Generally speaking, the terms man and woman are reserved specifically for humans. I couldn’t tell you why, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

For pets, the use of boy/girl probably does have a lot to do with how people tend to infantilize their companion animals.

Additionally, the boy / girl terminology is often generalized to cover all animals, particularly when adults are interacting with children and by extension when children are interacting with each other. It’s not uncommon to have a child ask something like “is that a boy rabbit or a girl rabbit?” but it is a little unusual to hear an adult ask another adult that same question, unless it’s sort of tongue-in-cheek or maybe in the presence of kids.

A neighbor told me that her daughter had been out playing in the yard one evening and apparently mistook a couple of young skunks as being kitties. They were quite docile and followed her up to the house. Fortunately, nobody got sprayed, not even the dog. Skunks are surprisingly docile when they don’t feel threatened in my experience, so I guess that’s why the kid thought they were cats?

If you go the qbittorrent route, my piece of advice is to always check the settings after any updates.

It was maybe around 8 or 9 years ago, but after one of the updates, all my settings got wiped and set back to defaults I assume.

I didn’t notice until I ended up getting a nastygram from my ISP.

It’s never happened since, but needless to say I always double check now.

So, first thing that comes to mind is that I put the effort into typing out a list but turns out there’s a character limit on the size of posts so one things leads to another and next thing you know I lose all my tabs.

This is one that’s not on my radar. I guess I’ll need to check it out sometime.

When I went off to college, I basically sold as much of my stuff as I could because even in the ancient times it was expensive as hell for a kid from a poor family. So, that was the end of my gaming days for the better part of a decade, and I honestly didn’t really keep up. My last gaming system was the original Playstation until around 2007 when I decided to spend money I didn’t have to buy a Wii.

Very nice. What species of flora and fauna are in there?

I’ve been winding down in the hobby, and as of a couple of months ago, I’m down to my last tank. I think when its occupant expires (an elderly clown pleco that’s at least 15 years old), I’m going to give it a break for awhile, but hope to be back some day.

I’ve seen him perform! Stage name is Miranda Warning. Oh that’s right, never mind, still not a drag queen.

I’ve kind of been on both sides of this.

For me, returning to and then leaving my home town triggers feelings of melancholy but also relief. I didn’t grow up in a stable, solidly middle-class (or higher) lifestyle, so I’m sure that’s a factor.

While I had a good childhood and loving parents, things got complicated the older I became. And even when I happen upon a reminder of the good times or a fond memory, way too often it’s tainted by how fucked up things were at the time.

On the other hand, “the kids” … it’s wonderful when they’re home for summer. When they’re at my house, at least I know they are safe, happy, and that all their needs are being met, in as much as possible. It’s sad to see them go, when I know it’s going to be months before they’re back.

But also, it’s a sigh of relief when my life can go back to being on my terms sans drama and chaos. It’s almost total bliss when I can go out to the kitchen in my undies for a cup of coffee fully confident that the milk jug won’t be sitting in the fridge completely empty (or with a minuscule amount of milk remaining so as to be practically useless but also technically not empty).

What’s the average price for an insurance for a middle class person living in a big city?

In the USA, shit’s so convoluted that it’s highly debatable whether average price is relevant. But, also, good luck finding someone willing to track that info down, assuming it even exists.

The costs depend on what state you live in, whether you’re getting insurance through your employer or the open market, whether you’re getting family or individual coverage, and a myriad other factors.

For insurance through your employer – The employer usually gets a group discount on a set of plans that range from shitty coverage to slightly less shitty, a range of costs based on how much the employer is willing to pay for each plan as a “benefit” to employees, and whatever other add-ons the employee selects (ex: dental, vision).

I don’t have average data, but I’ve paid as little as $50 a month for employer sponsored insurance, but it was the shittiest shit tier of insurance that was basically worthless (and that was over a decade ago). For my last few employers, the employee paid part of the plans seemed to be in the $200 to $400 range, again depending on the plan and the options selected.

For open market – This is even more complicated and complex. But basically everybody can get it through some version of what’s known as Obamacare or ACA. Costs and plans available vary from state to state. Technically, individuals are on the hook for the entire cost of the plans. In my area, when I last checked, there were a few options as low as $350 USD (but they were utterly terrible) to $2,500+ USD for ultra-premium plans. The caveat here is that the cost of these plans is partly based on income. So, in my state, basically everybody making below $60,000 USD (or so) gets a discounted rate (or rebate on taxes at the end of the year), such that people in the lowest income bracket can get health insurance for free or close to it.

Does families get an all-in-one or it’s different for any single person?

Cost-wise, there’s a different price for individual insurance versus family coverage. Usually the family coverage is priced so that it’s a bit cheaper per person than getting separate individual plans, but even then there are exceptions. Family plans tend to have a shared max out of pocket and deductible (which are basically the annual limits on what you pay) that’s higher than the individual plan.

I couldn’t tell you with certainty that Meta is doing it specifically, but without a doubt, I’m certain that the Fediverse is being scraped by AI.

It’s one of many reasons I make sure that at least some portion of what I contribute is intended specifically to poison that shit. Boomer-style anecdotes. Unpopular opinions. Completely and ridiculously incorrect information. Nonsensical but superficially coherent sentences and stories. They’re all kinda my jam.

