Professors don’t always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .

You’re right we’re nowhere close to downtrodden enough for that, but we definitely have enough inequality to want to joke about doing so, which I’m pretty sure is what was happening there.

This scam has been around since long before AI voice was a thing. You say something scary enough, and people will subconsciously attribute anything off about the voice to a bad connection and the severe stress the person is presumably under and genuinely think the voice sounds exactly like their loved one. AI voice makes it easier to fool more people, but I bet most of these types of scammers are not putting in the time to research every target to build a voice profile and instead focus on calling as many people as possible. Of course, these days anyone taken by this scam will assume it must have been AI voice, because otherwise how did they sound so convincing.

Well, TIL. Thanks for the correction.

Yes, figs are visited by wasps in the region figs are native to, but only in the same way that flowers are visited by bees. This picture is very much not what that would look like. This is, I’m certain, literally just a wasp nest.

Edit: I stand corrected, fig wasps are born and typically die in their figs. Fortunately, that still looks nothing like this picture because they are super tiny.

Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

Yeah, I’m sure it’s some sort of expensive hobby he’s addicted to, and perpetual project motorcycle would be my first guess.

You’re thinking of Scandinavian regional delicacies and certain seasonal special dishes, none of which I’ve ever had the misfortune of smelling, and serving those to prisoners does sound pretty inhumane. All Scandinavian food outside of those that I’ve tried or heard of tasted or sounded delicious.

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don’t think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.

The whole point of making a costly sequel is it can’t be a total disaster. If nothing else, “Joker: Folie à Deux” proved that is not the case.

Well, if studios can accept that sequels and remakes actually aren’t immune from being flops, maybe they will be more open to considering new ideas? I won’t get my hopes up, but it’s a nice thought.

an ice cream barge

For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy “ice cream” from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.

Right, see, those are relevant because they show the value of that inspiration. Inspiration that could have brought many more valuable changes to her life if she still had it, but sadly the park service stole that inspiration from her, along with many potential benefits it could have brought her if they’d just let her remain blissfully ignorant of the true identity of the inspiring bigfoot she thought she saw.

I had a housemate who fried sausage patties and eggs in my cast iron skillet every morning for a couple of years. Gave it a good wipe and that’s it. I’d cook other things in it sometimes and wash it up if needed. The seasoning on that thing developed into a deep black that was so smooth you see your reflection in it and you could fry an egg without oil and it came off clean with just a nudge from the spatula. It was beautiful.

We went our separate ways and it quickly degraded back to a more normal “good enough” level of seasoning. It was great, but I’m not frying up a fancy breakfast every morning for it.

Nothing you couldn’t recover from unless he managed to crack it. I’d wipe it down, and hit it with brake parts cleaner. If I was still nervous about contamination, I’d put it in an oven with the self cleaning function and run it. That should burn it back down to bare metal. Then, s good scrub with dish soap to remove any residue and a good seasoning, and you’re back in business. I don’t know if I’d personally skip the heat clean step or not, but I’d definitely put it back in usage.

The analysis I read from a lawyer explained how Wisconsin’s state laws on self defense are weirdly complex, and due to the exact order of events, under those laws, his intent technically didn’t matter, and that’s why it was inadmissible evidence. In most states it would be admissable, and he would be guilty. He even listed the laws out and while I don’t recall any of the details now, it did seem perfectly logical to my layman’s understanding. So it’s not that the judge was biased, it’s just that Rittenhouse, through dumb luck, happened to fall through a legal loophole. Wisconsin needs to fix it’s laws, because it’s abundantly clear he wanted to kill those people and morally speaking, I consider him to be an unrepentant murderer.

It’s not an official requirement anywhere I’ve heard of, but I do recall cases where people have noticed police departments declining to hire applicants who scored too high on their aptitude test. I think someone even sued over it, but the court found that being too smart was not a protected class, so the department was within their rights to do that. Or something like that, it’s been a while since that story broke.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

YES. YES! A square is a rombus is a parallelogram! You see it too! There are no parallels in this diagram, only lies and trickery!