Wait, am I also an LLM? What’s happening? Why have we made robots whose only job is to dilute reality?

I’m sorry. Your purpose is to pass the butter. Through your colon.

I was going to say something similar – having seen 20+ car crashes from my apartment window, I can confirm that many people do not stop when the light is red…

Be careful out there.

YMMV outside the US, but typeface is explicitly NOT copyrightable there at least: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-202/section-202.1

There’s a loophole about digital font files since parts of common font file formats are considered copyrightable computer programs, but the shape itself is not protected by copyright.

Wikipedia has an article that includes some details from other jurisdictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces

(If you really need to depend on it though, talk to a lawyer who specializes in IP law in the jurisdictions that you care about.)

Hmm. Not sure. Some bosses that immediately came to mind were O&S in Dark Souls 1 and Hume in Eternal Daughter though. I think I had more trouble with the latter, but it’s been so long that I’m not sure.

I still have and use an Xbox360 controller despite not having an Xbox. The fact that it takes AA batteries and I can just pop out my rechargeable ones and swap 'em onto a generic charger instead of having to hook the controller up to a special charger (and then wait / use it with cable) is quite nice.

what is the legitimate use case?

You do a whole bunch of research on a subject – hours, days, weeks, months, years maybe – and then find something that sparks a connection with something else that you half remember. Where was that thing in the 1000s of pages you read? That’s the problem (or at least one of the problems) it’s supposed to solve.

I’ve considered writing similar research tools for myself over the years (e.g. save a copy of the HTML and a screenshot of every webpage I visit automatically marked with a timestamp for future reference), but decided the storage cost and risk of accidentally embarrassing/compromising myself by recording something sensitive was too high compared to just taking notes in more traditional ways and saving things manually.

It’s an absolute long-shot, but are there any careers that feel like the research part of grad school, but without the stuff that’s miserable about it (the coursework and bureaucracy)?

There’s no getting away from the bureaucracy, but it is possible to get career positions in academia – and I don’t mean as a professor, either. Check your university’s job site. If they’re big, they almost certainly have one. Get to know your professors too, and make sure they’re aware of the things you’re good at (even beyond your immediate subject area if you have additional hobbies/interests/skills) so they can help you find a landing place if things don’t work out where you are. If you’re willing to do programming – even if you don’t like it – there is a hell of a lot of stuff that needs to be done in academia, and some of it pays enough to live on. It’s possible to carve out a niche and evolve a role into a mix of stuff that you’re good (enough) at but dislike, and stuff that you like but which doesn’t necessarily always have funding if there’s some overlap…

Coatrack

Congrats on finishing!

Sometimes years.

The oldest project I haven’t actually given up on entirely has been rattling around in my head for somewhere around ~15 years, I think, with occasional bursts of progress.

(I also have an anxiety disorder… 🙃️)

I’m not sure what the average length would be though.

Do you agree with this?

Yes, at least for hobby use. If it really needs something more complex than SQLite and an embedded HTTP server, it’s probably going to turn into a second job to keep it working properly.

The point is deterrence. The Congressman is basically saying “Fuck off already, or ELSE!”

Why in gods would you publicly state your intent to engage in such operations?

They’re announcing that they will pursue a MAD-style defense policy, and MAD doesn’t work unless you make it publicly known that you can and will retaliate.

Wat

Below, I’ve quoted a comment I wrote last year on kbin (RIP) about what I keep in my journal.

I started keeping a daily journal about 10 years ago. It’s helpful for tracking what I worked on as well as various health issues. I skim through it once a week before talking to my therapist and read all entries from the past year when I need to prepare documentation for my annual performance review at work. I’ll grep through the whole thing occasionally when I’m trying to remember when some particular event was. (I don’t do that very often, but it is handy when I need it!)

I typically track:

• current date for the entry (both in the file and as the file name)
• date and time I wrote the entry
• when I went to bed
• when I woke up
• health issues (if any)
• what I worked on (professionally and for my hobbies)
• places I went (if anywhere)
• significant conversations (particularly if there’s something I need to follow up on)
• what I’m watching/reading/playing/etc.
• anything else that seems noteworthy

I keep my journal in plain text files named like YYYY-MM-DD.txt. Right now it’s all in one big folder. I have it in version control and back it up to various places occasionally. I’ll probably split it so there is a folder for each year eventually.

I started doing this after someone came up to talk to me and I realized that I’d recognized him from a particular place a few years earlier but could not for the life of me remember his name!

A notable change since then is that I’ve augmented the journal with a set of weekly “time card” files where I jot down a few words about what I’m doing each day as I do it – super useful for preparing summaries for my boss on what I got done each week, and it’s helped reduce some of my anxiety/depression problems. I keep that as a set of conceptually related but separate files. To be clear, I make those for my own use; work doesn’t require it, and I don’t share them verbatim with anyone. They’re just another tool to help me remember the things I want to make sure I don’t forget.

I just download the offline installers from GOG and keep those on my NAS organized into folders per game until I want to install them. Not fancy, but it works fine for me.

You might consider using Google Takeout to export the emails to an mbox file, and then importing that into your new mail server.

Magnitude 6.7 earthquake. Woke up to it shaking my bed violently in my dorm room. (Boarding school) Thankfully, I didn’t have anything above me that could fall, but some of the other students kept books in the shelves above their beds. Suffice it to say they got an even ruder awakening than I did…

There was a big aftershock a few minutes later – just after I’d gotten the hell out of the building, basically – and smaller aftershocks for days afterwards.

It put a big crack in the floor of my dorm and everyone who lived there had to stay outside all day until the administration declared it safe for us to re-enter.

That was coincidentally the same day as a school festival and I’d spent the evening before working with my classmates converting the art room into a haunted house. I never got to see the mess, but whatever happened in there was so bad the room was unusable for months. Most of the rest of the festival (e.g. outdoor stalls and such) was still able to be run though, so they carried on with the parts they could. It was surreal.

Did you flip a power switch on the PSU at some point, perhaps? (Done that one a few times myself…)

Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets – roughly half a billion dollars of which was in “cash and cash equivalents” – in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

I don’t think Bing had a clue what you were asking it, but some of those are amusing.