Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird ai was invented because global warming wasn't making deserts fast enough.

@futurebird well, for most of the first century of movies, object permanence was at best an inconvenient side effect of the need for physical sets and physical models. Then along came CGI ...

@futurebird @PizzaDemon
I got caught in the tar pit of trying to figure out what paleontological sites a Los Angeles based organization would be physically nearby.

@futurebird @PizzaDemon
I have conflicted feelings about it, because I've met so many people whose knowledge of the actual Jurassic, and of biology and history in general, is so bad they'd have no idea it wasn't intended to be scientifically true.

@futurebird
as far as I can tell, microsoft has already shifted to "charge people for *not* using it". And I suspect there are enough other companies going that direction to make it the overall industry direction.

@futurebird chatGPT is to LLMs what kitchen hotpads were to asbestos.

@futurebird I thought buy-it-on-layaway was mostly replaced by "rent-to-own"?

(I know they're different, because with "rent-to-own", the item goes home with the renter, but there's a lot of overlap, and it seems most people will tolerate more predatory policies when they get to take it home right away.)

@futurebird
what the working people of america built.

@futurebird always get it mixed up with the desert.

"need more apple compute on table 3!"

@futurebird @jgordon
I guess about 15 years ago, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a popular book about what a great genius he was for figuring out how to get rich by betting on "black swan" and "grey swan" type disasterous market crashes. He was cautiously vague about the role shorting had played in the subprime loan crash, but his contemporaries shouted it from the rooftops. And so betting on the bubble bursting went from an obscure aspect of bubble dynamics to a famous aspect of bubble dynamics.

@futurebird remember _Friend Folio_, which included grrreat friends like the Flumph and the Guardian Familiar?

@futurebird
I can't explain why the homework was baked, but then, I also can't explain why about half of my classes in high school and all of my classes in college featured at least one classmate who went and got their homework folder professionally bound. That never made sense to me either.

@futurebird right after that speech, the university I would transfer to in autumn held a tech jobs fair for CS undergrads. They had crazy deadlines for registering for fall classes, so I was already registered and got invited. The jobs fair featured a speech by some microsoft dweeb, who had the gall to quote Greenspan and use it as the centerpiece of an argument for why we should all get jobs right now with stable, long-lived companies that would for sure weather any upcoming economic issues.

@futurebird My pet hypothesis is that Plimpton 322 is a homework assignment. The student was given s and d , and expected to calculate l. Extra credit if you can prove Teacher made mistakes in the exercises.

@futurebird how did they learn to read your handwriting?

@futurebird @nyrath @annaleen
I imagine the ants grounded it up by digging a deep hole and sticking a lighting rod in the hole so the current has somewhere to go when the reader is shocked

@futurebird actually it amazes me that road building isn't a major part of ant ecology. Or maybe it is and they just get called "pheromone trails" for traditional reasons.

@futurebird @Klara
1/2
there definitely was a huge expansion in biological *science*. Most of it very genetics-oriented, but there were also expansions in other areas of biology, including paleonotology and ecology.

the trouble is, investors actually don't like science, especially when it investigates environmental problems, which is where much of the biological science ended up going.

@futurebird @Klara

well - there's kind of a lot of hardware innovation that got sank into making fixed-point special purpose matrix multipliers ... eargh... what a waste.

@futurebird @Klara
raises the interesting question of how to go about making a robot that can imitate ant pheromones.

( if said robot can't match their pheromones, they'd take it apart. I know, know, I'm repeating what's obvious to you, but ... )