He’s English. You have described a Canadian.

I do not understand why car manufacturers love touch screens so damn much. My newish car has a nice display screen and on the console by the arm rest is a nice big chunky knob that controls the display interface. There are a couple other physicals controls around it as well. I can control everything without ever looking at the screen. HVAC system, also physical controls.

I have had a few rental cars from different manufacturers and no physical controls anywhere. So it’s touch screen only and the screen is not reachable from the driving position without leaning way forward. And of course since it’s a touch screen, do you know where my eyes aren’t? The fucking road!

Touch screens are annoying and imprecise at the best of times why do they think traveling at speeds in excess of 70 mph that it’s better? Make it make sense!

End Of Rant

Swingers and Clerks were DVD/cult hits after their theatrical runs ended

Which I find extremely odd, since some traditionally masculine activities are nature oriented. Hunting, fishing, outdoorsy stuff in general. It wasn’t that long ago that (environmental) conservation was a huge component of those activities to ensure continued access for people to those activities. Maybe it still is but I certainly don’t get that impression as strongly anymore.

Disney built its entire empire on existing/public domain stories. Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Robin Hood. The list goes on. Hell even Aladdin is largely located from Middle Eastern fairy tales.

The fact that they’re relying on existing IP now is nothing new. It’s who they’ve always been. It’s just that they had to buy it since it wasn’t already in the public domain.

What I don’t understand is how Microsoft has/has Watson which was able to answer questions well enough to go on Jeopardy and dominate. And now, more than a decade later these LLMs absolutely suck at it.

It makes me wonder if Watson was nothing more than a Mechanical Turk because what is out there now seems like a huge step backwards.

It’s cute that you think that would matter to Trump

30s

I will not stand for this! Rankine will be the standard! It will confuse and infuriate everyone equally. Truly the fairest of outcomes.

That creates its own potential (unintended) problems. There’s no one size fits all solution to gerrymandering.

Dave Wasserman did a really great job going through all sorts of potential solutions and the benefits and flaws.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/hating-gerrymandering-is-easy-fixing-it-is-harder/

Short answer, it’s complicated. Long answer, read the piece, it’s really good.

Fascists are funny like that

I think we found Alec’s Lemmy account

New? Hardly. Republicans have been using Iran as a scapegoat for decades. I can remember Bush admin being filled with Iran hawks and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go back to Reagan or further still

Honestly, it’s had pros for even longer. The USSR “amateurs” were members of the Red Army whose entire job was their sport.

Yes. For communities that on Reddit were small to medium size there was a critical mass of people to sustain large, lively threads, particularly during live events. Lemmy currently lacks that, outside of the letter tech, politics and meme communities. And for the smaller communities, activity can be almost non existent.

Then the federated nature of Lemmy allows for duplicate communities on different instances. This is not inherently a bad thing, particularly for larger interest areas as it helps prevent a particular sub group from dominating discussion in an area. But fracturing of smaller communities can make just finding an active one more difficult. I know that this is a feature in many ways, but it does have tradeoffs that have to be acknowledged.

Goddamnit. Now I can’t unhear it

That was an absolute master class in interviewing. She asks him direct, pointed questions. He was so horrendously unprepared for the most basic of questions and flails about helplessly. That first question was so perfectly executed. It was also such an obvious jumping off point that anyone walking on that stage should have expected it and been ready to answer. The fact the be just flails about says so much

Who was based on a doctor that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew.

Log scaling?