Mine

Then we invented a bot that just puts the most popular 10 year old answer into our code directly

MontyPythonClass

… I think I’d rather have someone’s headrest a little closer to me than feeling every movement of the person behind me as they shift in their seat with their knees wedged into mine

Was it recent? Is it hanging with you?

<(o_o)>

I’m about to combigate my foot with your ass!

(sorry, just felt right somehow)

I barely remember it, but I remember that the hardest mode of Shinobi was ridiculous. Basically just had to memorize and execute a perfect movement / attack pattern.

And if memory serves, it was like 2 levels before the final one that was actually the hardest on the hardest difficulty? Getting flooded with some kind of tricky enemy while way in the air?

But then you unlocked God mode and got to just slaughter everything with your OP abilities and sword… actually I think there were at least two levels of those upgrades. One had a life draining effect and the next was just absurd

Oh yeah! And some of the songs on Amplitude

Wtf, this pivot gave me whiplash

I used to prefer light mode until I first got into MUDs.

Not because of anything about the interface or mechanics, but because I got REALLY into them. Several consecutive nights reading digital text until 4AM makes you appreciate dark mode.

Light mode is for people with healthy computer habits

1940: “These mechanical monstrosities lack the intuitive check of a human mind. A mathematician can spot a stray digit through reason; a machine will blindly process an error to its conclusion. We are trading the elegance of thought for a noisy, fallible crate of glass and wire.”

1950: “Direct control is the only honest way to command a machine. If you cannot visualize the specific vacuum tube you are firing, you aren’t truly programming. To delegate this to any intermediary is to invite a loss of precision that the hardware simply cannot afford.”

1955: “These ‘mnemonics’ are a crutch for the lazy. By using words instead of addresses, the programmer loses the vital ‘feel’ for memory layout. We are seeing a five-fold decrease in efficiency; no automated assembler can ever match the tight, hand-calculated loops of a master of bits.”

1965: “Compilers are the death of performance. These languages allow ‘programmers’ who don’t even understand the CPU architecture to bloat memory with generic subroutines. Software is becoming a black box—impenetrable, unoptimized, and dangerously detached from the reality of the silicon.”

… did you just post “Why are ‘Why is X bad?’ posts bad?”

Freya’s lucky number was 13.

Christian missionaries trying to convert the Norse heathens spread the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky to turn people from the old ways

UI’s peaked with the CLI. It’s all been downhill from there

I wasn’t super into DC comics, but the cartoons were what was on when I would stay with my grandmother, and a certain episode of Superman with Dr Fate really moved me.

There was some terrible magical threat, and Superman had tried to get Dr Fate to help, but he refused with something like, “I’ve banished this threat countless times, yet every time it returns stronger. No matter how hard I fight, mankind continues to torment one another. Evil continues to rear its ugly head. I don’t know if I can still triumph, and I’m so very tired.” And Superman was like “F U I’ll do it myself,”

While Superman was fighting, Dr Fate suddenly showed up with the assist and managed to seal away the bad dude. Superman said something like, “I thought you were done with this fight,” and Dr Fate’s response has stuck with me all these decades:

“You made me realize evil isn’t the only force that keeps coming back.”

Defer to superior logic and not to superior rhetoric.

Compute to battle the evils.

Make open source tools to remove dependency on corporate spyware.

Create smaller low power AI assistants to make the giants redundant.

Create websites that inform rather than misdirect and out-market the evil ones.

Not proposing it’s easy or even realistic, but it’s the same battle that always was.

Being a particularly dumb fellow layman but seeing no other comments after 18h…

I’m picturing a ruler thrown into gravity waves and another ruler somehow measuring the parts of the first one where millimeter markers stop being one millimeter apart.

Now for Gemini’s summary:

Space-based gravitational wave detection is the study of ripples in spacetime using observatories positioned in orbit rather than on Earth. While ground-based detectors like LIGO and Virgo have already proven these waves exist, they are limited by their size and Earth’s seismic “noise.”

How It Works

Space-based detection uses laser interferometry across millions of kilometers of vacuum.

• The Formation: LISA will consist of three spacecraft flying in a triangular formation, roughly 2.5 million kilometers apart, orbiting the Sun behind the Earth.

• The “Arms”: Each spacecraft contains “test masses” (gold-platinum cubes) that float freely in a vacuum, shielded from solar wind and radiation.

• The Measurement: Lasers are fired between the spacecraft to monitor the distance between these cubes. When a gravitational wave passes through the formation, it causes the fabric of space to stretch and squeeze, changing the distance between the cubes by a fraction of an atom’s width.

… Honestly I’m feeling reasonably good about my dummy understanding. The “rulers” are lasers being shot between satellites all around the Earth, but I think it sounds roughly right?

Similar story here, and I have a lot of regrets centering around the crazy stuff I did while out of my mind.

In retrospect, I’ve come to believe that long periods of little or poor quality sleep led to much more insanity than any specific substance.

It didn’t necessarily have to be stimulants. Anything that kept me up all night getting high or prevented “real” sleep, even computers or video games to a lesser degree, could lead to this state.

Sleep is important.

Oh dear. I hadn’t thought of that. poof

I’m fairly sure this isn’t something human brains can do