I’d describe it as sort of 3 layers. The first is practical/everyday things, which are mostly much nicer than being alone, but require attentiveness and communication (learn what your SO doesn’t like doing, and do it. Learn what things are work together projects, and what things are stay out of my way type things for each of you, probably other aspects too) - but once you know how to take care of each other, almost everything is less work, takes less time, and costs less money. Cooking, laundry, cleaning, gardening, repairing things, painting the house are all improved. Decorating and having guests over are harder, at least for me. You have to not fall into the trap of taking the things they do for granted, even when those things are routine.

The second layer I’d describe is lust/romance, which is sort of easier, except that you must avoid letting things coast too long. You have to dedicate time and effort to discovering new things about each other, and new things you enjoy together. You should still be dating, no matter how long it’s been, and ideally you should both be planning things most of the time. In my relationship, this is usually 1-2 things per month, each.

The final layer is the emotional/support layer. Almost any time, my wife can seek comfort and support from me in a variety of ways for all kinds of things, and I get the same from her. All the big problems in life are easier when you can share them, so here the benefits are huge. This is the only thing I got basically none of from having roommates or a best friend, or dating. For my situation, there’s basically no downside to this.

Inflation is wild. Just a few decades ago, you could get this kind of thing for just an arm and a leg.

They were going to fire up the LHC to open a dimension, which can only happen when the moon is casting a shadow 6000 km away. Then aliens… or something.

This and systemctl cat $unit are my favorites.

The problem when photon containment breaks like this is that we can never be 100% sure which photons were SUPPOSED to be there, and which ones leaked out. We’ll need a dedicated team of particle physicists with very small tweazers to have any hope of sorting out this mess.

So you’re saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)

Thank you for the details.

From smallest to biggest:

Bits (basic unit)

Bytes (8:1 reduction)

Words (4:1 reduction)

KiB (32:1 reduction)

MiB (1024:1)

GiB (1024:1)

TiB (1024:1)

PiB (1024:1)

A normal amount of porn (237:1)

What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.

This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.

This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.

This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.

The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.

That estimate is based on assuming that the ratio of matter to light output is the same between galaxies 10 billion years apart in age. The high light output of these young galaxies could also be supermassive stars that burn out very quickly, larger stars typically forming faster than smaller stars, or many other things.

Blindly assuming a linear relationship between two things, then extrapolating is how you get the Windows loading bar circa 2000.

Separately, but just as big a potential issue, the data itself may be incorrect. Previous galaxies measured at extreme redshift values were remeasured, and found to have less extreme values. This can be as simple as there aren’t that many photons from these galaxies reaching us, so a short measurement period might not be enough to get an accurate picture.

Yeah, but then you have to limit your fashion selection! Imagine restricting yourself to wearing a hat over some silly fear of death.

“You wouldn’t put on a tricorn hat, would you?”

I actually would, if I could find a nice one…

“…and leave your job to sail the seas?”

… That’s an option? I didn’t even consider-

“And you certainly wouldn’t drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns.”

buys a tricorn hat

The reporting on the economy is very much in line with the sentiment “The surgery was a success. Unfortunately, the patient perished.” Different metrics matter to different people. Food prices climbed faster than gas or housing, so inflation feels high (we have to make different choices to afford to eat), but it’s not actually as high as it feels.

The employment rate (yes, that one, not the unemployment rate) is still not great, and lots of companies in the tech sector are tightening their belts to try to deliver on the sky high expectations they’ve been selling. The whole thing looks hollow.

Last time I tried freecad, the geometry solver was incorrect, so it would sometimes create two (or more) shapes from a fully constrained part. Since learning about openSCAD, I’ve seen no reason to give it another try.

I’m an extremely wealthy arabic numeral, and all my wealth is tied up in high quality French made cookware. If you pay shipping, I’ll deliver a truckload of cookware to your commercial warehouse facility, and you can keep one pallet as payment.

I accept Steam gift cards, Bitcoins, and pork belly futures.

My great uncle said he hoped for a quiet death.

This is easily resolved. Just start referring to the scandal involving the Watergate hotel as “Watergategate”. Then the contradiction is resolved with only one change.

If you can prompt it, “Write a book about Harry Potter” and get a book about a boy wizard back, that’s almost certainly legally wrong. If you prompt it with 90% of an article, and it writes a pretty similar final 10%… not so much. Until full conversations are available, I don’t really trust either of these parties, especially in the context of a lawsuit.

The best estimate I’m aware of is that 10,000 federal prisoners in long term facilities are there for marijuana related crimes. There’s potentially larger population that is people reincarcerated for marijuana possession and use while out on probation, but as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a good study of this.

There are more than 5,000 federal crimes defined today. Most have never been prosecuted, and it’s so impossible to know of all of them that when the federal government itself tried to count how many crimes are defined, it failed.

We could do a great service to citizens, lawmakers, courts, and actual victims of real and meaningful crimes by repealing most of these statutes, but that would involve real and ongoing work by Congresspeople to make things better for little personal benefit, so I don’t expect it to happen.

11. Don’t be evil.

12. Just do it.

13. Make, your dreams, come true.

14. [This one can’t be translated usefully into any modern language.]

15. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.