Tesla Seppanen

Live your life in such a way that Donald Trump wouldn't lower a flag upon your death

Ugh, my child is just asking to be grounded.

I had to explain to him that it’s not always as easy as finding an unsheathed wire in the wall or a convenient water pipe; from here it would be easier to sink a metal dowel deep into the earth just outside his bedroom.

Kids these days.

I grew up in a time when uncle Craig told you some bullshit "facts" (your nails keep growing after you die!), and you had to either believe him or walk down to the library.

Then came the Internet, and we had the world's knowledge at our fingers.

Then we resurrected Craig and renamed him ChatGPT.

I don't particularly want more great works of art that help us make sense of senseless acts of horror. What I want is fewer senseless acts of horror.

Can I keep the homeless people and get rid of the Fox News hosts instead? If you want to talk about leeches on society....

Clearly it's detecting metaphorical smoke.

People who don't understand how anything works are going to be the death of us all.

So why *are* people so reflexively vicious here? What is it about this specific platform that makes people so eager to respond to their own preconceptions, rather than to what a person is actually saying in her posts?

It's thoroughly tiresome and I'm beginning to wonder why anyone puts up with it.

This is so deeply ingrained that even a suggestion of wrongdoing typically has Dems throwing *themselves* over the side - not doing so is usually considered worse than whatever the original accusation was about.

There's something wrong with you if you're trying to defend these indefensible suspensions.

apnews.com/article/new-...

Seriously, New Zealand??

I like Ali Hazelwood's writing a great deal, even if she does think it's okay to use "timely" as an adverb.

Now you've got me wondering what tortures one would have to perpetrate on plants to so unquiet their souls that they would leave immortal remains.

Umm, thanks?

Okay, so I accept that eating ghosts is vegetarian, since ghosts aren't made of meat. But is it vegan? Hard to argue that there were no animals involved in their production.

Kiddo is having trouble identifying character traits for his Romeo & Juliet character tracker. I admit that I took some pleasure in explaining that it's perfectly okay to call out simplistic or superficial character traits because these weirdos are the 16th century analog of sitcom characters.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm pretty sure that the world wasn't *quite* this stupid when Townes was writing.

Indeed. There's no word for it because it's not a thing anybody would seriously do. It's like a plot element in a story somebody didn't bother researching AT ALL.

Today, for the first time ever, we got a yard raven. Apparently this raven saw the crow doing his thing, and decided to try it. I cannot tell you how surprised and delighted I was to hear a raven calling to me.

A very large black bird with a prominent hooked beak comes in for a landing on a fountain, wings still outstretched.

For a few years now we have had yard crows. The most brazen among them has trained me well: he swoops showily into the yard and perches on the balcony, and I feed him. If I'm too slow for his tastes, he yells briefly to get my attention.

These kids are so pure. I'm overhearing their conversation and Friend 1 just asked mine, “What's your favorite pi-themed T-shirt?”

In other news, my kid is so sigma that as they're having a conversation about who is sigma, mine says he thought sigma was just a symbol for summation.

An apple on a plate: the left half is bright red and the right half is spring green; there is a sharp vertical line of demarcation between the halves.

Child could not decide whether he wanted a Cosmic Crisp or a Granny Smith apple, so I made him a Cosmic Granny.

At this point I'm just groaning each time I run across yet another book citing these goddamned studies. I have not yet reached the "throwing the book across the room" stage.

(TBH, that's probably only because I use an e-reader.)

All that other stuff, though, suggesting that delayers had better life success? The effects vanished as soon as the subjects' data was contextualized with information about their backgrounds and demographics.

Really, there was one very useful conclusion - the one that was *not* overturned by experimenters taking a closer look at subjects' demographic data: self-distraction can help if you're attempting to delay gratification.

Apparently there's a law that every popular-press book addressing psychology, cognition, development, effectiveness, or anything peripherally related to any of those needs to cite the Stanford marshmallow tests - and that every author needs to fundamentally misunderstand the conclusions.

OMFG, not the damned marshmallow test again

20 Reasons Why Fascism May Not Succeed in the United States: Some Perspectives. It would, of course, be naive to think that we are not in a moment of profound danger – MAGA is a fascist movement, and America is, in fact, at a dark turning point in its history. We are all grieving...

www.dailykos.com/story/2024/1...

Paul Cantrell inthehands@hachyderm.net Companies are refusing to hire our even laying off plumbers because hucksters backed by massive unicorn-chasing investment money time them they can build plumbing faster and cheaper out of cardboard. A few years from now there's going to be a hell of a market for people who can replace cardboard toilets with real ones. And also for people who can replace carpets. And walls and floors. This is a post about LLM-generated code.