Porn hasn’t helped it either. It’s a popular topic but you only see the brief moments and not the after, and like you said, it takes both compatible people AND an agreement on expectations. One person strays from that, and you’ve messed things up for probably everyone involved with each other. I think it would only work if each person cared for the others at the same level, and not one being an “extra”.

I met my wife 40 years ago simply from a casual message that I could have missed or ignored. The thing you have to remember is, it’s not that you had some destiny together that you almost lost out on, but that it’s simply how things worked out, and if you’re happy with it, it worked well.

See Tim Minchin’s “If I Didn’t Have You” song.

That’s been their business model for a while now. “Here’s something you also didn’t ask for”

It is a slippery slope. But the difference is that in a story you’re only given what the writer gives you, and you have to work the rest out. In reality you can show there limitations in what we have now.

It is a problem with our AI because like with anything else, people are easily convinced and marketed to for what they want to see, and they usually don’t want to dig too deep to find the truth in what they want to be true. Caveat emptor is Latin because selling something based on appearances has been around a long time. Today’s AI is our snake oil. It can be useful, but only if you understand what its limitations are, and how to best utilize its power while not getting sucked into its falsehoods.

“The future is now” has been used in a lot of places, but I always think of the movie “The Time Machine”, and it being piggybacked with the later line, “We went too far.” Seems to work with this meme.

I’ve rewatched Andor a few times now. Quite a few scenes still hit me hard, even after knowing they’re coming.

I could say the same for LotR also.

What got me was the ending scene, that was the result of that decision. Full circle.

I’m still a believer that his Joi was different. Or maybe any of them could be, with the right environment. Much like Sam in Her wasn’t probably designed to go as far as she did, but they all (or many) ended up becoming something more. What was designed to be an AI girlfriend became aware in some aspects. Not saying what we have in reality is similar, just that emergence is still something to discuss even in a world of fakery to sell a product that isn’t really aware.

And it can be argued that even the tells of her being more could be saying what the user wants to hear, but… it may not be either. And that’s good writing, letting the reader have to fill in some of the ambiguous things on their own afterwards.

I want to believe. Maybe partially because it’s that much more tragic. His Joi wasn’t destroyed, she was murdered.

That means that big kills in the past by hunters where they wound the animal and follow it until it drops tasted terrible. But I guess bad tasting meat is better than not feeding the tribe at all.

Europa Clipper is on the way!

All of the classics have to be read with the time period and science knowledge of the when they were written. I love Heinlein, even though he doesn’t do female characters well. When I read him as a kid, I didn’t pick up on that, plus I’m more of a realist reader for the hard science and don’t always see the deeper stuff.

Probably like Apple and Microsoft working together in the past. Competition, but sharing some tech as well to further both sides. Or maybe it’s just money.

The active chart would be really useful if it showed both active posting and active logged in (reading). I can’t find anywhere in the websites or the github what “active” means, and while I would guess it means by posts, maybe that’s optimistic since any platform anywhere can have accounts that are “dead”.

MacBook 6,1 Core 2 Duo 2.26 13" White Unibody Late 2009

I got lucky, apparently Apple specs say a max of 4GB like so many of the others, but for some reason this odd motherboard will run 8GB. And I can confirm, 8GB works.

Could be. The artifacts suggest some age though. If Google image search worked like it used to, I’d try to find evidence. Thanks, Google. Stop breaking things that work.

Linux is the way to go if you want to get a few more years out of your hardware.

Not Windows, but I got an almost new laptop out of a MacBook by putting Mint on it (and $15 of more RAM). Its biggest drawback is how much heavier it is than anything new. My next target is jailbreaking an old Chromebook I have.

Not well, based on James Burke’s Connections episode

Tulsa and Wilmington are two examples of reactions to black people starting to build themselves up, as per the American Dream.

And as an NC grade school student, do you think Wilmington was mentioned at all in any history class? But we learned all the governor names…

I ran into this dramatization for media hits before, with the complaint about rocket launches and their contribution to pollution. People were all about getting out the pitchforks, especially since it was mainly about Elon Musk, but when the actual numbers were mentioned (very small), suddenly, I was the bad guy. No one likes real facts.

Now, should we be launching so many things that are designed to fall back down so soon? Probably not, that’s the mark of a disposable society in high gear. But how we’re doing things, and why, should be the focus, not a headline that makes it sound like things are falling out of the sky to hit people.

Bet this works as well as the PPP Covid payments did. No oversight, lots of big businesses that weren’t really eligible draining the funds before real small businesses got anything, and no accountability.