unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money

Do you really feel like inconveniencing us is unlikely?

A few years ago before I moved away, PNC bank had a few branches with new ATMs that made me tap through ads for loans and special checking accounts.

Are there hedgehogs with long tails like in the comic?

I think those are porcupines.

deleted by creator

My family calls them charging doots

Edit: or also sometimes “wall-to-usb adapters”

I’m pretty sure the average American doesn’t think too much about where FBI informants come from. That part seems like a decent wager on his disinformation attempt.

Plex was great in 2001 2004 when I had videos on my Macintosh and I wanted to play them using the PS2 PS3 hooked up to the television.

20 years is a long time for a rug pull. I think they just found themselves more excited about money after a while.

Opposite: I (US-ian) was visiting friends in Germany and they took me on a bike ride in the woods.

“Look!!” (Bike sudden halt, stop and point into a tree with full arm) “a squirrel!”

The chatbot is at its heart a text-completion program: “given the text so far, what would a real person be likely to type next? Output that.”

To get a vision of “normal”, it is trained on a corpus of, essentially, every internet conversation that ever happened.

So when an emo teenager comes in with the beginning of an emo conversation about beautiful suicide, what the chatbot does is fill in the blanks to make a realistic conversation about suicide that matches the similar emo conversations it found on tumblr which are… not necessarily healthy.

The “guardrails” come in a few forms:

• system prompt: All chatbots are using this. Before each session where the user starts a chat, the company feeds the chatbot a system prompt saying what the company wants the chatbot to do, for example, “Don’t talk about suicide, ok? It’s not healthy.” This works to an extent but is easy to trick. As far as the chatbot is concerned, there is no difference between the system prompt and the rest of the conversation. It doesn’t recognize any concept of authority or “system prompt came from the boss” so as the conversation gets longer and longer the system prompt at the beginning gets less and less relevant.

• tuning: All chatbots are using this. After training the chatbot intensively on everything ever seen in the whole internet, give it a 2nd level of more targeted training where you rank it on “good” and “bad” – these texts are bad, don’t copy texts like this; these texts are good, do copy texts like this. This is not as targeted as the system prompt, and can have surprising side effects because what constitutes “texts like this” is not well-defined. Doesn’t change the core behavior of the chatbot just wanting to complete the conversation like online example texts will do, including sick and twisted conversations.

• supervisor: I don’t know if this is in common use – have one chatbot generate the text, while another chatbot which does not take information from the user watches it for “bad topics” and shuts the conversation down. These are really annoying, so companies have an incentive not to use a supervisor or to make it lenient.

On direct vs indirect object, I’ve heard that before but it doesn’t make sense. None of the other pronouns in English work that way.

Best supporting authority I could find in 15 seconds of looking was Merriam Webster.

Pronouns! Whom is correct here.

Who / whom works like He / him —

“The Trump administration attempted to label him a terrorist.”

“The Trump administration attempted to label whom a terrorist?”

“He is the person whom the Trump administration attempted to label a terrorist.”

They had a plunger, ball goes up and hits targets (or not) and falls down. Your score is however many targets it hit while it was up.

Your controls were bumping and rocking the game case to try to make the ball bounce better off of things.

Games have … improved since then.

I’ve been really liking Wheel of Time. I thought the books were really great world building but desperately needed some editing, and the TV provided some good editing. Sue me.

Yes! All of that!

How much did the real estate value of the property go up during your experiment? Even if there’s no cash flow, helping to pay the mortgage while you sit on an appreciating asset might make sense monetarily.

Speaking here as an art noob who generally knows nothing of what the pieces are supposed to mean or what their societal context was when they were made and what forces they were pushing against etc:

When my arty partner drags me into art museums with huge abstract modern art pieces with just big splotches of heavily textured color (I’m thinking in particular of one giant piece filling a wall with jagged black heaps of paint) they do in fact make me feel feelings.

In my case, as in OP’s case, they were really bad feelings. I would prefer not to feel really bad and I don’t like that art. But I certainly couldn’t call it ineffective fart-huffing!

Not OP but I’m partial to, “Damn, that sucks.”

It’s a little late now that there’s camps, sure. If people had refused harder to put up with shitty democrats in the past, like… decades past… then the dems would’ve lost to past republicans who weren’t quite dictators.

In that alternate past where the dems actually lose for being center-right corporatists, they would’ve had to get some kind of spine or plan or… something… earlier to protect our public news and education from authoratarian misinformation and maybe prevented this bullshit.

In this current world that we actually have though… I mean you saw we elected Biden, right? And you saw how much good that did – right? We need somebody on our side with some teeth and rolling over for milquetoast donation collectors is not going to get it for us.

No they’re kind of just doing their thing how their thing feels best to them

No these are modified. Last time I saw a vehicle like that it was a Mormon family out camping with their 17 kids

Edit: honestly if you’ve got a giant family and you’re basically a half a busload of people everyplace you go, that’s pretty much the ideal best use case for a private car.

Same with this picture — if somebody felt the need to pay $$$$$ for extending the truck, they’re probably actually using that space for something productive and not just driving it around empty. I’m way more mad about the incredible waste of every suburban individual having their own heavy duty cargo hauler for daily chores that don’t need it, then I am about modified special-purpose vehicles doing a job.

Everybody is their own person and dating may not be for you, but autism does not have to mean that. I have a diagnosed autistic friend who dated so much they have two spouses now.