That is a neat detail I would not have zoomed in to see without it being pointed out, thanks for sharing!

The out-of-focus part of the whiskers blends into the lighter tower background on the cat’s left (picture right), but is still visible against the darker cat body on the cat’s right (picture left). The photo has definitely had at least sharpening done to it, but those kind of photo-editing tools were around long before AI, and many smart phone cameras now by default apply them automatically.

Also see the “autonomous taxi” services that, when encountering anything outside the limited scope their programming can handle, are remotely operated by human drivers.

Someone else posted firefighters working in high rises are trained on this. I haven’t seen anything more plausible.

It’s not possible at all, no permission exists that lets an Android app record something in another app. Much to the sadness of the mobile Hearthstone community that would love collection managers and stat tracking apps like what PC and Mac have.

It’s not possible on Android, which is incredibly disappointing because I play a card game exclusively on mobile, and would love to use a collection manager and stat tracking app. These exist for PC and Mac, but not for mobile because of the very hard no-record-other-apps wall.

I am sure boarding and deplaning takes longer if everyone is getting into or out of a prone position. The idea might have been standing seats for short flights where turnaround time between flights was a large percent of each trip leg.

doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer

I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.

Because our society has widely available public transit and pedestrian/biking options, of course there is no overwhelming pressure to drive to be able to hold down a job and purchase food. /s

Bizarre to have a headline claiming five “types” were identified, but then only describe the behavior of a single type. What are the other four?

People with currently-known genes for conditions like Tay-Sachs (recessive gene, if a baby gets two copies they are a normal baby the first several months, then get progressive nerve damage until they die around three), or Huntington’s (relevant gene is dominant, but condition manifests in adulthood) may choose not to have kids, or use technology like PGD to select embryos without the relevant genes, or in the case of recessive genes may refuse as spouse any potential partner that also has the gene.

Those are complicated decisions, and nothing should be forced, but it’s important to be able to talk about. There shouldn’t be a taboo on talking about how parents’ decisions affect their children, even if those decisions involve genetics.

Salt in the wound: The default judgements locking in wage garnishment to pay illegal parts of the debt (on top of the immorality legal ones) because the kind of people who get these loans have many responsibilities and often can’t make an arbitrary court date, and it’s not clear to them the stakes are “show up or lose all recourse” (no appeals are possible).

Vacant homes in general, yes. Similar numbers of people have second homes for vacations as are homeless in the US. There are also quite a few abandoned homes in dying rural communities with no jobs.

Property management companies are managing rentals, not squatting. Some investors hold properties empty, but they aren’t in large enough numbers to be THE problem.

Sure you can: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html

The Koch foundation made a long-term investment in making it seem like grass roots movements were pushing society to the right. They kept it up for over twenty years, and that persistence has paid off for them in ways that will likely take a similar amount of time to reverse https://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/

The difference in the size of left- and right-leaning media isn’t in news or comedy sites. The right-leaning news and comedy media is only modestly more watched than left-leaning media. Where the right really dominates is sliding politics into every single popular subject - topics like sports, games, wellness, and religion have tons of audience for right-leaning shows and basically no audience for left-leaning ones. https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

Sem was confused when it appeared that the named AI character was continuing to manifest in project files where he had instructed ChatGPT to ignore memories and prior conversations. Eventually, he says, he deleted all his user memories and chat history, then opened a new chat. “All I said was, ‘Hello?’ And the patterns, the mannerisms show up in the response,” he says. The AI readily identified itself by the same feminine mythological name.

Yikes. I had heard of issues with smaller AI companies that did not guard rail their products, but this is a supposedly flagship AI developer with extensive safety testing, and they haven’t even acknowledged the size of this issue.

My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

What figure is this? Sikh maybe?

There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!

The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s

Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…

Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…

…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.

The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.