No no no, you’re all wrong. It goes Agles, Beagles, Seagulls, Deegles, Eagles, etc. We’ve proven the existence of 3 of these species already, but the search continues for these other mysterious creatures the certainly must exist. In this TED Talk, I will…

Captain Planet Gull: “Give me those chips and I’ll poop on you!”

You: “… don’t you mean ‘or’ you will poop on me, not ‘and’?”

Captain Planet Gull: …

You: …

Linux developers can’t name their products any better than they name their variables.

“Programming done, time to publish, now it just needs a name…” briefly pauses, then smashes face into keyboard… “There! … ehh, no, still missing something.” clicks random spot, types X… “Perfect! Send it!”

but in the English speaking world I’d say it’s the most unique name I’ve heard.

Probably because it actually a French surname, which is itself based on a place name in France that no longer exists… and it is not her actual given name, but something she adopted from a character in The Great Gatsby.

No it’s a tool, created and used by people. You’re not treating the tool like a person. Tools are obviously not subject to laws, can’t break laws, etc… Their usage is subject to laws. If you use a tool to intentionally, knowingly, or negligently do things that would be illegal for you to do without the tool, then that’s still illegal. Same for accepting money to give others the privilege of doing those illegal things with your tool without any attempt at moderating said things that you know is happening. You can argue that maybe the law should be more strict with AI usage than with a human if you have a good legal justification for it, but there’s really no way to justify being less strict.

It’s pretty simple as I see it. You treat AI like a person. A person needs to go through legal channels to consume material, so piracy for AI training is as illegal as it would be for personal consumption. Consuming legally possessed copywritten material for “inspiration” or “study” is also fine for a person, so it is fine for AI training as well. Commercializing derivative works that infringes on copyright is illegal for a person, so it should be illegal for an AI as well. All produced materials, even those inspired by another piece of media, are permissible if not monetized, otherwise they need to be suitably transformative. That line can be hard to draw even when AI is not involved, but that is the legal standard for people, so it should be for AI as well. If I browse through Deviant Art and learn to draw similarly my favorite artists from their publically viewable works, and make a legally distinct cartoon mouse by hand in a style that is similar to someone else’s and then I sell prints of that work, that is legal. The same should be the case for AI.

But! Scrutiny for AI should be much stricter given the inherent lack of true transformative creativity. And any AI that has used pirated materials should be penalized either by massive fines or by wiping their training and starting over with legally licensed or purchased or otherwise public domain materials only.

More than that, giving food and drink to the hungry and thirsty, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and giving comfort to the imprisoned, is literally the same as doing those things for Jesus Christ, himself, from his perspective. And, moreover, those who do those things will earn their place in heaven, and those who fail to do those things will be eternally damned to hell. It’s not subtextual. It’s not ambiguous and up for interpretation. It says very clearly that Jesus separated those who are going to heaven and hell to either side and the distinction between the groups was how they treated “the least” of his brothers and sisters. Matthew 25:31-46.

So, bad news Christian Republicans. Might want to correct yourself now before it’s too late.

An administration or official that is otherwise competent, stable and uneventful can be rocked by a single scandal. If everyone can focus on one thing, spend time researching it, and drive it to ground finding out everything about the situation, they can shine a light on it and try to make a giant political issue out of it. A mistake can be career ending if they can find or manufacture some culpability or negligence in it.

But if you just constantly make incompetent decisions, mistakes, lies, threats, scandals, military actions, crimes, etc. and never give any breathing room between them, then despite the plethora of things to scandalize, no one ever had time to run any single issue to ground and use it against you politically. It’s a high risk, high reward strategy that works, unfortunately, very well. It puts your opponents on the back foot and makes their work seem daunting, and by the time someone does put in the time with one issue to expose the details, dozens more issues have stolen the limelight.

Think about this. Years later, everyone remembers scandals under or related to the Obama and Biden administrations. Benghazi, Hunter’s Laptop, Hillary’s Emails… but despite the overwhelming number of scandals under or related to Trump, it is a lot harder to pick just one off the top of your head. The exception to that is probably the things he was actually tried for, because those got a.lot of time and focus and people understand them well, and he wasn’t in a position of power to generate a many new scandals to steal the focus away. But things that didn’t get that focus? Despite being bigger deals than any of that shit accused of Democrats, they are just blips on the radar among many. Someone might bring one up and you think, “Oh yeah! I remember that!” That’s the strategy. That’s what they are doing. Intentionally.

I smoked too much and blacked out. I’m missing some thyme from yesterday.

Well, first I gotta ask, is any of this really necessary or worth it? You want to resolve some limitations with the standard MIDI format, but are those limitations worth this much trouble to fix? “Buy dont build” is an important principle for any developer to take to heart because we all want to just do it ourselves, dive into the challenge, fix the little gripes, etc. But sometimes good is good enough and there’s no reason to retread the same ground someone else has. If you absolutely need something standard MIDI format can’t give you or available editors dont meet your needs, then sure, build away. But otherwise, save yourself the trouble, put your focus on the more important aspect of your project and just use the standard format.

And dont fall for the sunk cost fallacy. You have already invested time into this, and that time is gone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should sink in more time if the outcome is not going to justify the additional time cost. It is okay to just shelf it for now. You can always come back to it if you need to later as well.

Like the Fremen. Harsh environments breed tough people.

Thanks for the recommendations

Low population, low density, lots of farm land, can count the number of houses in a mile stretch of road on your fingers. May have one small commercial area within 15 miles with a dollar general, a gas station and, if you’re lucky, a grocery store. Not nearly enough businesses nearby to employ people even the measly number of people there that isn’t a farmer, so they commute to neighboring towns or counties to find work in factories, possibly dozens of miles away. I basically just described where my sister lives in Tennessee.

I unapologetically love the version by I Fight Dragons. And the original is really not that bad.

I see what you did there. Would that I were a sword nerd. I was just googling the original because I couldn’t remember how it went and noticed it had an entirely different dude in it.

This isn’t the original image and that sword doesn’t really look like it goes with that scabbard. Did someone recreate/enhance the image with AI?

The original:

Bread requires a number of other tools, cooking techniques and inventions to come around before it makes sense that it was invented. It has definitely been around a long long time, but many inventions predate homosapien, and I doubt bread predates agriculture by much if at all.

What is interesting though is that what likely coincided with the invention of bread was the invention of beer. They’re a pretty small hop away from one another.

Zoe Saldana as Katara couldn’t be any worse than the nepo baby in the M. Night Shyamalan train wreck.

Words that rhyme with Trump: chump, grump, slump, bump, rump, lump, hump, Gump, dump, frump(y), pump, thump, clump, stump…

For Don: gone, pawn, prawn, fong, jong, con, QAnon, Mastadon…

There’s some pretty inspiring stuff to work with here for sure.

All of them are fingers. Thumbs are fingers, but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. I dont know where people get the idea that a thumb is not a finger. So many common sayings reinforce that it is. “Counting on your fingers (including your thumbs)”, healthy babies have “Ten fingers, ten toes”, “What did the five fingers say to the face… slap”, “high five”, “five finger discount”, etc. Also, honorable mention to Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya searching for “the 6 fingered man” which includes his thumb. “Middle finger” is not the only thing that makes no sense if you don’t accept that the thumb is a finger.