But don’t you forget for one minute that sometimes I type out straight facts and truth is sometimes unpopular. Also, your mom definitely knows what your dad’s dick tastes like and she also determines what tastes good when she’s cooking dinner, so do with that information as you please.

Which sounds like great, practical advice in a theoretical perfect world!

But, the reality of the situation is that professionals are usually balancing a myriad of concerns and considerations using objective and subjective evaluations of what’s required of us and quite often inefficiency, whether in the form of programmatic complexity or in the form of disk storage or otherwise, has a relatively low precedent compared to everything else we need to achieve if we want happy clients and a pay check.

I would correct their grammar if they were a native English speaker because having “a dream of me in it” sounds super weird.

But otherwise, people don’t control their dreams and some people are super sharers so really all just depends on a myriad of context details. Mostly it wouldn’t be anything I’d think about too much, one way or the other. Like if they told me they had tacos for dinner or that they were wearing wool socks because it was cold this morning. No real difference.

Almost every depiction of Anomalocaris, particularly in those CGI documentaries, make members of this genus look like enormous hideous sea monsters.

But in reality, these things are small, all less than 40 cm (like the largest ones are slightly more than a foot for us in the USA).

Giants of that era I guess and certainly an order of magnitude or more larger than superficially similar modern day relatives like sea monkeys and fairy shrimp. But they’re like the size of a lobster, we’d probably be eating them to extinction these days if they weren’t already extinct.

And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.

Also interesting reading the comments about how many other countries are wrong. I have a hunch this entire graphic is wrong.

I certainly would not be surprised if there are some inaccuracies, but of the comments I’ve read so far suggesting that the numbers don’t capture the truth appear to be misunderstanding what the data is showing (nationwide statutory paid time off and paid public holidays).

As an example, you mentioned the 7 paid federal holidays in the USA. But similar to some of the other observations in question, those aren’t what this graphic is capturing. Outside of government jobs and maybe certain industries, those 7 public holidays are not required by statute on a nationwide level – it’s not even close to applying to everyone. Even if we agree that most jobs give people paid time off (but not because they are legally required to) or that some states require it, that’s still not what this graphic is showing, so those don’t make the 0 in any way inaccurate.

To be perfectly honest, if a CEO is truly working 80+ hours a week, you almost have to wonder where they would find the time to write walls of text to rejected candidates and to play around on social media.

Granted, I suspect a lot of higher level folks are like the ones I know, they’re very generous with what they qualify as “working hours” for themselves. For instance, “I work 12 hour days” translates to I leave for work at 7 a.m. and I don’t get home until 7 p.m." so basically they consider their travel to/from the office, the 2 hour lunch break + gym time, picking up kids after school, etc to be part of their working hours. Or if they’re away from home for 3 days at a conference, that’s 70+ hours of work right there.

And the thing is, I don’t completely disagree with any of that, it’s just that they tend to take the opposite stance when it comes to people actually doing the work. If you’re not sitting in front of your computer or on the phone making calls, then you’re not working. Your commute to/from work doesn’t count. Your lunch break doesn’t count. Your travel time to and from the conference doesn’t count for your 38.5 hour minimum billable time for that week.

I’m hoping to be wrong, but I have to agree with the experts who are saying that current AI (i.e. generative AI / LLMs) are a financial bubble. It’s good, it does some things very well, but it’s not the AGI that the average non-technical person seems to view it as, and it’s not the replacement for real work that CEOs and CFOs seem to believe it is.

We’re just not there from what I can see. This is like 3D media and virtual reality, in a lot of ways. Every decade or so there’s a big break through, giant leap forward, brand new tech that’s going to revolutionize everything. But most of us are currently staring at conventional 2D screens right now thinking the VR stuff is cool but it doesn’t really deliver on the promise.

I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” but I remember how hilarious it was the first time I heard that original Resident Evil line about “you, the master of unlocking”. Granted, at the time I assumed it was all intentional B-grade horror movie parody.

See up there near the top where it says "Take 1 capsule by mouth every

morning"?

I was dog sitting for a buddy of mine once, and ended up giving the dog a triple dose of its medication partially because of what I’d call less than ideal label design and instructions.

My buddy left instructions to give the dog 300 mg of its meds. So, I found the bottle with the correct name of the medication, it said 100 mg pills, so I gave the dog three pills.

The problem is, the label actually said something like "This medication is not to be given with

100 mg pills".

Because the bottle was super skinny, it meant that the top line wasn’t even fully visible without turning the bottle to read it, plus there was so much space between the top line and the bottom one that they otherwise looked unrelated. Strangely, the actual dose of 300 mg was not like in the picture above, it was in a tiny non-bold font and much less conspicuous than the larger bolder font used for the directions so I didn’t even notice it until I went back later and searched for it.

Granted, it didn’t help that I was not aware that this dog had 2 different prescriptions for two different strengths, which would have hopefully prompted more scrutiny on my part if I’d known because I probably wouldn’t have just assumed the first bottle I grabbed with the correct name on it was the right one to give her.

The good news is, the vet said that it wasn’t anything medically significant and that the dog would probably just be a little sleepier than normal for the next several hours. And she was, but otherwise perfectly okay.

Okay, but have you seen the price of rotisserie chickens lately? I’m not made of money.