I mean the Great Lakes are truly inland freshwater oceans with tides, imense international shipping, famous shipwrecks, forgotten shipwrecks, folk songs about famous shipwrecks and even piracy

So the term “great lakes” clearly communicates that these are lakes (freshwater, not hydrologically connected to the ocean) but also that these are notable lakes as the “great” indicates the size, notability and gives a sense of wonder

The specifics will vary by jurisdiction. The state I live in, you can collect unemployment if fired but it has to be determined that you were not fired for noncompliance with workplace policies or illegal actions. For example if you stole from the cash register and got caught and fired you would not be able to collect unemployment. But if you were fired for poor performance you can receive unemployment

I learned this after a recent workplace decided to make up performance reasons to fire me. The state opened an investigation to determine if unemployment benefits should be paid out, which involved asking both myself and the previous employer about the stated reasons for the discharge, if any written or verbal warnings were given, etc. Hilariously my old employer dropped the entire line of reasoning and just said “it didn’t work out” when the investigator for the state spoke with them. I also then learned that the maximum unemployment benefit in my state is only $1200/month which won’t cover most folks rents so that’s practically useless!

Sounds like exactly what a bot would say! Now prove your humanity by clicking all of the traffic lights in this image…err that one doesn’t work? Uh…You shall prove your humanity by listening to this audio clip and transcribing…that one too huh? Now you shall…count the Rs is Strawberry? Really? Man this is a really dumb future we’ve found ourselves in

Part of the reason for those who won’t accept anything but cash is purely because they’re not actually homeless but instead learned that they can make more begging than they can working a crap fast food job for example. I’ve even heard of groups of people coordinating their efforts so they can make sure they aren’t oversaturating a given part of town or in a some cases pooling the takings at the end of the day to help even out the inevitable variability

I thought it was so quaint but learning that the reason for milk delivery was due to a lack of pasteurization (and therefore very rapidly expiring milk), and how many people died by drinking unpasteurized milk quickly dispelled that thought process

Just keep running the hot water, it’ll get the cooled water from the pipes out of the system at some point!

If you run the hot water lines under the streets it can double as snow removal in the winter to help reduce road salt consumption!

…We’ll just pretend we don’t have to worry about making urban heat islands worse in the summer

Need a strawberry milk line too! We don’t want the pink cows going extinct now do we?

I think they mean a cat that grew up mousing and knows how to catch and eat mice. Both of my cats came from my in-laws farm, and both greatly enjoy when the first cold nights of late fall come around and a couple of mice make it into the house, because they spend the entire night chasing and ultimately killing the mice (and then we toss them outside for wildlife to eat because the cats are only after the hunt and prefer their kibble for feeding)

…we won’t talk about that

queue

Actually in this case “cue” is the correct form of the word. It’s reference to cue sheets for plays

See I made the brilliant decision immediately upon moving into my house of “I’m going to go back to college!” Nevermind the fact that I hadn’t even come close to finishing unpacking, nor that my wife was pregnant at the time. I went for it. It sucked and was terrible timing, but I graduated and now make significantly more working jobs I’m far more satisfied with than I could before

But I’ve got all of these last minute moving decisions that I never got around to sorting out, so I’m slowly getting all of that squared up now

I’ve just been thoroughly unimpressed by all of the American car brands. Crap vehicles with lousy interiors the lot of them.

The rule of thumb from data centers is every watt of compute equals 3 watts of energy consumption, 1 to power the thing and 2 to remove the 1 watt of heat, so high power components are really a ton of power

I mean the difference between pointing out the environmental impacts of AI compared to the environmental impacts of heating/air conditioning, industry, transportation etc. is there’s useful output from one and the other just creates low quality slop.

Most of the use of AI right now is entirely pointless. It exists purely because of the AI bubble and eventually companies won’t be burning queries on annoying sales chat bots that the user isn’t even interacting with or inaccurate search result summaries that you can’t reasonably turn off

My printer died so I go to the library to print when I need to. For ¢25 per color print or ¢10 per black and white print it’s a lot cheaper than buying another printer, plus I’ll really consider if I actually need to print that thing

Yeah it’ll be bad, but realistically it’ll be like every other major economic calamity. Your accounts lose a ton of value very rapidly, but as long as the money keeps going in (or as long as you have a small enough withdrawal rate if you’re already retired) ultimately it’ll eventually bounce back and then some in the recovery, because when stocks are down that’s the time to pile more money in (buy low sell high)

Honestly the AI bubble is going to take the entire stock market with it. Over a quarter of the S&P 500 (an index of the 500 and something most valuable companies on the US Stock Market) is made up of tech companies directly investing in the AI bubble, and most individuals and funds these days invest into indexes rather than individual stocks so when a single overvalued market sector making up over a quarter of the market loses most of its value, every stock portfolio is going to lose a shitload of value.

This dude was honestly kinda insane. The most charitable interpretation is that he had a specific idea in his head of exactly how a given task should get done based on what works well for him and any employees deviating from that approach to the task are doing so incorrectly. He also did not maintain up to date documentation of any of his expected workflows so you’d better hope you remember his expected workflow when he comes to yell at you (and he yelled a lot!)

Notably he didn’t like automating any frequent tasks nor creating templates because he seemed more focused on what happens if the process goes wrong than what happens if a person makes a mistake. I would argue that humans are incredibly fallible and it’s better to have the computer automate the parts of the task that can be automated so that the human can focus on the parts that can’t be and work more quickly and efficiently, but he was far more concerned about the rare instances where the automation might break.

The big problem with using an LLM for formulas in Excel is you need those numbers to be right, and if you don’t fully understand what Excel is doing to your numbers you can’t know when the numbers are wrong nor why they’re wrong.

I even had one manager once who took this to the extreme and said no formulas ever just in case the individual doesn’t understand them (he also happened to be the worst manager I ever worked for)