was available (I don’t carry cash). I…

I know what you must be thinking: How many more AI-generated Republican white men must I suffer through?

So one of the big issues with electric vehicles being adopted in Canada is that they don’t tolerate cold very well. IIRC, the cold saps the battery, so pushing up the range would help in cold weather to where the vehicle is actually useful (also not helped by the fact that towns and cities are usually quite far apart).

Well, scientists have been talking about mitochondrial Eve for a long time. It’s a pretty embedded metaphor now, quite secularised. As a long time atheist I’m not offended. I do agree that maybe there could have been a more creative title, but it telegraphs the idea of the book pretty cleanly.

Jesus, have a little faith that women actually know their own minds. She said she didn’t want kids and would have an abortion if pregnant. I’ve been telling people since childhood that I didn’t want to be a mother and no one believed me until I hit my mid-forties with nary a pregnancy in sight. Shit like what you just…

I’ll probably get reamed for reporting on this but according to the Walter Isaacson biography, Musk does not have and never had a relationship with Shivon Zillis beyond babydaddy/employer. Ie. they were never an ‘item’. Musk encouraged her to have children (not specifically his), and Zillis asked Musk for his sperm…

I used to work as a photographer and specifically avoided weddings because weddings are high maintenance, overlong, multi-stage, and may involve drunk people (and as a photographer, you often don’t have as much control over lighting conditions which is a huge hassle in post which adds greatly to the time spent working…

So I’m in the UK, but it’s a similiar dynamic. Ocado is fully online and robotic, no in-person stores, and they have excellent control over their inventory. I almost never get a missing product (I don’t do substitution, because I’m miss picky). However if I do a Sainsbury’s shop, which picks from your nearest physical…

That’s an interesting theory. And by and large Gen-X had Silent Generation parents (also a low birth rate demographic, as they were born in the 30s and 40s), which also has similar traits to Gen X and Gen Z (does that make them Gen V? Ha!)

Weird on the tipping. Here in the UK there is no option to tip on grocery delivery, at least from the bigger supermarkets with scheduled delivery. The smaller services (like UberEats) do have an option to tip, but they are also coming from the restaurant model. But in general tipping is not as much of a thing as it is…

I live in the UK and in London specifically so I’m spoiled for choice. I did online grocery shopping prior to the pandemic for heavy items (like cans and shelf-stable plant milk), primarily with Ocado (which is an online only supermarket and has the most usable website). In the pandemic nearly every store went online…

I’m not sure why this assignment is so inappropriate? The language is outdated, but the concept would still get kids thinking. I can see Health class as not being the most appropriate. This was the sort of out-of-the-box weird stuff we did in gifted class (the main goal of which was to keep us engaged in education…

AI doesn’t need to be self-aware in order to be creative; thinking in this way is a bias many people have that assumes humans are somehow uniquely “better”. Do you remember how Elon Musk said for several years running that Tesla cars would be self-driving within the year? It’s not just his chronic bullshitting, the…

There’s a simple reason why LLM models like ChatGPT can’t write good scripts; it’s the fact that they can’t look back as they write, they can only look forward (LLMs are essentially a basic evolution of auto-complete). If/when these models gain the capacity to revise their text, they will probably be very good. So…

I’m in the process of listening to the audiobook version (2o+ hours...ugh). Isaacson is a good writer, and even in the first couple of chapters lays out some rather shocking stuff rather objectively. It’s like, “here’s some really bonkers thing that happened. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how that affects a…

Wait a sec...how is the Congress building 270 years old when the US is only 247 years old?