Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird exactly. LLMs are most commonly given a chatbot interface in order to exploit this confusion ...

@futurebird
but if students learn redstone and mercury, they'll start launching astronauts, and you know where that leads.

@futurebird
character twist: becomes a vampire: "One! ha ha ha! Two! ha ha ha! Three ha ha ha!"

@futurebird
Player 1, wizard: "ok I've pressed the money detector button and it says there's no money in the chest the orc is guarding; it's all behind a secret panel on the North wall."

Player 2, bard: "I offer the orc 10% of the profits if he promises to just stand there while we raid the secret compartment behind the panel."

@futurebird does not having a working camera qualify as strange? (Also, I don't have another camera to photo either of my computers with). (The only other strange things about my computers is that they are old; laptop is from 2012, the other from 2017, but budgeted for $300 at that time. )

@futurebird
It is notable that people who are way too into military crap use "parking lot" as a euphemism for the end result of bombing a region until nothing can live there. As in "we'll send the B-2s to turn nation X into a parking lot", where nation X is usually some majority non-white nation they probably can't find on a map, and yet are very sure needs bombing. Everyone knows cars need death zones.

@futurebird in most states it's also easy to get a "security" job that grants access to police databases. And many states make it easy to become a "bounty hunter" and get access that way. Then there's the nightmarishly bad security of police databases ... *sigh*

@futurebird in some ways, I miss assembly line work. Once I got used to the routine, I could follow it robotically and use the other 80% of my brain to think about something interesting.

@TerryHancock @futurebird
I think I've been seeing graphical abstracts much more during the last 10 years or so? Before, graphical abstracts seemed rare. Wikipedia claims they go back to the 1970s! Of course it's no wonder that they couldn't catch on back when printing of readable graphical figures was so hard. Now I'm sure they'll become the norm as soon as scientists have the time and funding to add a graphical design degree to all their usual schooling.

Graphical abstract - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

@futurebird
I followed kit adventures for, you know, kittens, like Pica, and now I'm confused?

Is this goiing to be taken over by ants again?

@futurebird
oh I know this one! you teach your dragon to crawl along the tracks and say "chugga chugga chugga chugga choo-choo" and blow smoke and steam and appropriate points.

@BLTpizza @futurebird
teacher: "now, dear student, you will learn how to identify trees by their bark "

student: "but teacher, so often I see different kinds of bark on the same tree! "

teacher: "relax! we will begin with the easy trees, which seldom have more than four different kinds of bark on the same tree."

@futurebird my old cat has recently cut back on the yeowing a lot, and now it feels like the end is near. (She has an old hip injury that has always caused her pain, though, and I often wonder if I should ask the vet to double her painkiller perscription, but I dunno how I'd afford it.) Thing is, if anything I think her pain levels have actually increased recently rather than decreased.

@futurebird @stevegis_ssg

"habit" isn't perfect (in common parlance it's too close to "addiction", ugh), but I guess it's better than "syndrome" .

I have this vague memory that at some point in past decades, Paul Martin or one of his following made an analogy between late Pleistocene human bands and army ants in the context of their "they killed everything in their path" hypothesis for the end Pleistocene megafauna extinctions. But Paul Martin had what I feel was a rather extreme view.

@stevegis_ssg @futurebird
I think either is ok?

I'm not a botanist, but the terminology that botanists use is "habit". An oak or a maple may have either a tree habit or a bush habit depending on local environmental conditions.

@futurebird @stevegis_ssg

it is, but in many species that can be trees, there's also some individual variation possible; on the mountainside near me there are an awful lot of oaks (Quercus gambelii, probably), but they are seldom more than 2 meters tall and often look more a bush or a shrub than a tree. But under the right conditions they can reach 20 meters tall. So whether they're a bush or a tree depends on local conditions.

@futurebird I used to have a field guide to trees of north america. It was thicker than any of those wheel of time novels, and considerably more interesting. I never set out to learn them all, though; I only wanted to be able to find a few in the book. No idea what happened to the book.

@futurebird what a sweet, adorable cat. He looks as happy as a supercell thunderstorm.

@futurebird it's not really a chatbot, it's a person in a concentration camp forced to pretend to be a chatbot by a fascist government trying to keep up the facade of "AI".

@futurebird welp, they've found out how much sugar the human mind requires, and they're taking steps.