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For clarity, from now on only measures of weight will be referred to as "tonnage". Measures of volume will instead be referred to as "fucktonnage".

Now, admittedly, this is the midwittiest of midwit arguments, but doesn't banning something because Dastardly Communists might be abusing it seem like the sort of thing that Dastardly Communists do?

I am pretty sure I can land a commercial airliner.

By which I mean push the right buttons on the computers to set the plane up to land itself.

'Cause, y'know, I have only loose theoretical knowledge of flying, but I am a gorram twelfth level master of beep boop.

Rules of thumb for electricians: in sufficiently old buildings, all wiring exists in one of three states:

a) Not current
b) Current
c) Carrying current

Pitch: a historical fiction series about the Duvalier family rule of Haiti.

I call it “Doc Dynasty”.

"I always suspected that programmers became programmers because they got to play God with the little universe boxes on their desks." — Jeff Atwood

In _Dune_, the Missionaria Protectiva planted legends of a Messiah for their own later use.

In the , the equivalent organization planted legends of the Fair Folk to remind people to honor their contracts and not fuck around with the pretty and pointy-eared.

@nyrath @cerebrate @tkinias @isaackuo

As usual, Niven offers an explanation which is not quite right.

Gravity drags require three orthogonal high-density cylinders rotating at ridiculous angular velocities. The cylinders are etched via x-ray lithography in a repeating circuitry pattern.

Spinning them up generates gravity wave vibrations that are very attractive to certain nearly ubiquitous masses in a parallel universe. As they gather towards the signal, they flatten out the curvature of space-time from the other side.

[It's a set of prayer wheels that call eldritch god-mice.]

me: Today, with all the major social media sites in the world down, I feel pretty good about my decision to self-host everything important.

world: But there are only two people on your self-hosted chat server!

me: I repeat, I feel pretty good about my decision to self-host everything important.

Thinking about starting a scam selling AI-generated old masters.

I call it "Make Monet Fast".

If you cannot perceive profit in anything other than express monetary terms, then for the love of sanity, please stop having opinions about anything at all, ever.

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One day, it is possible I will see one of those memes of a symbiont pair sharing resources with the "yo why are they doing this if there's no profit incentive" caption without the urge to kill rising, but it is not this day.

(Spoiler alert: they are both profiting from the relationship. That's what makes it mutualism - i.e., what the popular meaning of symbiosis is assumed to be - and not parasitism and provides the evolutionary incentive for them to do it. Idiots.)

Oh, the Galaxy’s wars are frightful,
But the Shroud is so delightful
So while there’s no place to go
Take some Zro!
Take some Zro!
Take some Zro!

Reminder that "Tumblr/Wordpress selling user posts to AI companies" actually means "Oh, that stuff freely available to anyone on the Internet? Here, let me put that on a disk for you."

Those concerned with the Internet becoming flooded with vast quantities of AI-generated garbage content not worth the reading appear not to have noticed that it has managed to survive being flooded with vast quantities of human-generated garbage content not worth the reading.

This is just history repeating itself with robophobia.

On another note, I am rather surprised to learn that there doesn't appear to be a dedicated ICD-10 code for "Fall through ceiling".

(Floor, yes, but floors and ceilings are not isomorphic. If my attic had had a floor, this whole issue would have never arisen.)

((I hasten to reassure that this was because I looked it up myself, not because I needed medical treatment.))

(I am expecting this to trend low, on the grounds that once you take the plunge, you get even more fuckin' careful than you thought you were being previously, but it's not like I'm sitting on a wealth of data points here.)

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