You know what’s crazy? So are intersex people!

My main reason is that its output is bollocks.

But here’s some variety. The bean counters at my factory have, on multiple occasions, taken away the things we need to make the products. They never even come on the floor to talk to us, they just decide something costs too much and stop buying it or restrict access.

Furthermore, we have to justify improvements to our working conditions on the basis of cost; can’t be spending too much on the workers after all.

Yet the factory is spending $96,000 a year on CoPilot. That’s money which could be spend on necessary equipment.

No idea but I’ll tag @apps@toot.fedilab.app in case they know

Pinterest has always been more popular than Twitter.

“I gave the AI’s advice the exact same consideration and credence you give to advice from your subordinates”

Yeah, The Lord of the Rings isn’t an allegory, but it does have themes, and Tolkien definitely drew on his experiences in WWI when writing it.

Thirded

There’s a whole history there!

In short: swearing on the Bible doesn’t stop you from lying, it makes God angry at you if you do.

Long answer: When you swear or solemnly affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you are making a legal commitment not to lie; if you lie under those circumstances, you are committing the crime of perjury.

But what if somebody was to deny they swore an oath? That’s why we have witnesses, and there is no better witness than a god. (Actually, the difference between an oath and a pledge is that an oath is formally witnessed by at least one god. A vow, meanwhile, is a promise made to a god).

So when a Roman swore an oath, he announced his name and the god he was swearing by; that got the god’s attention, and since gods see everything, the swearer will be punished if he violates the terms if the oath. You know how in movies a character will tell an obvious lie and declare “and may God strike me down if I lie”, whereupon something immediately hits them on the head? That’s how oaths actually work.

Likewise, swearing an oath while touching something related to the witnessing god makes the oath even more powerful and binding. Thus, you don’t want to break an oath sworn by Jupiter, and you really don’t want to break an oath sworn in a temple to Jupiter with your hand on a statue of Jupiter.

Instead of swearing by Jupiter (or Odin, or Ra, or Enlil, or whoever), Christians swear by God, and touch a Bible to make their oath stricter. Muslims use the Qu’ran to the same effect.

Who you calling a snollygoster, you wangdoodle?!

“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more, no less”

I was a big Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan in the 1990s, so I really started with h2g2. For those who don’t remember, it was an early attempt to make a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, but unlike Wikipedia, a given page could only be edited by its original creator or admins. I learned quite a bit of HTML from there.

Every page on h2g2 had an attached comment section, and because anybody could make a page, most of us used it primarily as a message board. There was a lot of roleplaying.

From there I branched out into forums. The big one I posted on was TotalGames.net, the joint forum for a bunch of video game magazines, because I read Cube in secondary school and they regularly posted stuff from it to get more people to join. One of the regular members, Android18a, set up her own website at SilentDream.co.uk and had an attached forum which had six, maybe seven posters. That was a nice, intimate community, and we broke the rules of the forum software by regularly posting porn.

I signed up to a few other forums but never stayed long. In college, I joined TVTropes and actively contributed for a bit over 20 years; I just stopped this week because the new owners seem intent on turning it into another Wikia. TVTropes’ forum software is quite good, really solid, and the community is probably the most thoughtful, rational group I’ve ever encountered online (except for that one moderator. If you’re a regular on the TVTropes forum, you know the one).

I was almost one of the first people in Ireland to join Facebook. During college, I did a work placement where I shared a house with two American girls (also a Polish boy, a Romanian girl, and an Irish girl who moved out because she didn’t get along with anybody). The Yanks told me about this great website called Facebook, which I had also seen mentioned on College Humor a lot. It seemed great, but I kept saying “Oh, I’ll join tomorrow” until everybody else was on it, at which point I decided not to join it because it was too popular (yeah). That turned out to be the right decision.

I made a Twitter account after college because I was a fan of Channel Awesome and they all seemed to be on it, and so was apparently every other famous person. I could keep up with Twitter somewhat for a few years because I was unemployed and had little else to do, but actually keeping up with that site is a full-time job. I tried getting back into it on and off, and eventually deleted my account just before COVID when I figured out I have clinical depression and just reading Twitter aggravates it.

I started using Reddit at some point and I liked it, but stepped back when I realised it was addictive and toxic. I look in once in a while, and every time I do, it seems to be getting worse.

Then when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I started hearing about this thing called Mastodon. I made myself an account which I use daily, but I learned the lesson from Twitter not to bother trying to keep on top of everything. Mastodon led me to Lemmy, which led me to kbin, which is now mbin, which is where this account lives.

I also have a Discord account, but Discord confuses and overwhelms me.

Oh, and I also used UseNet a little bit, but its heyday was long past by the time I got online.

Because current (amps) has nothing to do with energy. Formally, an ampere is the current of 10¹⁹ electrons moving through a given point in 1.6 seconds; in more reasonable terms, it’s 1 coulomb per second. The amount of energy in those electrons doesn’t matter to the amount of current, but energy is very relevant to making machines do things.

Potential (volts) does include energy; specifically, 1 volt is 1 joule per coulomb. Add more energy and you get more volts, but the current remains the same. So volts are more relevant to how much use you can get out of your electrons.

Power (watts), meanwhile, tells you how effective your machine is at extracting that energy. 1 watt is 1 joule per second. Suppose you are running a 6W heater. Every second, that heater converts 6J of electrical energy into heat energy, while the current remains the same.

Thus, knowing current is important for electrical engineering, but potential and power matter more for operation.

I’m doing my part to genericise Google®'s trademark.

Yeah, Trump is just a blowhard who can’t accept losing. (He’s also a liar, but I’m not sure he doesn’t genuinely believe the election was rigged).

They’re not all shagging at the same time

Probably Obama, like most people, figures there’s life on another planet somewhere in the universe, but that tge aliens haven’t visited Earth.

And those people have higher than average testosterone, so they’re hornier. Apparently Olympic Village is a small orgy, hence all the condoms.

What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?

Pre-WWII Superman was pretty aggressively leftist.

Before the 1840s, Irish farmers lived on.potatoes and milk, with the odd herring in winter when milk was harder to come by. Not a pleasant diet, and you’re buggered if the potato harvest fails, but definitely doable.