Paid in cheese

The Witness. It might have had its moment but it feels like it’s probably pretty forgotten at this point. It’s a first person puzzle game where you’re on an island … and it’s not Myst, Riven, or … that other game that was a puzzle game where you were on an island? At least as far into it as I’ve played, it’s pretty low stakes and there’s very little in the way of videos or audio narration. It’s spooky but in bright daylight. There’s quite a lot of game there, too.

An idea whose time as come … again.

We’re at a unique moment where a decent computer from 10 years ago is still pretty usable provided you don’t have Windows 11 or a need to run a particularly recent version of Mac OS. There’s no real reason to keep replacing laptops these day outside of physical damage.

Not to mention the advantages of having the ability to pull a battery from a computer that won’t respond even to the power button (a problem I had to deal with for a Windows firmware update I told Windows not to apply … this year or late last year). I ended up connecting USB accessories to run the battery out faster so I could get my computer back. Technically, I could have gotten the battery disconnected but the bottom panel was messed up and I couldn’t sensibly get it off without voiding a warranty.

Bring back swappable batteries. And how about RAM and storage that’s not soldered on while we’re at it?

Not really keen to get into a theological argument about a sacred text I don’t believe in. However, if you gave a neutrally translated Bible to someone who had never heard of the Trinity, it’s extremely unlikely they would come to Trinitarianism on their own.

Not an athiest but not a Christian or Muslim either. I used to be a Christian. At roughly the minute mark, the presenter claims that the Bible says that god is a Trinity. The video references Matthew 28:18-20 (about baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). While it’s true that Matthew says that about baptism, that verse doesn’t say that God is a trinity. Trinitarianism is one doctrine some have derived from the Bible but the Bible doesn’t contain the concept directly or Christians wouldn’t have had so much fighting about it. That’s not even getting into the nature of Jesus himself which spawned some humdinger disagreements over time. 🥴

Slightly before that, the presenter claims that the Bible is our only source of truth (paraphrasing … not going back to get the exact wording). The video doesn’t prove that and it’s not true that the Bible is our only source of truth.

It also relies on a lot of ignorance of the Quran at the very least on the part of the people watching it. I’m not in a position to speak much to the Quran other than to note that a devout Muslim would likely not find those arguments compelling.

This kind of “apologetics” / evangelical effort aren’t edifying or useful to the believer or the unbeliever. To borrow a concept I heard from Christians while I was one … those who can be argued into converting can be argued out of it. This kind of presentation is the sort of thing unprincipled people use to grift money out of believers in the idea that this will convert unbelievers.

At the moment, not so far as I know. The challenge for any client is that Mastodon (right now) doesn’t load entire threads unless you’re on the same server as OP. Instead, the API object says the post is “in reply to this post.” If no one on your server is following the post directly prior to that in the thread, then the chain is broken.

There’s a bot called FediFetcher that an admin can install to pull in other toots in a thread. Vanilla Mastodon is already working on an effort to integrate this functionality directly but I don’t know how soon it will be live.

There’s a browser plugin called Substitoot that will pull in other parts of a thread provided you click on the next post up in the thread (in my experience this may take a few clicks).

Lastly, I hear that GoToSocial already pulls in the rest of the thread.

None of that does exactly what you asked for but it’s a prerequisite to implementing what you’re hoping for.

If it is the DNS, I’d say OP should change DNS on their phone to point to something else. I can (and do) on iPhone. I’d be shocked if Android couldn’t. Easier than leaving your VPN on all the time. Although there are benefits to leaving VPN on too. Kind of a personal choice for the most part.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardassians_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine_episode)

I was getting the episode number for a joke I was doing in Ten Forward. 😹

If part of your coworker’s job is answering questions for coworkers, it’s disrespectful (not to mention a career-limiting move) to outsource that labor to an LLM. However, your coworker may be in a situation where they feel overwhelmed by coworkers not using available resources or they may have some other reason for “outsourcing” their work to an LLM. Or they could be underpaid, disgruntled by workload, or a bunch of other different things.

Without more context, it’s hard to know what may be going on there. I don’t think a constructive conversation with your colleague is possible without getting more information from them. I would recommend being pretty direct. Maybe something like: “It seems like you may not have read my question. This isn’t a question that I can get a usable answer from an LLM for. Is there another resource you think I should have used before contacting you?”

If this still feels too confrontational, you could take out the second sentence.

Hard to pick just one but I’ll go with John Titor.

For my full desktop, I turn it off when I’m not using it. It basically exists to do heavy compute tasks. I basically do that a few times a week. There’s no reason to leave it on if I’m not in the middle of a job. That would be true regardless of the O.S. I’m using on it.

My main computer, I suspend. Usually, I try to make sure that happens on purpose because Ubuntu has this impossible to troubleshoot behavior¹ that seems to happen more often if it falls asleep on its own.

I would be more inclined to shut it down but I’m particular about my windows and it takes what feels like an hour to get everything just so after reboot. I can’t deal with that every day. (Nor am I thrilled about how often Ubuntu LTS wants me to reboot for updates. My desktop needs Ubuntu Studio LTS but my main computer doesn’t. When I get time and energy, I’m switching it to Mint so I can deal with someone else’s obnoxious choices for a change without learning an entirely new distro.)

¹ The behavior is not recovering video on wake. It does seem to be working but following the commands I have memorized to shut it down from inside a virtual terminal don’t work. The only way to get it down is to hold the power button for “4 seconds” or pull the power plug.

Pedro the Lion (like Priests And Paramedics and A Simple Plan), the Sixpence None The Richer album This Beautiful Mess particularly Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death, some of Rich Mullins like much of A Liturgy, a Legacy, & a Ragamuffin Band.

I think the ethics mostly come into how you raise them, religion or not. It’s ethical to teach kindness and empathy. It’s ethical to allow your kids to explore while asking them questions that help that exploration. You can do those kinds of things no matter what faith (or non-faith) you practice.

Speaking as someone who was raised in an environment that gave lip service to kindness and empathy but was really very harsh, judgmental, and rigid, only one of my siblings kept something reasonably approximating my parents’ faith. The rest of us are mostly some variety of pagan. Each of us had a painful journey out of our parents’ faith to something. No matter how you raise your kids, they are their own people and will come to their own conclusions. You can make the path much more difficult than it needs to be or you can set them up for a much less traumatic journey.

I’m not sure hate is the right word. When you’ve got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you’re feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?

I “hate” it in the sense that it’s built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I “hate” it in the sense that we’re living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and “AI” is adding fuel to the fire. I “hate” it in the sense that it’s being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I “hate” it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.

That’s a task that probably would be better served by purpose-built machine learning. Using “AI” for that isn’t what anyone means by “AI art” though.

Assuming that the person saying that is an American, I think that they don’t understand economics and probably aren’t as socially “liberal” as they might like to think they are … or they haven’t thought that hard about either topic. I think that based on the numerous people I’ve heard say that to me in the past.

It’s fine to not really have thought about these things that much. Not understanding economics isn’t a moral failing either. The people preaching about the economy usually have an agenda that isn’t well-served by accurately describing economics and it can be hard to know where to find good information. I would rather hear “You know, I think those are important topics but I’m not sure where I stand on them yet” though.