Yeah, I assume the now-former employee acted with full expectation of losing her job over this. She succeeded at bringing attention to something many people (myself included) hadn’t heard about before, so she at least accomplished that much.

Well, I’m doing my part against them by refusing to click on any bait headlines, but I fear it’s a lost cause anyway.

Found Lemmy during the API protest and ditched reddit. I’ve been meaning to go back to reddit and get banned over the whole crazy censorship thing, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

It may not rise to the level of proof, but it is a memorable and easily understood demonstration of something already proven by car safety researchers, as mentioned in the article.

Why shouldn’t they precut the wall into cartoony shapes? It adds entertainment and doesn’t compromise the demonstration.

Well of course I am. Lots of sensible folks are posting negative things about ICE online. ICE are a bunch of assholes.

That’s my read on it too. Trying to have it both ways, and not exactly succeeding at it.

It’s my understanding that the executive does not have the authority to unilaterally change official geographic names. As of my writing this, the name “change” has NOT been adopted by the United States government. Congress granted that authority to the US Board of Geographic Names in 1890. Unless accepted by the US BoGN, it changes nothing. I suppose Congress could rename it if they passed a bill that the president signed into law overriding that authority for that specific case, but until they did so, it’s not official.

Here is the link to the US Geographic Names Information system page showing the current official name of the Gulf of Mexico: https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/558730. Note the list of accepted variant names, which still doesn’t include “Gulf of America”.

Google are saying here that they will only change it on maps if it’s made official by the US Government, which has not happened yet. That’s why they haven’t made any change yet, and won’t unless Trump gets the US BoGN to do his bidding.

Edit: well that didn’t take long. They already made made the change.

My brother ate an 8 years expired Twinky we found when we were in boy scouts. We were cleaning out the troop’s chuck wagon (food and cooking trailer). Something got lost at the back of a deeper storage compartment, and being the little skinny kid, I volunteered to climb in to find it. I noticed the Twinky slipped into a crack and read the date with amazement. The thing was over half as old as I was, and must have been sitting in that trailer, outdoors, for at least most of that time! After pardeing it around demanding everyone “behold the ancient Twinky” someone dared me to eat it. I never liked Twinkies, but as I’d already confirmed it was still sealed, and my brother was hungry, he didn’t hesitate to claim that dare. We all watched in suspense for his reaction, and were disappointed when he just shrugged and said that it tasted a little dry, but otherwise no different than normal.

have a sniff

I just always do that instead of looking at dates on food. If it looks off, smells off, or tastes off I trash it (always checking in that order, of course). Seems fine, I eat it. Never had a problem doing that.

Well, never a food bourn illness problem. I had a big argument with a housemate about expired food. Shortly after she moved in, she promptly trashed any food that was any amount past expiration, and proudly informed me that she had cleaned out the fridge, saving me from eating pickles that were a whole 3 months past safe to eat. To be fair to her, half the things she trashed actually were bad, but the pickle jar went right back in the fridge. If you don’t want me eating pickles that have been in the trash, Amanda, then don’t throw out my perfectly good pickles! Good call on the bottle of ranch dressing though, I forgot that was in there and it looks nasty.

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 .

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.

I would argue that doesn’t qualify as trivial.

Thanks, that is a better word there.

I can see the argument that it has a sort of world model, but one that is purely word relationships is a very shallow sort of model. When I am asked what happens when a glass is dropped onto concrete, I don’t just think about what I’ve heard about those words and come up with a correlation, I can also think about my experiences with those materials and with falling things and reach a conclusion about how they will interact. That’s the kind of world model it’s missing. Material properties and interactions are well enough written about that it ~~simulates ~~ emulates doing this, but if you add a few details it can really throw it off. I asked Bing Copilot “What happens if you drop a glass of water on concrete?” and it went into excruciating detail about how the water will splash, mentions how it can absorb into it or affect uncured concrete, and now completely fails to notice that the glass itself will strike the concrete, instead describing the chemistry of how using “glass (such as from the glass of water)” as aggregate could affect the curing process. Having a purely statistical/linguistic world model leaves some pretty big holes in its “reasoning” process.

Pidgeon -> Parrot -> Turkey

I think it would be Pigeon -> Parrot -> Pheasant -> Peacock, but then I don’t know a lot about Pokemon.