Y’know if I was the exec of a bloodsucking electricity company, I’d be explicitly putting something in my terms and conditions that commercial AI data-centre use of my company’s supply is to be charged double or triple, and that undeclared use will be subject to heavy legal repercussions and surcharges.

There has to already be precedent for specific commercial uses of resources being treated differently from others. And if not, commercial versus non-commercial use may be a close enough precedent.

Likewise, if I’m the oil company or builder of power plants, generators and the like, I’d be putting a similar clause in.

This would then be one of those situations where desires align, however different the goals.

This feels like a recipe for screen burn, but I assume whatever elements the watch uses for pixels don’t do that, and it’s just the bad side of nostalgia making me feel that way.

My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.

This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I’d looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.

I think they believed me in the end though.

FWIW, I can see them and am probably some level of ADHD or autistic. I would have expected the correlation to be the other way around to be honest, i.e. more neurodiverse folks can see magic eye images than neurotypicals, but our two data points aren’t enough to say one way or the other, only that maybe neurodiversity has nothing to do with the ability after all.

2140000000 for decimal round number enjoyers

0x7FEEDBAC for hexadecimal pun enjoyers

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I’d somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I’m not colour-blind.

You mean, right-click and save-as the images that are built into the site before uploading them somewhere else? That seems unnecessary. Anyone could grab those from the site themselves. Or use the site.

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I’d somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I’m not colour-blind.

Oh man, I was freaking out for a second after clicking one of the simulations and seeing no difference from the regular image. Then I thought to check whether NoScript had blocked scripts from the site. Yeah. So, it hadn’t loaded the simulated image and I was seeing the original.

OK, yeah, you can’t control a third party’s promises (or hallucinations), but the boss isn’t going to fire someone from sales and/or marketing. They’ll fire the developer for failing to deliver.

TBH, this is barely any different from marketing promising that a product will have a feature that the development team only find out about later purely by accident when upper management asks about it.

(The following is from my, possibly faulty, personal observation. Take it as you will.)

Clowns are at least 80% mime. If you can convey a message - often a funny one - with only exaggerated actions and facial expressions, I’d say you’re well on your way to clowning. They almost never talk and there’s a definite shared white face-paint thing going on.

The main talkers seem to be the ones that do kids’ birthday parties or ones in “senior” positions in a troupe where it would be funny to imitate a bossy person. They might otherwise allow a shout or mock cry of pain, but rarely use words when they do.

The other 20% is brightly coloured, ill-fitting (usually oversized) clothing, a bigger emphasis on slapstick, and props that make noise.

I’ve seen mimes perform cheap magic tricks, so that’s not exclusive to clowns, but I’d say that was more of a clown thing as well.

There’s a whole continuum from mimes to clowns to magicians and back again now that I think about it. Teller of Penn and Teller fits somewhere around the “back again” part. And Harpo Marx was basically a clown without the face-paint.

People who have only just learned the moves of chess play better chess than I do.

That this happened around April Fools’ makes me think that someone forgot to instruct it not to partake in any activities associated with that date. The fact it chose The Simpsons’ address in its (feigned?) confusion is a dead giveaway (to me) that it was trying to be funny.

Or rather, imitating people being funny without any understanding of how to do that properly.

Its explanation afterwards reads like a poor imitation of someone pretending to not know that there was a joke going on.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

How about cultivating a world that is less depressing before jamming wires into people’s skulls to “fix” a problem that might not originate there?

Oh no, that won’t do, the people who have low tolerance for depressing reality have to be turned into drones for the corporate machine just like everyone else. If we can turn off the emotions that derive from a sense of self-preservation, they’ll be more willing workers for the constant grind.

In before employers require that their applicants must have one of these implants. People without will not be hired.

By the 24th century we won’t be Star Trek’s Federation, we’ll be an unholy hybrid of the Ferengi and the Borg.

“Mum” is a shortening of “mummy” (or similar) which almost certainly came before “mother” (or its ancestor words) as a word for one’s primary female caregiver if not also birth giver, on account of it being baby-talk that ancient parents naturally took to be a name bestowed by the child.

In languages descended from Proto-Indo-European, the -t(h)er suffix is a familial grammatical particle that has long since ceased being productive, and remains frozen in all daughter languages. Speaking of which, the -ter of “daughter” is the same particle.

That “mum”, at least phonetically, is also an abbreviation of “ma’am” is a coincidence caused by dropping so many sounds from the original “ma dame” that it reverts to, well, mumbling, which isn’t far off baby talk, all things considered.

FWIW, there are places in the world where “Mam” is a name given to mothers by their children, which is also rooted in baby-talk and also has no connection to the other pronunciation of “ma’am”.

To her face, “Mum”, but when referring to her indirectly it’s usually, “my mother”.

I remember asking if it was OK to stop calling her “Mummy” but I’m not sure how old I was at the time. Definitely under 10 though. Probably heard other kids of the same age calling their mothers “Mum” when they were being collected from school and figured I’d better act accordingly and do the same.

(The only people who use “Mom” here are folks in the West Midlands, I think. And American ex-pats, I guess, but that doesn’t really count.)

Racial / cultural supremacists wouldn’t want to kill anyone of their preferred (usually their own) group, and certainly not a significant number of them. They’d basically have to gerrymander the water supply to arrange things so that only those they want to be poisoned actually get poisoned.

That’s 1) expensive and 2) someone’s going to notice.

It would be far easier, and cheaper to go full genocide and start shooting.

In one case, active in the world right now, the “undesirables” live in one area, and rather than poison the water, the supremacists have simply cut it off. They’ve also implemented the “start shooting” strategy.

I wish them all a crippling attack of conscience, and if not that, the inability to distinguish who they want to shoot from who they don’t want to shoot.

Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.