• 1 Post
  • 149 Comments
Joined 3 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年8月22日

help-circle
  • These people would be surprised how many people have preserved multiple portraits of Hitler and hidden away in their homes and shops. I’m talking about stamp collectors. There were very many stamps issued with Hitler’s gave on them, and very many casual to dedicated collectors own at least one.

    Having a shrine to Hitler is not fine. Owning historical items in context is totally fine. Authentication and appraisal is a normal part of insuring any kind of collection.

    The real issue is not that a politician has one Hitler-related item amidst a wider collection of rare, historical items, but that someone who is independently wealthy and can spend millions of disposable dollars on a hobby is representing “the people” in a time of rising unemployment, affordability crisis, housing crisis, cuts to essential services, etc.


  • It’s happened to me several times that other shoppers have come up to me in a store to ask where such-and-such is, which I didn’t know the answers to 🤷‍♀️. I have never even worked retail before. (Food service, yes, retail, no.) I think maybe just walking with purpose gives off a vibe? I walk with purpose because I want to just buy what I need and get out 😂





  • Truly, I don’t understand why, but there are fully grown adults who believe that anything an LLM says is true. Maybe they think computers are unbiased (which is only as true as programmers and data are unbiased); maybe its the confidence with which LLMs deliver information; maybe they believe the program actually searches and verified information; maybe it’s all of the above and more.

    I know a guy who routinely says, “I asked ChatGPT…”, and even after having explained how LLMs are complex word predictors and are not programmed for factual truth, he still goes to ChatGPT for everything. It’s a total refusal to believe otherwise, but I can’t fathom why.



  • To be pedantic, Ake was there, too. (She said the Doctor and Sam were not the only ones who spent 17 years on Kasq.)

    But to be not pedantic, I thought the exact same thing. What kind of resilience building experiences could she have had in that environment? Falling and hurting her knee? I feel that one is the biggest tantrums (some) kids have are over food, and Sam doesn’t even eat. Reading does increase people capacity for empathy, so there is that opportunity for her, but even so, there’s a vast difference between sympathy and resilience.

    I hope they actually fill this in in a reasonable way. Even though this episode was beautiful in some ways it still had some glaring problems.




  • It gets better… In the fifth and final season.

    There were actors and characters I really liked (Doug Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Jason Isaacs top that list), but the stories… Fortunately, I think every NuTrek series is better than Discovery and I like them all in their own way. The biggest appreciation I have for Discovery is that it made the way for all the others that followed.

    Except Section 31, that was pretty bad.




  • I understand what you mean, but life is not binary and it doesn’t have to always be all-in. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” We can still enjoy good things and incremental improvements even if they’re not perfect or ideal. A tool doesn’t have to be perfect for 100% of situations for it to still be useful.

    Obviously, you don’t care for the device, and I’m not trying to convince you to get something you don’t want—and I note you haven’t tried. But I am saying we should (in life, in general) consider options for improvements even if they’re not perfect.


  • I can clear a double driveway with an electric shovel/snow thrower. It depends on the battery and, of course, the length of the driveway. But we’re taking Brampton, not an estate house.

    The thing is you have to do it before the snow is higher than the face of the shovel, so you might have to go out twice or even three times (while it’s still snowing and once when it’s done) instead of only doing one pass at the end with a significantly larger snow blower.

    There are other shortcomings compared to a snow blower, such as it only throws the snow in front of itself; you can’t direct it otherwise. So you have to think about how you’re going to physically do the task. Also, I find it’s not as effective when the snow is wet.

    Overall, though, if a snow blower is not feasible for whatever reason, it’s a decent option for lessening the physical burden of snow shoveling, but definitely not eliminating it.


  • Around two or three years ago, I was on a sales call/app demo as a potential customer–not for TikTok, of course. It’s an American company and I’m based in Canada. I asked the sales guy about their data storage, encryption, privacy, and the like; he didn’t know. I said I needed to know that if our group uses the application to communicate internally about, for example, helping refugees, the government won’t be able to access it. The guy asked me if that really was a concern.

    Well, you tell me now, sales guy, is it really a concern?




  • Your thinking wasn’t wrong, the problem was that the municipal and provincial police and governments abdicated their duties and abandoned their citizens. The federal government stepped in because the lower levels of government refused to do their duty for weeks. I don’t disagree that Trudeau stepped a foot beyond his jurisdiction, but in that scenario, he was being the only responsible adult who actively cared about the well-being of Canadians.

    I’m glad it was done, and there was nothing in the execution that was heavy-handed or otherwise untoward. The people had more than ample warning to disperse, the line moved slowly (giving the people every opportunity to leave of their own volition), force was restrained and minimal. People got arrested because at that point they made the choice to be. It certainly was not the situation we currently see unfolding in the US right now (which, if we are honest, the convoyers would have wanted for their side to perpetuate, if they could).