Just noticed my orchids are spiking this morning! It’s one of my markers that the days are indeed moving and that spring is inching closer.

I wonder which AI companies he’s invested in

I don’t think it’s necessarily phobic but I personally find it a bit presumptuous for someone you’re not dating yet to express preferences about how they prefer you to groom.

HAVING the preference doesn’t seem like a problem and doesn’t seem linked to transphobia.

In my perfect world you would learn about their preferences when you were trying a new thing (shaving, haircut, outfit, whatever) and they were like “I find this new thing incredibly attractive.”

I was bored so I looked up these apps for receipt scanning and it looks like it’s a combination of couponing and consumer data broker. Most of them require you to activate promos on the app first, go shopping, then get “cash back” for certain promo items when you take a picture of the receipt.

I’m guessing this is on top of the discounts you can get directly from grocery store apps (which are surely already brokering purchase data).

One or two of the apps don’t require activating offers at all so I guess those ones are JUST data brokering.

I love big tech’s products after the startup funding designed to kill competition has been spent. It’s really the sweet spot where the product doesn’t function efficiently anymore AND it costs more than the original product or service it replaced AND any human workers involved are not protected as employees.

Agreed, couch co-op games are doing well in general because they’re an easy hangout activity and only require one console/computer. Couch co-op has been out of vogue amongst the big publishers (I’m sure a fortnite player is more valuable to them) so people are using what’s available. The few by big publishers with nice graphics have been popular as well (split fiction, it takes two).

It’s hard to come up with solutions but often trivial to check whether the solution works

More and more stuff in Math and CS goes up on arxiv before publication. I think the structure would not work as well for humanities though, math is easier and faster to verify

Agreed. I tried looking for a big monitor instead of a TV last time we were in the market for one and there were shockingly few options.

Did you know there’s some scientific basis for talking about brainwaves synching now? Maybe you and I_love_older_women are kindred minds

Not privacy focused but read on if you want my thoughts on Duo vs Busuu. I used Duolingo back in the day but they chased me away with their complete 180 on ads (they used to advertise as no ads ever!). Duolingo was great for learning vocab but terrible for grammar in my opinion (at least eng-> german and eng-> spanish).

After bailing I didn’t use anything for awhile but I picked up Busuu a few years ago shortly after it was purchased by Chegg. They have a premium and an ad supported tier and the ad tier is terrible, it makes you have to close out at the end of each lesson to proceed past an annoying screen trying to get you to upgrade. The premium is advertised at about $70 a year but it comes down to around $50 for good sales. The monthly is a bit pricey ($10 or $12 or something).

Anyways, I really like Busuu for learning grammar. They have a flash card section for vocab that’s excellent as well but the grammar is where I saw huge improvements. The grammar is introduced in the lessons then given a strength that degrades over time until you practice it again. It tells you where your skills are weak so you can focus on a particular grammar element.

I also really like that they include regional differences in word use and regional expressions.

They recently introduced an AI speaking feature but I haven’t opted into it because I’m not comfortable with them processing my voice data. I haven’t read the privacy policy. This means skipping 1-2 lessons each unit which isn’t a big deal to me.

Hope this info is helpful to someone!

I predicted sleuths would be able to figure out some stuff that was supposed to be redacted (like “donald trump” redactions always being the same width or something) but if this is true it has to be sabotage from within lol

Exactly. If we thought the companies would fold in AI thoughtfully as one tool of many for game creators to consider when implementing their vision I doubt people would be negative. As it stands we trust companies to continue doing what they’re doing: forcing workers to incorporate AI into their workflow because they’re rich friends at google/meta/openAI really really need the technology to succeed to make back anything on their investment even though the profit step still reads ??? in their master plan anyway.

hehehehe

Roblox wants the future of communication to be via Roblox?

Were you the only one who knew how to press the input button on the remote to switch devices?

A second peace plan in as many months designed to legitimize a landgrab by an imperialist power

They’re not in the new Epstein Ballroom, they’re in the student loan servers (they’re nice and cool like tunnels)

I was on snap in college and I had to resubmit the paperwork to apply every 3 months. What I got would change every time I refiled. I feel like it had a lot to do with which caseworker I got. Sometimes the paperwork would come in the mail past the deadline for the interview and I would have to restart the process.

I hate how it deals with lines in chart grids where it looks like different lines are bolded depending on your zoom level