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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • As someone just old enough to remember, we did have that with CFCs. Might not have been super mainstream, and nobody who would have done it out of spite really had the disposable income to actually do it.

    I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian “cult” and I remember the adults around me “joking” about it all the time. I remember a Missionary to northern Canada visiting our church (in rural America) to try to raise support talking about the temperatures and joking that it’s so cold that he wanted to stand outside with an aerosol can in each hand to try to bring on some global warming, and that getting a laugh from the congregation. You might think that maybe it was a “harmless” joke that maybe as a child I didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, but there were absolutely adults there who fully believed that there was nothing humans could do to damage the earth, because God takes care of it. “And how dare the government and these evolutionists try to tell us how to live.”




  • Correct, they do scale the boss HP when solo vs a normal trio game, you also get one guaranteed free revive and shops are guaranteed to sell a revive item. Personally, I’d still rather queue with randoms, but we’ll see how that goes when they add duo games. Queue times can already be a bit long sometimes, and I’m a bit concerned that losing duo teams to their own mode will make solo queues even longer and more annoying.


  • I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.



  • As someone who has casually considered running for office in South Carolina (because our local representative is an incompetent buffoon, and while I don’t consider myself qualified to run, I know I could do a better job), I kinda agree. If you want your representatives to be normal people, and understand what reality is like, then you really need to pay them at least a somewhat liveable wage, because as it stands, the only people who can afford to do the job are those who are basically independently wealthy, own a car dealership or some other business that basically runs itself, or are retired. I’m not saying politicians should be making boatloads of money. But their pay should also be a liveable wage for the area they represent.







  • Not one of those gun people, but I still support the 2nd ammendment to some extent (down to ban AR-15s and other “scary-looking” guns simply because they are often used by mall-ninja types who do mass shootings). But I think most responsible gun owners are refusing to give fascists a reason/excuse to accelerate or escalate things (for the record, none of MAGA qualify as “responsible gun owners”). I know things are terrifyingly bad right now, but guns/violence are only going to make the current situation worse faster - at least for now. We do seem to be charging full-speed into a situation where they’ll be helpful and useful, which is terrifying. But with as much as it might feel like an “easy fix” to nip things in the bud now, it’s more likely to give fascism even more power and fuel for their propaganda.



  • Wild that there’s an AI-generated summary of the article before the article, on a story about the problems with AI. Also, is it that hard to ask your writers to write a summary of their own articles? Hasn’t writing tweets (or similar microblog posts) already allowed most writers to develop the skill of writing a concise, simplified version of a story? Why are we entrusting this to AI when a human will be able to more accurately summarize their own article, and include appropriate nuance.

    Apologies for the mini crash-out that isn’t really related to the real story here. Thank you OP for sharing, and kudos to the MP for taking a stand.






  • Not saying it isn’t a bad thing, but as Hank Green pointed out recently, remember that the “weight of a credit card” is at the high end of that estimate (the 5 grams) unless you are chewing on plastic pencaps or have unusually high exposure, you probably aren’t getting that much per week. The range is really broad.

    Now if we say more than one credit card a year? That uses the low end of the range, is still troubling, and isn’t spreading misinformation that everyone is consuming a credit card worth of plastic every week.

    Not being critical of you at all, I’ve quoted that myself in the past, but just wanted to spread the awareness about this stat that I had overlooked before too. And again, I’m not saying that much microplastic exposure is less bad health-wise, just that the “credit card a week” might be a bit sensationalized.