BenSM

"I tell the actors what to do. Well, I tell them WHEN to do it anyway." #ExplainSMing

Since we’re talking about ‘The Last Jedi’s’ slow chase I’d like to remind people Battlestar Galactica’s best episode ‘33,’ is that exact concept, just executed by competent and experienced sci-fi writers who actually knew what they’re doing.

i had a conspiracy theory about why every iphone user hates getting texts from android and i finally actually checked it and YES the contrast ratio between the green and white is lower than the blue and white, which makes green messages genuinely more annoying to read. apple 100% did this on purpose and i kinda respect it

I find it's the people my parents age who can't understand hyperbole or conjecture anymore.

I don’t need “AI.” I have a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Shutup and take my money.

I think about this all the time

i could look up the word “the” using gmail’s search function and it would gleefully tell me i have never sent or received an email containing that word in my entire life

this is my favorite piece of art of all time

84 months is 7 years. For every one of those years, that cheese sat as part of a full wheel in a dark cave where someone washed it in salt water, flipped it over, and scraped bad mold off by hand. It had a full-time babysitter. The cave sat at about 55°F in thick, damp air around 90% humidity. Your fridge runs at 38°F with dry air around 65%. The cave is warm enough for good bacteria to slowly break down the cheese from inside, which is where all the sharp, deep flavor comes from. Your fridge was built to suck moisture out of the air. Good for keeping your milk fresh. Terrible for cheese. The skin on that wheel (called a rind) was alive. It was covered in bacteria and mold that were actually helping it, working like a living armor that fought off the bad stuff the same way your immune system fights a cold. And those good bacteria had been winning that fight for 7 straight years. Then someone cut the wheel open, sliced off a small wedge, wrapped it in plastic, and shipped it to your grocery store. Now the cheese is exposed on two or three sides with zero protection. Bacteria from all over your fridge, the open yogurt, the leftover curry from Tuesday, whatever else is in there, can land right on it. The small piece dries out fast because almost all of it is touching air. And the plastic wrap traps moisture against the cut surface, which is exactly what bad mold needs to grow. Fort Saint Antoine in eastern France is an old military bunker carved into a mountain. Inside, 100,000 wheels of Comte (a hard French cheese) age on wooden shelves while workers walk through and care for each one on a set schedule. Your wedge went from that level of treatment to sitting between a jar of pickles and some week-old pasta. That cheese was fragile the entire time. It spent 7 years in a fortress with a security team. Now it is in your fridge with nothing but plastic wrap between it and a slow death.

I swear I get more done if I am not focusing and just jumping from task to task as I feel the whim.

I was just thinking fondly about this era the other day.

@JenLRossman hey I hate AI but you need to watch this if for no other reason than I need you to post about it (with one character in particular in mind) youtu.be/DuM_UIg8nZA?si…

Holy fucking shit. Finally found the name for it. Im going to cry Ive never been able to explain this to anyone they never know what im talking about

I used to think the Star Trek world was unrealistic in terms of how it used AI. But some recently argued to me, it's actually very straightforwardly a world where everyone knows they *could* build more advanced AI, but, they know that the alignment problem is unsolved. So, they don't. Instead, they limit themselves to LLM-like AI, which operates on discrete tasks. Data is a one-of-a-kind wonder people don't know how to replicate. Pretty much every other time someone tries to build advanced AI, something goes wrong. (Data's creator made a second android, named Lore, who was erratic and manipulative, and eventually turned against the humans) Most other advanced AI in the show either grow into godlike power outside human control, or get shut down while weaker but would clearly become a problem if unchecked. (V'ger, Moriarty). The more I looked at it, the more it seemed Canon Star Trek just straightforwardly depicts an adult civilization that has chosen to be careful.

Granted it's because I was under the weather, but I think this is the first day I haven't even left my house in YEARS.

Used to waste so much time in class messing round with these!

the other night husband and i were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears. anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. people said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. now, i happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. so every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange. so now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? bear. every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear. bears. they’re everywhere. be wary. anyone or anything could be a bear.

NASA pays $100M for Microsoft 365 licensing across the agency. They standardized every system on Microsoft. They put Microsoft Surfaces on the Orion spacecraft as the crew's personal computing devices. And the first technical crisis of humanity's return to the Moon was Reid Wiseman radioing Houston to say he has two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one works. Mission Control's response? "With your go, we can remote in and take a look." The same exact workflow your company's IT helpdesk uses when you submit a ticket on a Monday morning. Except the user is traveling at 4,275 mph, 30,000 miles from Earth, and the Wi-Fi situation is considerably worse. This spacecraft survived hydrogen leaks, helium leaks, a faulty heat shield, and a broken toilet. Outlook broke anyway. The toilet actually got fixed faster. The real story here is that Microsoft has achieved something no other software company in history can claim: a support ticket from lunar transit. Their enterprise sales team should frame this. "Battle-tested in space" is a positioning statement most B2B companies would mass murder for, and Microsoft accidentally earned it because Outlook crashes everywhere, including orbit. Outlook remains the only software in human history that performs identically whether you're in a cubicle in Redmond or aboard a spacecraft bound for the Moon. Universally, reliably broken. And we keep buying it anyway.

I have a boo boo on my right index finger and while it's possibly the most debilitating injury I could think of, I made it into a friend.